Jungle of Snakes Read online

  Regardless of whether they were occupying a remote station or guarding supply bases and escorting convoys, young American soldiers found such routine duties unappealing. They had either volunteered for military duty or chosen the military as a profession and did so with the expectation that they had joined a fighting service. Instead they “were confronted with conditions utterly alien to their experience . . . They found themselves living in native houses or church buildings in the middle of large towns, in many cases of four or five thousand people, whose language they did not speak, whose thoughts were not their thoughts.”2 The natives’ lack of enthusiasm and support for their earnest efforts initially perplexed the American soldiers. Then came frustration. They had given the gift of American-style democracy and met indifference or re sistance. The only possible explanation was that the natives were too primitive, too foreign, too different to appreciate the benefits of American-sponsored civilization. The strong words the American soldiers used for Filipinos—“niggers,” “gugas”—betrayed their disdain for the local population.

  The Guerrillas Adapt

  From the American strategic viewpoint, the dispersion of the Army of Liberation into guerrilla bands had pluses and minuses. A big advantage was that guerrilla leaders had great difficulty communicating across districts because terrain and American patrols made the ability of a courier to deliver a message highly problematic. Thus there was little strategic coordination among insurgent bands. Each operated in a near-vacuum of information about the activities of bands outside the district, so they were unable to mass for powerful attacks against isolated American garrisons. Consequently the Americans could disperse to occupy the countryside without fear of being overrun. However, on the negative side, the decentralized nature of the resistance meant that there was neither one place to capture nor one leader to kill to cripple the insurgency. In effect, the resistance had mutated from a recognizable entity with a spine and a central brain into something more primitive that could endure the loss of an appendage or a nerve bundle and survive.

  The typical American combat operation involved a small patrol searching the countryside for guerrillas and their bases. The soldiers called these operations “hikes.” In order to march light, they discarded heavy packs and extra gear and severed reliance upon traditional supply trains. They used mule pack trains and native bearers. To increase mobility they formed picked detachments of mounted infantry and scouts. Whenever they possessed useful intelligence, these mounted detachments hounded insurgent bands relentlessly. However, most hikes failed to find the guerrillas. Insurgent spies and civilian sympathizers often forewarned the enemy. Moreover, the rugged jungle and mountain terrain provided excellent concealment. One typical hike traversed what the soldiers called the “Infernal Trail,” a rugged, mountainous path only eighteen inches wide that zigzagged through jungle and forest and ascended steep slopes where a misstep meant a 300-foot fall into a cliffside ravine.

  In such terrain a typical encounter began when guerrillas hidden in thick bamboo alongside a trail or concealed in a mountain gorge fired at an American patrol or supply column. This first fire invariably came as a surprise. After discharging a few shots the guerrillas scattered. The entire event usually ended within a matter of seconds. Such combats were enormously frustrating to the American soldiers. General Arthur MacArthur later testified that because it was so difficult to find the insurgents and because their shooting was so wild, American officers regarded “a contact under any conditions as a great advantage.”3 A new arrival to the Philippines, Captain David Mitchell, certainly held this view and it cost him his life.

  Mitchell commanded Company L, Fifteenth Infantry, based in Laguna Province in southern Luzon. This was the home territory of the insurgent leader General Juan Cailles. Cailles sent the local American commander, Colonel Benjamin Cheatham, a message that Cheatham regarded as “insolent.” Cheatham resolved to make Cailles “eat his words” and sent two infantry companies to attack Cailles’s stronghold in the village of Mabitac.4 On the morning of September 17, 1900, Mitchell encountered Cailles’s men defending the approaches to Mabitac. Cheatham’s plan called for Mitchell’s 134-man company to create a diversion while a flanking company maneuvered into position.

  Although Cailles’s force apparently numbered about 800 men, Mitchell cared not. In Mitchell’s mind the difficult part of the operation, finding the insurgents, was over. Now all he needed do was kill them. The terrain heavily favored the insurgents. The end of the monsoon season had flooded the countryside. The only way to get at the enemy was by advancing along a narrow causeway leading to Mabitac. Under such conditions even the notoriously poor insurgent marksmanship proved deadly. Their first volleys killed most of Mitchell’s advance party. None of Mitchell’s men had ever been under fire before and the survivors refused to charge into the hail of bullets. Mitchell and his subordinates exposed themselves recklessly to encourage the men to advance. Some soldiers tried to deploy off the causeway only to encounter waist-deep water. Meanwhile, deep water prevented the flanking column from providing assistance. Limited to an advance over the fire-swept causeway, the Americans had nothing except naked courage. It was not enough. After eighty minutes the battered Americans withdrew.

  Mitchell and twenty-three of his men lost their lives. Another nineteen Americans were wounded. In his report to Washington, MacArthur put the best light possible on this pointless carnage, asserting that the 33 percent loss rate was a sign of the “fearless leadership of officers and splendid response of men.” MacArthur privately acknowledged that if Mitchell had not been killed he would have been court-martialed for his reckless conduct. When U.S. forces returned the next day to resume the fight, the enemy had disappeared. MacArthur explained that Cailles’s men had undoubtedly escaped to nearby barrios, where they would pose as “peaceful amigos” until summoned to fight again.5 MacArthur mentioned neither that Cailles had returned the bodies of eight of Mitchell’s soldiers along with all their private property nor that Cailles claimed to have suffered only ten casualties.

  In the fight against Mitchell’s regulars, the insurgents had enjoyed a commanding position that turned the combat into a virtual turkey shoot. Consequently they willingly held their ground to inflict the maximum number of casualties. More commonly the insurgents avoided large American forces and instead struck isolated, vulnerable detachments. There was no pattern to the timing of the contacts and they could take place anywhere. An American regimental commander explained that the insurgent strategy thus gave the guerrillas a preeminent advantage since they could act the role of either insurrecto or amigo according to circumstances.

  MacArthur described the insurgents’ tactics: “At one time they are in the ranks as soldiers, and immediately thereafter are within the American lines in the attitude of peaceful natives, absorbed in a dense mass of sympathetic people.”6 Captain John Jordan described how his patrols entered a village to encounter people greeting “you with kindly expressions, while the same ones slip away, go out into the bushes, get their guns, and waylay you further down the road. You rout them & Scatter them; they hide their guns and take to their houses & claim to be amigos.”7 The insurgent-amigo act infuriated American soldiers. They could tolerate the common civilian attitude of sullen indifference. But treachery and betrayal were something else. A Manila-based journalist, Albert Robinson, wrote, “We have found many of them who were believed to be honestly friendly, but time has proved that they were simulating. Some of our most promising local presi-dentes [mayors] have been found guilty of the rankest treachery toward the Americans.”8

  American conduct also stoked the insurgency. There were the inevitable unfortunate encounters between intoxicated soldiers and civilians. In addition, soldiers supplemented their often deplorable rations by taking from civilians. But there was also something deeper. Most American soldiers had enlisted to fight. They generally regarded Filipinos as the enemy and believed that an enemy was someone who should be killed. Journalist Robinson
noted, “The enlisted man of the army to-day is not a philanthropist with a broad love for his fellow men . . . Many enlisted for the avowed purpose of ‘killing niggers’ and such have neither intent nor desire to return without having done their errand.”9 Although the army sometimes tried to punish abusive behavior, the deterrent effect was problematic. And there were routine cover-ups, as when soldiers in the Thirty-eighth Volunteers found a comrade’s decapitated body and retaliated by burning down a large section of the nearest town. Army investigators concluded that Filipinos had started the blaze.

  As 1900 progressed, increasing numbers of Filipinos who had been displaced by the war returned to their homes. They began living among the Americans, which gravely worried insurgent leaders. A guerrilla colonel warned that because of the American “policy of attraction” regular civilian contact “with our enemies may cause the gravest damage to our sacred cause.”10

  It is impossible to make a sweeping generalization about the impact of building schools, conducting classes, and providing a host of other civil services. They probably influenced events in the 44 percent of the provinces where no conflict occurred. Within insurgent strongholds they had little effect. Under American duress, municipal officials would perform their American-directed duties by day and at night cooperate with the insurgents. It was a logical human choice given that neither side could adequately protect them from the sanctions of the opponent.

  The ability of the Americans to defeat the insurgents with ease in open battle had awed the insurgents. The American inability to capitalize upon their conventional victories gave the insurgent leadership hope. At least one farsighted American Colonel perceived this. He warned his superiors, “It seems to me that the people have less respect for the United States’ authority than they had six months ago. They still have the same appreciation of their incapacity to meet its military power, but they have learned what they did not know, that it can be evaded, and how this can be done. I say this with profound regret.”11

  Presidential Politics

  As the pacification strategy based on a policy of attraction faltered, the upcoming American presidential election dominated events in the Philippines. Aguinaldo and his lieutenants invested great hope in the election’s outcome. They thought that if they inflicted some sensational losses then the American public would turn against McKinley and elect Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

  Had the Demo cratic Party nominated a different candidate this strategy might have been effective. But in 1900 American voters were enjoying economic recovery from the depression of 1896. Consequently, Bryan’s “Free Silver” economic policy, which had seemed appealing four years earlier during Bryan’s first contest against McKinley, failed to compete with the Republican slogan, “Four more years of the Full Dinner Pail.” This left Bryan with only his opposition to the annexation of the Philippines as a reason to attract voters and it proved not enough.

  However, in the summer of 1900 Aguinaldo did not perceive that Bryan was virtually unelectable. In June Aguinaldo issued a general order calling for “heavy blows” against the Americans during the summer months.12 His subordinates echoed his call. In August General Cailles ordered “constant combats, ambuscades, surprises and encounters” to “aid the triumph of the candidacy of Bryan who is our hope for the declaration of the in dependence of our country.”13

  Like their Filipino counterparts, American generals understood the significance of the election in determining the war’s outcome. Civil War veterans recalled their encounters with a press corps filled with anti-Lincoln and antiwar journalists. In the Philippines in 1900, as in Virginia and Georgia in 1864, they knew that military setbacks would provide political ammunition for the administration’s opponents if someone could deliver that ammunition. War correspondents in Manila tried to fulfill this role. To thwart them, the military leadership in the Philippines imposed strict censorship. An Associated Press reporter complained that this was more “unreasonable” and “stringent” than at any prior time and that censors “suppressed” his report about “incontrovertible military occurrences,” “delayed” controversial reports, rewrote political news, and “prohibited” the word ambush.14

  To influence the election, the military also exaggerated its accomplishments and inflated reports to make it appear that the war was progressing smoothly. In a war in which the capture of modern rifles was a crucial metric of progress, an official army bulletin announced the surrender of 800 insurgents and their firearms in the province of Bayombon. On the surface this appeared to be a notable victory. A diligent correspondent investigated and determined that in fact only forty rifles had been captured. The army had included in its count obsolete weapons and unimportant handguns found in private homes and also inflated the total to match the number of prisoners. The discrepancy between number of prisoners and number of firearms raised the question of how many of the prisoners were actual insurgents.

  Correspondents correctly believed that linguistic manipulation—such as forbidding the use of the word ambush—coupled with official censorship and exaggeration had political motives. However, when confronted by a military willing and able to control the flow of news there was little they could do about it. Only after the election did information emerge that would have brought into sharp question the administration’s veracity regarding the war’s progress.

  Taft and MacArthur

  The effort to muzzle the press during the run-up to the election consumed time that officers would have preferred to spend in actual military operations. But they understood that the fight against the insurgents had an important domestic political component. Reinforcing this point was the arrival of another distraction; a high-ranking, politically well-connected civil commission headed by William H. Taft. A fat man—schoolmates had nicknamed him “Big Lub”—whose appearance disguised his gifts, Taft was contentedly serving as a federal judge when he received an unexpected summons to the White House. McKinley still believed that the best way to undermine the insurgency was to demonstrate America’s benign intent. His vehicle for accomplishing this was a five-man Philippine Commission chaired by Taft.

  His offer of the chair floored Taft. “He might as well have told me that he wanted me to take a flying machine,” Taft related. The offer seemed a perilous career detour, so Taft equivocated. Secretary of War Elihu Root applied the necessary suasion. He told the forty-three-year-old Ohioan, “You have had an easy time of it holding office since you were twenty-one. Now your country needs you. This is a task worthy of any man. This is the parting of the ways. You may go on holding the job you have in a humdrum, mediocre way. But here is something that will test you . . . and the question is, will you take the harder or the easier task?”15

  For a parochial Ohio boy, the Philippines presented a novel challenge. Taft observed to his half brother, “The situation in Manila is perplexing. You meet men who are completely discouraged at it; you meet men who are conservative but very hopeful of good results; and you meet men who have roseate views of the situation.”16 In Taft’s mind, the commission’s goal was clear: to gain the confidence of the Filipino people by providing them with the best government possible.17 In September 1900 the Philippine Commission assumed legislative and executive duties for the islands. In practice, civilian rule, as represented by the Philippine Commission, replaced military authority as soon as the army declared a province pacified. Then the commission established municipal and provincial governments. Over time, the commission could boast of a rare accomplishment: it conducted a steady transfer of power that amounted to a self-liquidating colonial management. But at the start success seemed a distant mirage because Taft and his fellow commissioners met a wall of re sistance erected by Otis’s successor, Arthur MacArthur.

  A Wisconsin native, MacArthur compiled a distinguished combat record in the Civil War. Thereafter he spent twenty-three years languishing as a captain in the regular army until finally receiving the recognition he craved. He lacked the tactical flair some possessed
. But he was unusually well-read in military matters and put his learning into practice as he deliberated over alternative plans. Some called him slow and not particularly bright, while others judged him “thoughtful” with partic ular talent for “efficient strategical movement.”18 Regardless of what others thought, MacArthur was much convinced of his own brilliance and also was a tireless self-promoter, two characteristics he would pass on to his son Douglas. Like many other officers, he keenly resented the notion that civilian government could be put in place in the Philippines while the fighting still raged. MacArthur considered Taft and his fellow civilians annoyances best ignored.

  Taft also served as a con venient lightning rod for the enlisted men’s frustrations. After Taft characterized the Filipino as “our little brown brother” who merely required American compassion to improve his lot, field soldiers replied with new lyrics to a popular tune: