Spanish-American War at Sea

By piecing together diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and rare privately printed memoirs, the author has created a story which tells how America's ragtag navy—composed mainly of converted yachts, steamers and tugboats—was able to fight and win against the more powerful Spanish gunboats. The naval battles fought in places like Santiago, Cardenas, Cienfuegos, Manzanillo, Port Nipe, Guantanamo, San Juan, Guanica, and Ponce come alive in this book. The stories of the brave little ships that fought these battles—with names like the Gloucester and the Yosemite—at times against overwhelming odds, demonstrates the excellent training of the men who manned their guns under leadership of daring officers. This book fills in many of the missing pieces in the history of the Spanish-American War.

A. B. FEUER is a military historian and freelance newspaper and magazine journalist. He is the author of Bilibid Diary: The Secret Notebooks of Commander Thomas Hayes, Combat Diary: Episodes from the History of the Twenty-second Regiment, 1866-1905 (Praeger, 1991), General Chennault's Secret Weapon: The B-24 in China (Praeger, 1992), Coast Watching in the Solomon Islands: The Bougainville Reports (Praeger, 1992), and The Santiago Campaign of 1898: A Soldier's View of the Spanish-American War (Praeger, 1993). He has also published articles in numerous journals, including Military History Magazine, Sea Classics, Civil War Quarterly, and World War II and is a book reviewer for Military Review, Military History, and World War II.