Jungle of Snakes Page 5
I’m only a common soldier-man in the blasted Philippines.
They say I got Brown Brothers here, but I dunno what it means.
I like the word Fraternity, but I still draw the line; He may be a brother of William H. Taft, but he ain’t no friend of mine. 19
Indeed, the song made light of a significant problem. As one American general observed around this time, “The most serious obstacle in the way of complete pacification of the islands now lies in the mutual distrust between the troops and the inhabitants.”20
THREE
The War Is Won Again
Lieutenant William T. Johnston Goes to Work
THE INSURGENTS’ PREELECTION OFFENSIVE focused attention on combat encounters between American soldiers and guerrillas while obscuring the more important battle to control the civilian population. Americans were learning that benign assimilation in the face of an insurgency able and willing to terrorize the civilian population was impossible. Among them was William Taft. By now Taft had visited some of the islands’ safer regions—including in his baggage an outsized bathtub since he could not fit into the local ones—and reached the conclusion that most Filipinos wanted peace but were too frightened by the insurgents’ systematic terror campaign to act. An American Colonel concurred, observing that civilians “would gladly take their oaths of allegiance if assured that our troops would remain to protect them.”1 But the Americans were unable to provide adequate security.
General Lloyd Wheaton, the commander of the Department of Northern Luzon, studied the problem and concluded that the insurgents had prepared carefully for the American arrival. They selected loyal delegates to confer with the Americans and participate in the American-sponsored elections. Thus they controlled the municipal government. A vice mayor’s official duties included fulfilling contracts to supply the Americans. He siphoned off half the profits for the insurgency. An insurgent colonel or-ga nized the police force. The police force’s most important duty was to inform the insurgents about American movements. Their second duty was to mislead the Americans regarding the whereabouts of the guerrillas. In sum, the insurgents had established an embedded infrastructure, what later generations would call a shadow government. Wheaton himself did not hold such a sophisticated view. He concluded that the policy of “benevolent assimilation” was not working because the Filipinos were “semi-civilized natives belonging to a race whose every impulse is to treachery and perfidy.”2
The extent of the continued Filipino re sistance surprised the man at the top, General MacArthur. He had originally thought that Aguinaldo’s fighters represented a distinct minority. However, “contact with both in-surrectos and amigos” had taught him that in fact most Filipinos on the main island of Luzon supported Aguinaldo.3 MacArthur had reached a different conclusion than Taft regarding Filipino motivations. MacArthur concluded that the Filipinos were quite happy to accept the material benefits flowing from the American pacification effort while continuing to support the insurgents with money, supplies, shelter, and new recruits. As MacArthur pondered what to do, Lieutenant William T. Johnston produced a brilliant analysis titled “Methods Adopted by the Insurgents for Orga nizing and Maintaining a Guerrilla Force.”4 It arrived on MacArthur’s desk at the end of June 1900 and proved a shocking appraisal of past pacification efforts.
To date no American had systematically studied the infrastructure that supported the insurgency. Johnston set to work diligently investigating towns and villages in the province of La Union, some 170 miles northwest of Manila. Painstaking interviews with local Filipino officials convinced Johnston that a very active insurgent shadow government was operating right under the noses of the American garrisons. Just how active and how close he did not know until a stroke of fortune produced an invaluable infor mant. This was Crispulo Patajo, a suspected outlaw delivered to the Americans by the mayor of Bauang. Patajo turned out to be a disgruntled leader of a minor religious cult, the Guardia de Honor. The cult had long been in conflict with Filipino authorities. Patajo took the opportunity of his arrest to seek revenge against his cult’s oppressors. He told Johnston that among others the mayor of Bauang was a member of the insurgency. He offered to prove his accusation by exposing the region’s entire guerrilla network.
Johnston, in turn, pursued the matter like a detective investigating a crime. He gave Patajo the opportunity to establish his bona fides by revealing the locations of hidden insurgent supply depots. At his first test, Patajo led the Americans into a supposedly pacified town, denounced several men who turned out to be insurgent officers, and found a stockpile of guns. Encouraged by this demonstration, Johnston unleashed Patajo on Bauang. In short order, Johnston reported, “Bauang was cleaned up and the presidente [mayor] made to see the error of his ways.”5 With a huge assist from Patajo, in less then three months Johnston assembled a complete picture of insurgent operations in the region. Among his findings was the startling fact that insurgent leaders routinely circulated among multiple safe houses in the midst of American-garrisoned towns and villages. Here they regularly met with civil authorities including mayors and police chiefs. Those officials handed over tax receipts and forced requisitions as well as monies siphoned off from American aid programs. If they needed muscle to enforce their demands, the insurgents summoned guerrillas from secure camps located within two miles of a an American garrison. Indeed, the presence of American forces did little to deter the insurgents. Johnston learned that insurgent shadow governments operated even in places occupied by substantial American garrisons. Here as elsewhere, men serving the insurgent cause had been installed by the Americans to serve in the American-sponsored municipal government.
Armed with this knowledge, Colonel William P. Duvall, the officer commanding La Union, set to work. Duvall melded Johnston’s talents, Patajo’s offer to provide anti-insurgent volunteer militia, and a handful of rebel turncoats into a comprehensive intelligence system that produced dramatic results. Duvall appointed Patajo chief of detectives for the entire province and allowed him to recruit from within his own cult. Patajo quickly raised some 400 to 500 volunteers who accompanied American patrols. The volunteers proved their worth by guiding the Americans to guerrilla hideouts or operating on their own. At the end of March, Patajo’s men attacked an insurgent force, capturing officers, men, and guns while they rested in their safe houses. This was a feat the Americans alone could not accomplish.
Patajo handed the prisoners over to the Americans, who gave them the choice of prison or freedom if they betrayed their comrades. From an American perspective, the beauty of this approach was that once a guerrilla became a turncoat, he also became highly motivated to fight the insurgency since he well knew that he had become a marked man. Indeed, the local guerrilla commander offered a large reward for killing the “terrible Americanista” Patajo, to no avail. Worse from an insurgent standpoint, once Patajo’s men rooted out the shadow government and replaced it with their own, the insurgents found that they could not regain control of the towns.
Higher in the chain of command, Colonel Duvall’s decision to rely on Patajo and his cult was problematic. It went against official policy, upset the region’s Filipino elite, and alarmed American civil authorities. Taft reported to the secretary of war that Duvall had merely replaced insurgent terrorism with a different system of terrorism. Taft warned that this approach would ultimately harm American pacification efforts. However, there could be no denying results. As Johnston noted, Patajo’s men “are the only ones who have ever told us where we could find insurrectos and guns, and who voluntarily went and helped find them.”6 By exploiting ethnic and religious differences, the Americans in La Union were able to sever the connection between the insurgent bands and the towns that supported them. In a matter of months, the province that MacArthur’s predecessor had called the worst part of the Philippine islands was pacified.
At the end of June 1900, when MacArthur read Johnston’s eye-opening analysis, he praised it as the best description of the insurgen
cy he had seen. He concluded that the extent and strength of the insurgency demanded a major strategic shift. But if he announced such a shift, he would give ammunition to the opponents of the McKinley administration four months before the presidential election. Consequently, MacArthur bided his time and warned the War Department that the war had entered a new phase that was likely to persist for a long time. The general relied upon his censors to keep this information from the American public.
THE PHILIPPINES EXPLODED into violence as the insurgents began a general offensive timed to influence the American election. In spite of the censors’ efforts, as the presidential election entered its decisive weeks, events in the Philippines assumed center stage. McKinley responded to fierce domestic political attacks against his Philippine policy by appealing to patriotism and asserting that victory was very near if only the country stood to the task. He did not reveal MacArthur’s altogether different assessment. Republican advocates equated support for Bryan with support for the insurgents. Secretary of War Root openly called into question the patriotism of the anti-imperialists, saying that insurgents firing from ambush and the anti-imperialists were allies in the same cause. Other politicians quoted letters from servicemen saying that the only reason the Filipinos continued to fight was because of reports from the American press that undermined the administration. The pro-administration New York Tribune charged that Bryan was more of an insurgent leader than Aguinaldo and “every American soldier that is killed during these months can be laid directly to his door.”7
On election day 1900, William McKinley won reelection with 52 percent of the popular vote and almost twice the number of electoral votes as Bryan. In this, his second contest against Bryan, his margin of victory was substantially higher than it had been four years before.
For the Filipino insurgents, this result spelled disaster. They had always suffered from a scarcity of military resources and from indifferent popular support. They invested both assets heavily on the prospect of Bryan’s election. McKinley’s overwhelming victory saw their hopes dashed and their assets depleted. It also allowed the Americans to take off the gloves and begin a much crueler war.
The Laws of War
One of the army’s hard men, Major Matt Batson, greeted McKinley’s reelection with great satisfaction. He told his wife:
The time has come when it is necessary to conduct this warfare with the utmost vigor . . . But the numerous, so styled, humane societies, and poisonous press, makes it difficult to follow this policy if reported to the world, so what I write to you regarding these matters is not to fall into the hands of the newspaper men. At the present we are destroying everything before us. I have three columns out, and their course is easily traced from the church tower by the smoke from burning houses . . . there will be but little mercy shown to those who are carrying on guerrilla warfare, or giving them aid.8
The soldiers doing the burning were Filipinos recruited from the town of Macabebe. The Macabebes had a tradition of military service to Spain and detested the Tagalogs. Batson orga nized a five-company battalion named Batson’s Macabebe Scouts. As time went on the Macabebes usefully provided scouts, guides, and interpreters, but they and their leader really excelled at small-unit counterinsurgency operations. During the unit’s first week of existence Batson proudly wrote his wife: “With my battalion of Macabebe Scouts I am spreading terror among the Insurrectos. They may be wily but they have found their equal, I think. Word reaches a place that Macabebes are coming and every Tagalog hunts his hole.”9
Exploiting ethnic divisions to squash an insurgency had long historical roots. The Romans had been masters of this approach. In the Philippines, the success of Batson’s Macabebe Scouts encouraged the U.S. Army to take advantage of the archipelago’s ethnic rivalries and recruit some 15,000 native auxiliaries. Employing natives was a helpful step but in MacArthur’s mind it was not enough. Like almost all of his veteran officers, the commanding general believed that for too long American policy had been mistakenly tilted in the direction of attraction. Even MacArthur’s offer of a general amnesty—in his mind a nonpareil exemplar of benign assimilation—had failed. MacArthur complained that the routine reluctance of even the most active pro-Americans to give useful intelligence was one of the greatest problems. Yet MacArthur judged that this reluctance was merely a manifestation of a deeper problem.
According to MacArthur, the insurgency received widespread popular support by “a strange combination of loyalty, apathy, ignorance, and timidity.”10 So strong was the insurgent hold that civilians marked for death by the insurgent command accepted their fate without appealing for American protection. Something had to be done to detach the towns from the insurgents in the field. In MacArthur’s view, looming strategic defeat required a “new and more stringent policy.”11 The new policy’s legal basis derived from an order drafted and adopted by the Lincoln administration in 1863. At that time the Union army was occupying areas of the Confederacy where partisans waged an increasingly effective guerrilla war. The rebels had extended the cloak of legitimacy to guerrillas who operated in civilian dress. The guerrillas’ ability to blend into the civilian background frustrated the U.S. Army. In response, the army’s commanding general asked a noted legal scholar, Dr. Francis Lieber, for his views.
The result was General Order 100, “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” a synthesis of the laws of war as they had evolved by the mid-nineteenth century. Its central theme was that the object of war was restoration of peace, not the death of one’s foes. It included a long list of moderating guidelines for an occupying army. However, toleration had limits and irregulars who fought out of uniform could be treated summarily as pirates rather than as legitimate combatants. For active guerrilla sympathizers, legitimate sanctions included exile, relocation, imprisonment, fines, and confiscation. Because of its realistic blend of moderation and severity, General Order 100 gained international accep-tance and served as the basis for the first formal international agreements on the laws of war. On December 20, 1900, with the American presidential election comfortably past, MacArthur informed the Filipino people of his new policy. Written in English, Spanish, and Tagalog, his proclamation stated that the insurgents and their supporters were “collectively and individually” guilty of violating the laws of war as encoded in General Order 100.12 They would eventually be brought to justice. The proclamation’s special focus was on the most successful guerrilla elements, namely, those who kidnapped and assassinated American collaborators, participated in the guerrilla’s shadow government that operated in American-occupied towns, or fought without belonging to an orga nized military unit. MacArthur pledged to counter their deeds with exemplary punishments as determined by American military tribunals. He noted that the excuse that someone was acting because of intimidation by the insurgents would rarely be accepted.
MacArthur took additional steps permitted by General Order 100. He sent into exile prominent Filipino leaders. He ended the misguided policy of automatically releasing prisoners. He authorized his provost marshals to arrest and detain suspects without evidence. MacArthur specifically warned that insurgent leaders involved with assassinations would be forbidden from returning to normal civil life once the fighting ended. This threat gave insurgent leaders pause. They had grown up as members of the islands’ upper class and heretofore had assumed that, win or lose, when the conflict ended they would resume their privileged lives.
Prior to MacArthur’s proclamation to the Filipino people, many American officers such as Matt Batson had already regarded General Order 100 as justification for burning crops and buildings, incarcerating suspects, imposing curfews that authorized shooting on sight anyone found near a telegraph line, and executing prisoners. In one sense, MacArthur was merely providing official ac knowledg ment for practices already widely employed. However, most American military men had a different sense of what MacArthur’s new policy implied. They understood that going forward they had
official sanction for waging a much harder war. General Samuel S. Sumner explained, “I am aware that this is a severe and stringent measure and will entail hardships and suffering on the inhabitants, but it seems the only practical means at hand.”13
MacArthur’s new counterinsurgency strategy coincided with a surprising decline in American popular support for the war. The anti-imperialists were enraged that first the McKinley administration had waited until after the election to acknowledge the extent of the Philippine insurgency and then implemented a much harsher policy. Anti-imperialist headlines announced that MacArthur intended to show no mercy, telling Filipinos to “Be Good or Be Shot.”14 As discouraging reports of violence and killing continued, opposition to the war spread beyond the anti-imperialists. On the second day of 1901, the formerly supportive New York Times presented an opinion that spoke for many:
The American people are plainly tired of the Philippine War. The administration must be aware that the case of its enemies is not weakened nor the confidence of its friends augmented by the daily reading about all this cost and killing. To kill rebellion by inches and trust to patience and slow time to bring back peace and contentment is not a humane or wise policy. It cannot be the lack of money. Is it the lack of troops, supplies, transportation, ammunition, artillery? Is it the lack of a competent commander? The public simply does not know where the trouble lies. It does know that there is trouble somewhere. Where is it? How long is this Philippine War going to last?15