Jungle of Snakes (8 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
Bell assumed command in Batangas eight months after Aguinaldo’s surrender. He understood the difficulty of the challenge,
observing that the revolution appeared destined to meet its death “in the place of its birth and to die hard.”
13
Like most American soldiers, he was contemptuous of the natives. In particular, he considered them peerless liars totally
unfit for self-government. Along with his racial bigotry, Bell also possessed a sharp analytical mind. More than any other
American general, he had studied the insurgency and gained a comprehensive understanding of how it operated. He explained
the beliefs undergirding his strategy in a circular order to all his station commanders: “The insurrection in this brigade
continues because the greater part of the people, especially the wealthy ones, pretend to desire, but in reality do not want
peace.” Bell continued that as soon as the people wanted peace, peace would come quickly. Based on his experience in northern
Luzon, Bell concluded that clearly the correct policy was to “make the people want peace, and want it badly.”
14
On December 8, 1901, Bell gave his most controversial order. Some years back Bell had interrupted his military career to study
law and pass the Illinois bar. Now his legal eye examined General Order 100 and focused on the mandate requiring an occupying
force to protect the people from undue hardship. This duty to protect the people became his justification to concentrate them
into secure camps. He ordered post commanders to establish protected zones for the safety of all Filipinos who desired peace.
The peace-loving people had twenty days to move their families, food, and possessions into the protected zones. Thereafter,
all territory outside of the zones would be treated as enemy territory. Here all property could be confiscated or destroyed
and all males subject to arrest. If they tried to evade they would be shot. Bell informed his subordinates that General Order
100 “authorizes the starving of unarmed hostile belligerents as well as armed ones, provided it leads to a speedier subjection
of the enemy.”
15
Bell was correct that General Order 100 allowed the “withholding of all sustenance or means of life from the enemy.” Indeed,
this was well within accepted military practice. From earliest recorded times, starvation was the method by which a besieging
force compelled the surrender of a castle or fortress town. senior American officers were well aware that the starving of
the people of Vicksburg had led to its surrender to the Union army commanded by U. S. Grant. Likewise, the practice of forcibly
separating civilians from insurgents was not a novel solution. In South Africa the British were using concentration camps
in their battle against the Boers. During the American Civil War, something of this sort had been done on a smaller scale
and had been a key ingredient in ending Confederate guerrilla operations in northern Arkansas. But the policy had most recently
been employed by the Spanish in Cuba and this was not a happy comparison in American minds.
Spanish general Valeriano Weyler and his Cuban
reconcentrado
policy had drawn widespread condemnation in the American press. During the buildup to the war with Spain, he was routinely
described as “Butcher Weyler.” Press accounts of the Cuban victims of Butcher Weyler’s concentration camps had been instrumental
in turning American public opinion against Spain. With this in mind, heretofore the U.S. Army had concealed its concentration
camps by calling them “colonies” and “zones of protection.” Chaffee tried to maintain this fiction, going so far as to ask
the adjutant general of the army to hand-deliver news of Bell’s plan to the secretary of war and then destroy it. Chaffee
explained that he did not “care to place on file in the Department any paper of the kind, which would be evidence of what
may be considered in the United States as harsh measures.”
16
In the event, a concentration policy of the scale employed in Batangas could not be concealed. The
Philadelphia Ledger
compared Bell with Butcher Weyler and asked, “Who would have supposed . . . that the same policy would be, only four years
later, adopted and pursued as the policy of the United States in the Philippines?” The
Baltimore American
expressed astonishment “that a general of our army in the far-off Philippines has actually aped Weyler.” It continued, “We
have actually come to a thing we went to war to banish.”
The imperialist press counterattacked. It wrote that comparisons between Bell and Weyler were mendacious because Bell, unlike
Weyler, did not intend to starve the people. It asserted that complaints about Bell’s policy stemmed from either partisan
politics or, as the
Army and Navy Journal
explained, sheer ignorance: “The things which the civilian critics in the United States don’t know about military affairs
in the Philippines would make a whole library of war history.”
17
FAR REMOVED FROM this highly charged domestic debate, American officers in southwestern Luzon implemented Bell’s directive,
concentrating about 300,000 Filipinos inside the protected zones. The extent of the protected zones depended upon the size
of the U.S. garrison. Small garrisons controlled areas limited by the range of their Krag-Jorgensen rifles. The larger garrisons,
in towns such as Batangas, established zones one or two miles wide and six miles long. A perimeter 300 to 800 yards wide surrounded
each zone. This was known as the “dead line,” beyond where soldiers had orders to shoot to kill anyone who strayed without
permission.
Many officers used their local knowledge to apply commonsense interpretations of Bell’s directive. They told their men to
avoid shooting women, children, and the aged and to exhibit restraint at all events. In addition, the Americans properly considered
it their duty to feed the Filipinos who inhabited the protected zones. But the purpose of the concentration order was to separate
them from the insurgents and then destroy all food outside the camps in order to starve out the insurgents. The soldiers focused
on this task.
Prisoner interrogations indicated that the insurgents had hidden a two-year supply of food. Bell intended to find and destroy
these caches even though it meant searching “every ravine and mountain top.”
18
And as long as they were in the field, Bell wanted the soldiers to kill all the animals they could not bring back to the
towns so that nothing edible remained to nourish the guerrillas. To cripple further the insurgent ability to find food, the
army closed all ports in Batangas and in an adjacent province. Bell banned the movement of merchandise by land inside these
provinces. No civilian was allowed to travel within the province without a special pass. Able-bodied males did not get passes.
No longer would individuals or town councils be allowed to straddle the divide between the Americans and the insurgents: “No
person should be given credit for loyalty simply because he takes the oath of allegiance or secretly conveys to Americans
worthless information.” Henceforth, the only acceptable measure was public acts that “commit them irrevocably to the side
of Americans by arousing the animosity and opposition of the insurgent element.” Examples of such acts included leading American
troops to enemy camps, identifying insurgents, and denouncing members of the insurgent shadow government. Civilian neutrality
was no longer acceptable. Either a person demonstrated by deed, not word, that he opposed Malvar’s insurgents or he was considered
hostile. No person was to receive credit merely for doing nothing against the Americans.
19
Within two weeks of launching his campaign, Bell called for increasingly harsh measures in order to apply extreme pressure
against the region’s elites. Bell knew that since the beginning of the insurgency the
ilustrado
class had provided both revolutionary leadership and vital material support. What he did not realize was that the insurgency
in Batangas now extended beyond this class. So in a special “confidential” telegraphic order—Bell recognized the howls of
protest this order would produce if exposed to the public—he attacked what he thought was the root of the insurgency by ordering
the arrest of all municipal officials, priests, and policemen who failed to perform unmistakable acts against the insurgents.
If a mayor had denounced an enemy agent, if a policeman had guided the Americans to a food cache, he was considered loyal.
Everyone else was given the choice to do the same or go to prison. Another tactic was to arrest the relatives of prominent
guerrilla leaders and hold them hostage for the conduct of the insurgents. Of course it was desirable to have “proof” before
making such arrests, but in the absence of evidence a well-founded suspicion was acceptable grounds for arrest and indefinite
confinement.
20
More of the same followed. What was good for the gentry was good for all. Bell ordered that captured insurgents, meaning any
males outside the zones, be brought to trial for violation of the laws of war unless they provided useful intelligence about
the insurgency. Faced with the prospect of a military trial, certain imprisonment, and possible execution, many prisoners
turned collaborator. The American pressure brought a recurring problem of false denunciations. Bell responded by ordering
military trials for anyone strongly suspected of this behavior. He authorized burning of dwellings near where telegraph lines
were cut or bridges burned. On the day before Christmas he brought back the old Spanish law of forced work to compel the able-bodied
men concentrated in towns to earn food for themselves and their families.
21
He imposed universal curfews from 8:00 p.m. to daybreak. If people refused to meet food and fuel requisitions, the town leaders
were to be arrested and forced to work harvesting crops and cutting wood until the villagers complied. Likewise, if the town
leaders refused to provide guides, they themselves were to be installed at the front of American patrols and forced to lead.
On December 24, 1901, Bell reiterated that the entire Filipino population was at heart opposed to the Americans. Therefore,
he reminded his officers, it was necessary “to make the state of war as insupportable as possible, and there is no more efficacious
way of accomplishing this than by keeping the minds of the people in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living
under such conditions will soon become unbearable.”
22
Bell was too smart merely to impose benevolent assimilation with threat, armed might, and rough treatment of prisoners. He
also understood the salient importance of timely intelligence. So Bell created a nimble intelligence machine that passed information
obtained from captured documents, informers, and interrogations rapidly up and down the chain of command. Each garrison had
a post intelligence officer whose task was to maintain updated information about his region and its inhabitants. These officers
exchanged lists of known and suspected insurgents, often annotated with physical descriptions or even photographs. When American
intelligence pinpointed an insurgent column, fast-moving cavalry set off to engage them. In most cases Filipino scouts, local
militia, or rebel turncoats acted as guides.
While Bell’s provost marshals dismantled the insurgents’ clandestine infrastructure within the concentration zones, patrols
crisscrossed the hinterland. Bell believed that he had to combine pressure against civilians with relentless pressure against
the armed insurgents in order to wear them down. Toward that goal, at any one time about half of Bell’s manpower, 4,000 men
or so, was engaged in field operations. This was “hard war” writ large. Bell issued orders to kill or capture any able-bodied
man encountered, round up everyone else, and “destroy everything I find outside of the towns.” Bell added, “These people need
a thrashing to teach them some good common sense, and they should have it for the good of all concerned.”
23
A typical large-scale operation began on the night of January 31, 1901, when 1,800 Americans established a cordon stretching
about ten miles from the outskirts of Batangas. The next morning they began moving slowly like a line of army ants devouring
every animal, crop, and structure encountered. The soldiers commanded by Colonel Almond Wells—about half the total—kept meticulous
records of the destruction: more then 500 tons of rice and corn burned; 200 water buffalo, 800 cattle, and 680 horses killed;
uncounted thousands of hogs, chickens, and goats killed; more than 6,000 houses burned.
In addition to the larger sweeps, small American patrols flooded the interior. Bell’s tactical instructions encouraged aggressive
response to all contacts with the insurgents. Even in the event of an ambush he wanted his men to respond with bold attacks.
He judged that because of his soldiers’ superior firepower and training they had achieved a moral superiority over the guerrillas
and such aggressive tactics would be rewarded. In a typical operation, individual companies established a base interdicting
a trail. Bell was so confident in his soldiers’ superiority that he authorized the detachments to secure their bases with
only one or two soldiers while everyone else went out on patrol. Detachments fanned out from this base to interdict guerrilla
movement and comb through the hinterland.
Bell had warned his officers that, “inasmuch as the change of policy which has recently taken place is calculated to arouse
strong resentment on the part of the enemy,” the likelihood of aggressive response was high.
24
Bell overestimated insurgent capacities. Malvar’s entire force numbered about 2,500 rifle-armed men. But they could not operate
in large enough units to challenge even the smallest American detachment. Relentless American pressure forced the insurgents
to move constantly. Seldom could they remain in place for more than a day. If they had any spare time, the desire to seek
revenge paled against the need to rest and find food.