Fifteen minutes later, at 5:25 am, the New York opened with a broadside from her main battery at the works on the east of the entrance to the harbor.  All the ships followed in red streaks of flame.  The fleet, enveloped in smoke, pelted the hills and kicked up dirt and masonry.

Though the gun captains had been cautioned not to waste ammunition, but to fire with deliberation, the fire was so rapid that there was an almost continuous report.  The measured crash of the big thirteen-inch guns of the battleships sounded above the rattle of the guns of the secondary batteries like thunder-claps above the din of a hurricane.  A strong land breeze off the shore carried the smoke of the ships seaward, while it let down a thick curtain in front of the Spanish gunners.

The dons responded spiritedly at first, but their frenzied, half-crazed fire could not match the cool nerve, trained eyes and skilled gunnery of the American sailors.  Our fire was much more effective than in preceding bombardments.  The Admiral’s ordnance expert had given explicit directions to reduce the powder charges and to elevate the guns, so as to shorten the trajectory and thus to secure a plunging fire.

The effect of the reduced charges was marvelous.  In fifteen minutes one western battery was completely wrecked.  The Massachusetts tore a gaping hole in the emplacement with a 1,000- pound projectile, and the Texas dropped a shell into the powder magazine.  The explosion wrought terrible havoc.

The frame was lifted, the sides were blown out and a shower of debris flew in every direction.  One timber, carried out of the side of the battery, went tumbling down the hill.

The batteries on the east of Morro were harder to get at, but the New Orleans crossed the bows of the New York to within 500 yards of shore and played a tattoo with her long eight-inch rifles, hitting them repeatedly, striking a gun squarely muzzle-on, lifting it off its trunnions and sending it sweeping somersaults high in the air.

When the order came, at 6:30, to cease firing, every gun of the enemy had been silenced for ten minutes, but as the ships drew off some of the Spanish courage returned and a half-dozen shots were fired spitefully at the Massachusetts and Oregon, falling in their wakes.

Went ashore with A rush.

Sea and weather were propitious when, on June 22, the great army of invasion under General Shatter left their transports in Baiquiri harbor, and landed on Cuban soil.  The navy and the army co-operated splendidly and as the big warships closed in on the shore to pave the way for the approach of the transports and then went back again, three cheers for the navy went up from many thousand throats on the troop-ships and three cheers for the army rose from ship after ship.

The Cuban insurgents, too, bore their share in the enterprise honorably and well.  Five thousand of them in mountain fastness and dark thickets of ravines, lay all the previous night on their guns watching every road and mountain path leading from Santiago to Guantanamo.  A thousand of them were within sight of Baiquiri, making the approach of the Spaniards under cover of darkness an impossibility.