Jungle of Snakes (7 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
While Funston and his fellow officers hid in the nearby jungle, the column’s sham insurgent officers went ahead. A last obstacle
remained: the unfordable Palanan River. Two “officers” crossed in a canoe and gave instructions for the Macabebes to follow.
The two “officers” approached Aguinaldo’s headquarters to see a uniformed honor guard formed to greet them. The cover letter
had done its work. Aguinaldo was completely deceived. For a very nervous thirty minutes the two “officers” regaled the insurgent
commander with stories about their recent ordeal. Finally the Macabebes arrived. They formed up across from the honor guard
as if in preparation to salute Aguinaldo. Then at a signal they opened fire at the startled headquarters guards. Inside Aguinaldo’s
headquarters, the two “officers” seized Aguinaldo. Meanwhile, Funston and his band emerged from the jungle to take charge.
The effect of the surprise was so overwhelming that Funston’s commandos managed to escape with their prize and rendezvous
with the waiting gunboat.
Funston took Aguinaldo to Manila, where MacArthur treated him with great courtesy, even to the point of having his staff dine
with the insurgent leader. Within a few days Aguinaldo was exploring terms of surrender. Within a month he issued a proclamation
calling on all insurgents to surrender and for Filipinos to accept United States rule.
In a campaign suffering from slow and indeterminate results, Aguinaldo’s conversion was something concrete. MacArthur and
the War Department took full advantage, proclaiming the incident the most important single military event of the year. Among
the skeptics were the midshipmen of the Naval Academy standing in the left-field bleachers at the first Army-Navy baseball
game ever played. Arthur MacArthur’s son Douglas was Army’s left fielder. The midshipmen heckled Douglas with the chant:
MacArthur! MacArthur!
Are you the Governor General Or a hobo?
Who is the boss of this show?
Is it you or Emilio Aguinaldo?
24
Indeed, the claim that Aguinaldo’s capture was decisive overstated the facts. Instead, although it was not clearly apparent
at the time, MacArthur’s stern policies had already begun to erode insurgent strength significantly. While his conversion
did inspire the surrender of five prominent insurgent generals, and hundreds of soldiers either turned themselves in or ceased
active operations, his removal from the scene had little practical impact for many insurgents. They were accustomed to recognizing
the authority of their local commanders. Those commanders, in turn, had been acting like regional warlords for some time and
consequently were used to a high level of autonomy.
Aguinaldo’s capture was a brilliantly conceived and boldly executed coup. As had been the case when Otis proclaimed victory
after dispersing the regular insurgent forces, senior American leaders anticipated a prompt end to the war. Unfamiliar with
the ambiguous nature of counterinsurgency, they again overestimated the value of a single “decisive” success. On July 4, 1901,
as MacArthur neared the end of his tour of duty in the Philippines, he reported that the armed insurrection was almost entirely
suppressed. The army had squashed armed resistance in nearly two thirds of the hostile provinces. In the United States a pleased
President McKinley began a domestic victory tour designed to heal the sharp political divisions created by the war.
Again the general commanding the field forces and the commander in chief were wrong. The insurgency survived the loss of its
leader and persisted for more than another year.
The Response to Massacre
IT FELL TO MACARTHUR’S SUCCESSOR, Major General Adna Chaffee, to bring the war to a close. When he assumed command in September
1901 it appeared that the endgame was in hand. Chaffee identified three remaining areas where the insurgents were active:
southwestern Luzon, Samar, and Cebu. Chaffee was perfectly happy to cede control of everywhere else to the Philippine Commission
and get out of the pacification business. The velocity of this transition was a problem. An officer serving in Samar, one
of the lingering trouble spots, caustically questioned whether the time for civil government had really arrived given the
commissioners still required strong security detachments around their Manila residences. He complained that the Filipinos
“cannot be conquered, civilized, and taught to love us in a year.”
1
He concluded that it was a mistake for impatient Americans to force the expansion of civil government in places where security
was problematic.
Chaffee cared not. In his view, for too long junior officers had operated outside the scrutiny of their betters and it was
time to reel them in. With the guerrilla war all but won, he wanted soldiers to return to real soldiering. Then, “like a clap
of thunder out of a clear sky,” came the Balangiga Massacre on September 28, 1901.
2
The small port of Balangiga was on the southern coast of Samar. Samar, in turn, was the home island of a ferocious, untamed
insurgency. To date, small American garrisons had seldom ventured inland from their coastal enclaves and were ignorant of
all that transpired outside range of their Krag-Jorgensen rifles. The mayor of Balangiga had invited an American garrison
to protect his town from Moro pirates. Better American intelligence would have revealed that pirate raids against coastal
Samar had all but ended more than fifty years earlier. Instead, Company C, Ninth U.S. Infantry, came to Balangiga to provide
security. Company C was a veteran outfit. One soldier had served aboard Dewey’s flagship, the
Olympia
, at the battle of Manila Bay. Most had fought insurgents on Luzon and all had traveled to China to fight the Boxers. But
their return to the Philippines and occupation of Balangiga was not happy. The company commander, Thomas Connell, was insensitive
to local mores. He insisted that the villagers work to trim back the jungle to eliminate concealment, he tried to ban the
popular cockfights, and he attempted to keep his men from fraternizing with young girls. Ugly incidents of abuse and rape
ensued. To limit conflict with the villagers, Connell forbade any save his sentries from carry ing weapons. Meanwhile, the
village mayor informed the insurgents about the Americans’ habits and routines.
Around midnight on September 26, numerous women began delivering small caskets to the central church. A suspicious American
sergeant glanced inside one casket, saw a child’s body, and allowed the women to pass. Although he noted that the women wore
heavy clothes in spite of the warm night, the sergeant was well aware of his captain’s demand for strict conduct in the wake
of the rape incidents, so he did not investigate further. Had he done so he would have found that the clothes concealed machetes
and that the caskets actually held drugged children lying atop hidden weapons.
On Sunday morning, an apparently friendly Filipino police chief paused to chat with a sentry and then seized his rifle and
shot him. The church bells began pealing, the signal for bolomen to emerge from hiding to cut down the remaining sentries.
Simultaneously several hundred machete-wielding men emerged from the church to overrun the officers’ quarters and murder the
Americans in their beds. Connell leaped from a window into the street, where insurgents hacked him to death in full view of
his regulars. The first surge killed some fifty soldiers. A sergeant rallied thirty-eight survivors around the arsenal, including
eight too hurt to fight, and managed to fight off the bolomen. They made their way to three dugout canoes to begin paddling
to the nearest American post while pursued by insurgents as well as swarming sharks attracted to the blood seeping into the
water. Only six regulars escaped unharmed. A total of fifty-nine were killed and twenty-three were wounded.
3
It was the heaviest American loss of any action during the entire war.
The next day came the American reprisal. After a gunboat blasted Balangiga with Gatling guns and cannon fire, an infantry
column stormed ashore. They beheld the mutilated bodies of their comrades. They saw a trench filled with the Filipino casualties
from the previous day’s action. Apparently the Americans had interrupted the burial service. A patrol caught twenty unarmed
men and the officer in charge handed them over to the six unharmed American survivors. The six proceeded to gun down the prisoners.
After burning the town the Americans departed.
In the United States, a hysterical press promoted an atmosphere of panic by calling the massacre a Philippine version of Custer’s
Last Stand. In Manila, the civilian commissioner Taft retained a balanced perspective. He recognized the event as a discouraging
blow but told the secretary of war that “there will be no shadow of turning from the course we have marked.”
4
The military man, Chaffee, exhibited less balance. The massacre seemed to fly in the face of the claim by the Philippine
Commission and the Federal Party that the insurgents were on their last legs. Instead, Chaffee listened to his intelligence
service, which now reported that the insurgents were regrouping in preparation for widespread uprisings in January 1902. Their
warnings convinced Chaffee that he was sitting on a powder keg that was about to explode.
In this climate of high emotion and fear, Chaffee insisted on a harder war against the remaining insurgents. As a twenty-two-year-old
second lieutenant, he had participated in Sheridan’s razing of the Shenandoah Valley in 1864. Given that a policy of massive
property destruction was acceptable against fellow Americans, Chaffee saw no reason it should not be used against Asians.
To fight this harder war, he called upon two hard men. He assigned Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, his most accomplished
counterinsurgency general, to squash the rebels in Luzon’s Batangas Province once and for all. To remote Samar he sent Brigadier
General Jacob Smith.
In Samar, insurgents operated from jungle sanctuaries in the roadless interior and confined the Americans to a handful of
coastal enclaves. Their victory at Balangiga had increased their strength. Whomever Chaffee had assigned to Samar would have
faced tremendous problems, including the need to keep the American troops firmly in hand because the lurid memories of the
“treachery” at Balangiga were foremost in their minds and they wanted revenge. Unfortunately the sixty-one-year old Smith
possessed few qualifications beyond a savage instinct—he would be best remembered for allegedly ordering a subordinate to
reduce Samar’s interior to a “howling wilderness”—and his loose control led to some of the worst American atrocities of the
war.
5
Smith knew war. He carried a Confederate minié ball in his hip, a legacy of his valiant conduct at the Battle of Shiloh. His
subsequent behavior during a three-year recuperation revealed a less attractive side to his personality. While serving as
a recruiting agent, he invested ignorant recruits’ bounties for personal gain. Cashiered for insubordination during the 1880s
and then reinstated, Smith again displayed valor at the Battle of El Caney in Cuba, where the Spanish defenders shot him in
the chest. Transferred to the Philippines, Smith found himself in in dependent command at a level he had never before experienced.
He enthusiastically complied with Chaffee’s demands to employ the harshest methods on Samar. He ordered his brigade to wage
hard war, telling subordinates the more killing and burning the better, and reminded them that not even civilized war could
be carried out “on a humanitarian basis.”
6
He then set to work by ordering the concentration of Samar’s inhabitants into protected zones on the coast. He treated the
rest of the island as enemy territory. Smith sent his forces, including a battalion of U.S. Marines, inland, where they killed
opponents, real and imagined, burned houses and crops, and slaughtered livestock. Many of his subordinates kidnapped civilians
and routinely applied physical abuse to extract intelligence. Eventually, a comprehensive starvation policy forced the insurgents
to spend most of their time searching for food. Meanwhile, uncounted numbers of civilians also perished. The capture of an
emaciated and sick Vicente Lukban, Samar’s insurgent leader, on February 18, 1902, led to mass desertion among the remaining
insurgents and marked the collapse of resis tance against American occupation on Samar.
After the last guerrilla bands on Samar surrendered, a series of courts-martial ensued. Revelations of gross misconduct, including
murder and torture, emerged. Allegedly when an officer asked Smith to define the age limit for killing, he replied, “Everything
over 10.”
7
The judge advocate general of the army noted that only the good sense exhibited by the majority of Smith’s subordinates had
prevented a complete reign of terror on Samar. The fact that Chaffee’s fearful overreaction to the Balangiga Massacre had
created a climate where such conduct could occur escaped scrutiny. Smith had conducted a savage campaign well outside even
the stern norm of American operations elsewhere in the islands. His legacy was to tarnish horribly the history of the American
war in the Philippines.
The Real Terror of the Philippines
In contrast to Smith, Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell conducted his Batangas campaign within the boundaries of what the
military considered acceptable. Indeed, he employed counterinsurgency methods that he and others had successfully demonstrated
in previous campaigns. Nonetheless, for many Filipinos the consequences looked very much the same as those endured by the
inhabitants of Samar.
Bell was forty-five years old when he took over the Third Separate Brigade in Batangas. He was one of the army’s comers, a
West Point graduate who arrived in the Philippines as a first lieutenant in the regular army and then ascended rapidly.
8
A contemporary described him as “robust, vigorous, energetic.”
9
He raised, trained, and commanded the Thirty-sixth Infantry, U.S. Volunteers. The regiment comprised soldiers who had come
to the Philippines as volunteers in the state regiments, discovered that they rather liked being soldiers, and opted to remain
when their units returned home. They were tough, spirited men who found a kindred spirit in Colonel Bell. A subordinate whose
long career would extend through World War I wrote, “In all my service since, I have never known an officer who was held in
such high regard by the officers and men of his command as was Colonel Bell.”
10
During the campaign in northern Luzon, Bell repeatedly conducted daring reconnaissance missions. He was personally brave to
the point of recklessness. In one famous combat, he led a scouting party into the teeth of a much larger insurgent force.
Ignoring the fire from insurgents concealed in a nearby bamboo grove, Bell drew his revolver, charged seven
in-surrectos
, and single-handedly captured three of them. His combat courage later won him the Congressional Medal of Honor. Transferred
to Manila, he served as provost marshal. At the time the capital served as an insurgent sanctuary, with numerous safe houses
where guerrillas could find food and shelter and recover from the strain of active campaigning in the hinterland. Six months
of Bell’s stern rule changed everything. His success at clearing the capital of the insurgents won praise from civilians and
soldiers alike.
Promoted to brigadier general, at the time the youngest man to hold this rank, Bell went to northern Luzon. Here his solution
to the insurgency was to make the civilians feel “the full hardship of War” in order to make them not only stop helping the
insurgents but also take an active role in defeating them.
11
Success in northern Luzon enhanced his reputation. William Taft was one admirer. Taft told Secretary of War Root that if
Chaffee would send Bell into Batangas, the general would “make things so uncomfortable for the people who are supporting the
insurrection that the men in the field [the guerrillas] would soon be brought in.”
12
Batangas was a particularly tough nut to crack. Located in southwestern Luzon, it was a large, densely populated province
with wretched terrain ranging from rice paddies and swamps to jungles and volcanic mountains. Filipinos living in the Batangas
region had been in revolt since the uprising against Spain in 1896. This was the Tagalog heartland, from where a majority
of the important revolutionary leaders emerged. In Batangas, guerrilla leaders avoided direct combat with the Americans. Instead,
they concentrated on maintaining support in American-occupied towns by enforcing orders against Filipino participation in
American civil government. Regional, ethnic, and family ties accounted for much of the support given to Aguinaldo and his
successor, Miguel Malvar. Revolutionary terror—threats, property destruction, kidnapping, assassination—kept those inclined
to support, or at least tolerate, the Americans in check. As was the case in Samar, to date American pacification efforts
had failed here.