BANNERS IN THE AIR - The Eighth Ohio Volunteers and the Spanish-American War by Hard, Curtis ed by Robert Ferrell

Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, (1988)., US first edition, hard bound in dust jacket, xvi, 147 pages,FINE/FINE CONDITION, illus, maps, roster, notes, bibliog, index.-----------------------------------------------------------------------The Spanish-American War of 1898 boiled up suddenly in April, within weeks of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor, and by August everything was over. Spain had relinquished Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the remnants of her once grand empire. The United States had become an imperial power, and more acquisitions would follow—the Panama canal zone, protectorates in Central America and the Caribbean, the Danish West Indies. All because of the War of 1898.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Here, in short compass, is a lively, highly personal, and compelling account of what the war was like to the soldiers. The colonel of the Eighth Ohio Volunteer Regiment, Curtis V. Hard, spent most of his life in Wooster, Ohio. After serving in the Civil War he became a bookkeeper and eventually cashier at the National Bank of Wooster, Ohio. In later years he organized and was principal shareholder of the Wooster Electric Company.His regiment came from the little towns and small cities nearby: Akron, Canton, Massillon, Bucyrus, Alliance, Medina, Wadsworth, Mansfield, Shreve, East Liverpool, Hayesville, Big Prairie.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hard's group was the only Ohio regiment to go to Cuba. The men saw no combat action because they arrived only a few days before the armistice at Santiago, but the value of Hard's account lies elsewhere—in the story he tells of the men in his regiment. He recounts the mechanics of mobilization, camp life, the pace and problems of campaigning, and the traditional enemy of soldierly life before this century—illness. Seventy-two of the 1,325 men in the regiment died from malaria or other illness in Cuba or aboard ship or at Montauk or in hospitals in the United States or at home.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hard's narrative is enhanced by over thirty photographs—many taken by and preserved in the personal album of Chief Musician William R. Palmer, bandmaster of the Eighth. Other photographs are drawn from the personal collection of Hard's son, Dudley, who accompanied his father to Cuba in 1898 as a lieutenant.The War of 1898 was the last heroic war in which the citizens of the United States would take part. Thereafter, in World Wars I and II, in Korea, and in Vietnam, war became an anonymous, unheroic activity, and sometimes, as in Vietnam, the cause itself disappeared from sight. The Spanish-American War provided the turning point and from it we gained an understanding that older ways would no longer work, that the foreign policy of Washington and Jefferson and Monroe lay in the distant past. But for one last glorious moment Americans could think of going to war with banners in the air.