Jungle of Snakes Read online

  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.

  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 Filipino
s 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.