Sampson asked for military aid early in June, and on June 7 the War Department ordered the army that had been mobilized at Tampa to go to his assistance. General Nelson A. Miles, in command of the army, was not allowed to head the expedition, but was kept at home while General William R. Shafter directed the field work. At Tampa there was almost hopeless confusion. The single track railway that supplied the camp was unable to move promptly either men or munitions, the Quartermaster's Department sent down whole trainloads of supplies without bills of lading, and when the troops were at last on board the fleet of transports they were kept in the river for a week before they were allowed to start for Santiago. Sixteen thousand men, mostly regulars, with nearly one thousand officers and two hundred war correspondents, sailed on June 14, and were in conference with Sampson six days later. A misunderstanding as to strategy arose in this conference. Sampson left it believing that the army would land and move directly along the shore against the batteries that covered the entrance to the harbor. Shafter, however, though he issued no general order to that effect, was determined to march inland upon the city of Santiago itself. On June 22 and 23 the army was landed by the navy, for it had neither boats nor lighters of its own. The first troops, climbing ashore at the railway pier at Daquiri, marched west along the coast to Siboney, and then plunged inland, each regiment for itself, along the narrow jungle trail leading to Santiago. Shafter himself, corpulent and sick, followed as he could. Before he established his control over the army on land the head of the column had engaged the enemy at Las Guasimas, nine miles from Santiago, on June 24. The First Volunteer Cavalry, under the command of Colonel Leonard M. Wood, with Theodore Roosevelt as lieutenant-colonel, had marched most of the night in order to be in the first fighting. After a sharp engagement the Spanish retired and the American advance upon Santiago continued in a more orderly fashion.