Congress debated a new army bill while the navy was being prepared for war. Not until April 22 did it permit the enlargement of the little regular army of 25,000. Until war had begun the volunteers, of whom some 216,000 were taken into the service, could not be called out or made ready for the field. Some preparations were made within the War Department, but the little staff of clerks, used to the small routine of the peace basis, and having no plan of enlargement or mobilization worked out, made little headway. The navy was ready to strike the day war was declared, but the army had yet to be planned, recruited, clothed, drilled, and transported to the front. The men of the navy knew their duty and were ready for it; in the army thousands of civilians had to blunder through the duties of strange offices. William J. Bryan accepted the colonelcy in a Nebraska regiment. Theodore Roosevelt resigned his office in the Navy Department to raise a regiment of volunteer cavalry. Politicians struggled for commissions for themselves and friends. Civil War veterans fought for reappointment, and enough soldiers of the Confederacy put on the blue uniforms, or sent their sons, to show that the breach had been healed between the North and South. It was an enthusiastic rather than an effective army that was brought together in the two months after the war began. Cuba, the cause of the war and its objective, was the center of the scheme of strategy. The navy was called upon to protect the Atlantic seaboard from the fleet of Spain, which was reputed to be superior to that of the United States. It had also to maintain a blockade of Cuba and prevent the landing of reinforcements until the army could be prepared to invade the island. Dewey's fleet in the Pacific was ordered to destroy the Spanish naval force in the Philippine Islands, and moved immediately upon Manila when Great Britain issued her proclamation of neutrality and made it impossible to remain longer in her waters at Hongkong. On the morning of May 1 Dewey led his squadron past the forts, over the submerged mines, and up the channel of Manila Bay. The Spanish forces in the islands, already contending with a native insurrection, were helpless before evening, having lost the whole fleet. Dewey was left in a position to take the city when he chose, and sent home word to that effect. He waited in the harbor until an army of occupation had been got ready, hurried to the transports at San Francisco, and sent out under General Wesley Merritt. He brought the native leader Aguinaldo back to the islands, whence he had been expelled, to foment insurrection. The first American reinforcements arrived at Manila by the end of June. On August 13 they took the city.