The trigger for the Spanish-American War was a false one. Spain did not plant a mine, nor did anyone else. The Maine was destroyed by 11,190 pounds of its own powder in a magazine for shells, ignited by fire in a coal bunker separated by a single bulkhead. It was a preventable accident. Had this been publicly known at the time, as it might have been, it is conceivable America would not have gone to war; and it might very well not have become an imperialist power.
That the Spaniards did not blow up the warship is the inescapable conclusion of a study carried out by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover in 1976 with expert testimony. The celebrated admiral's study was published by the Naval History Division of
the Department of the Navy, but received surprisingly little attention. Histories still routinely refer to the Maine's being sunk by a mine.
Two official inquiries, one in 1898 and another in 1911, both blamed a mine. The mystery should have been cleared up there and then in 1911. But that board still concluded that the magazine was exploded by an external force. The board did so because it was puzzled that one of the four bottom sections of the Maine was displaced inward. Rickover's experts, Ib S. Hansen and Robert S. Price, explain this by the dynamics of the explosion on the particular design of the Maine and the fact that later experiments with explosions inside destroyer bulkheads have produced results just like the Maine. Moreover, the small section of plating folded inward showed no evidence of the deformation that would have certainly been brought about by a Spanish contact mine of the day of 100 to 200 pounds of guncotton-the size of mine that would have been needed to detonate the magazine. Other evidence also points away from a mine-no upward plume of water, no upward shock and the sheer unfeasibility of anyone being able to place a mine of sufficient size in the right location.
Of an accident, on the contrary, there is persuasive evidence. Between 1894 and 1908, more than 20 coal-bunker fires were reported on U.S. naval ships. The Cincinnati and New York nearly went the way of the Maine. A sad fact of the Maine is that while Captain Charles Sigsbee may have been a good seaman and a brave man, he was, in Rickover's words, "the victim of the new technology which was transforming the Navy . . . and perhaps it is also significant that the Kearsarge and Texas while under his command were also found dirty." Captain Sigsbee did not know how much coal there was in the forward bunkers. The coal he had on the Maine was the same brand that had ignited on the New York in March 1897, just three and a half hours after an inspection. The explosion on the Maine came nearly 12 hours after the last required inspection, ample time for a bunker fire to begin, heat the bulkheads and set fire to adjacent compartments.
Rickover's conclusion bears remembering: "In the modern technological age, the battle cry ÔRemember the Maine!' should have a special meaning for us. With the vastness of our government and the difficulty of controlling it, we must make sure that those in Ôhigh places' do not, without most careful consideration of the consequences, exert our prestige and might. Such uses of our power may result in serious international actions at great cost in lives and money-injurious to the interests and standing of the United States."
Both are deeply flawed. Both failed to call technical experts. The evidence that induced the first board to report so devastatingly to McKinley was the divers' findings that the keel was bent into an inverted V shape (^) in the region of structural frames 18 to 22. This, the board concluded, could not have been caused by the magazine explosion and could have been brought about only by the upward force of an external explosion at this point. They were wrong. The 1911 inquiry, with the benefit of a raised wreck, found that the center of the explosion was not at frame 18 but in the magazine near frame 27. And the keel damage could, after all, be accounted for by the action of gases of low explosives in the forward magazine. It had no bearing on whether there was an external burst.
1898: The Birth of the American Century
by David Traxel