Jungle of Snakes (4 page)
Authors: James R. Arnold
The Policy of Attraction
Aguinaldo’s decision to shift from conventional to guerrilla warfare forced American leaders to adapt a new strategy. During
the spring and summer of 1900, northern Luzon served as a proving ground for an American counterinsurgency strategy based
upon what planners called a policy of attraction. Here the military would prove that it could simultaneously implement civil
government and fight the insurgency. The operating assumption was that northern Luzon was peaceful and the Filipinos accepting
of American authority. This assumption was out of touch with reality. Because of insurgent terror directed against the inhabitants
of towns and villages, the Americans received little useful intelligence about their foes. Thus they were completely in the
dark about insurgent plans, movements, and strengths. Moreover, however peaceful the situation appeared in coastal urban areas,
insurgents, criminals, and untamed mountain tribesmen dominated the interior’s jungles and mountains.
Heedless of this reality, well-intentioned Americans conducted a large-scale program to eliminate smallpox by hiring Filipino
doctors and providing them with vaccine. Believing that poor young men joined the insurgency out of economic need, the U.S.
Army financed road repair projects to provide a legitimate income alternative. The construction of new schools served as the
symbolic centerpiece of American benevolence. The emphasis on civic action meant that a second lieutenant in an isolated village
or a major in a large town acted as administrator of municipal government in an alien culture. The officers fell back on what
they knew. Just like the progressive reformers at home, they believed that republican institutions produced enlightened and
free citizens. So they worked to alleviate society’s ills by giving more people greater economic, political, and social opportunities.
Their labors made real differences. Medical and sanitation teams brought cholera, smallpox, and plague under control and reduced
the incidence of malaria. New water and sewage systems also improved public health. But none of these efforts tamped down
the insurgency.
It became apparent that Otis’s victory claim was premature. As soon as the rainy season ended in northern Luzon the insurgents
began a new offensive. During the next three months, they inflicted 50 percent more casualties on the Americans compared to
any other time during the guerrilla war. They cut down vital telegraph lines faster than the lines could be repaired. They
repeatedly attacked the rafts that provided the main source of American supply. When U.S. soldiers tried to clear the riverbanks
they encountered significant guerrilla opposition. As alarming as all of this was—and it was sufficient to panic the district
commander, Brigadier General Samuel Young, into writing his superiors that defeat might be at hand—perhaps worse was the ability
of the insurgency to prevent Filipino cooperation with the American vision of civil government.
A guerrilla armed with an obsolete firearm might not be able to engage the Americans on equal terms but his gun allowed him
to intimidate unarmed civilians. Better still, in the interest of revolutionary justice, a collaborator hacked to death with
a bolo in a village market made a powerful impression and saved scarce ammunition. During 1900 the Americans recorded 350
known assassinations and 442 assaults. The actual numbers were doubtless much higher.
The ability of the guerrillas to terrorize anyone who contemplated cooperation with the Americans made it impossible for the
United States to create a civil government. Among many garrison commanders, Major Matt Steele tried to implement his orders
and dutifully called for elections. He candidly wrote his wife that he did “not expect a single person to vote” because “the
edge of a bolo and the hand of an assassin are the price they would pay for taking that oath and holding office under American
rule.”
14
An insightful American colonel came to the realization that the “best assistance the Military authorities can now give to
the schools is to guarantee to the towns a stable government and to the people personal safety.”
15
With a strength of some 60,000 men, the U.S. Army lacked the manpower to garrison enough places to maintain law and order.
Furthermore, the units in the garrison and in the field could not obtain useful intelligence about the enemy. They lacked
guides to lead them along obscure jungle and mountain trails. They did not have the language skills to communicate with the
local people. Everyone appreciated that efficient Filipino auxiliary forces could solve these problems. Indeed, colonial empires
from imperial Rome to British India had rested on the backs of native soldiers. But which natives to trust seemed unknowable.
The Failure of Attraction
THE U.S. ARMY THAT FOUGHT THE guerrilla war in the Philippines comprised regular infantry and cavalry regiments made up of
veteran, professional soldiers. Supplementing the professionals were the National Guard and volunteer regiments, “the Boys
of ’98,” commanded by officers who had distinguished themselves during the Spanish-American War. The equipment and training
inadequacies that had hampered the fight against the Spanish in Cuba had been corrected. Notably, both regulars and volunteers
now received rigorous training. Consequently, they were tough, capable soldiers. Although few enlisted men and junior officers
had seen combat prior to 1898, they displayed one of the hallmarks of the American soldier: a willingness to learn by trial
and error.
The senior officers from regimental command on up were combat veterans, having fought in either the Civil War or the Indian
Wars, if not both. The legacies of these conflicts blended to shape the conduct of the guerrilla war in the Philippines. The
Civil War officers were prepared for stern measures. They remembered Sherman’s March to the Sea and Sheridan’s torching of
the Shenandoah Valley. The Indian War officers were comfortable with small-unit warfare, a style of command that involved
a high level of command autonomy and rewarded individual initiative and aggressiveness.
For officers and enlisted men alike, the guerrilla war was sporadic and highly localized. During the entire war, no fighting
took place in thirty-four of the seventy-seven provinces in the Philippines. In some of the contested provinces, the Americans
operated with a light touch. In Albay, on Luzon’s southern tip, Filipinos were more concerned with their export economy than
with revolutionary slogans. Their lack of firm resis tance gave the Americans time to disprove revolutionary propaganda. Contrary
to that propaganda, Americans did not kill, enslave, or forcibly convert insurgent prisoners from Catholicism to Protestantism.
Instead, they offered peace, the prospect of economic recovery, and amnesty to insurgent fighters. True, the American soldiers
often drank to excess, but so did many locals, hence this behavior was tolerable. Albay proved to be one of many places where
the Americans merely had to demonstrate that they were better than the Spanish to become tolerated if not welcomed.
Because the insurgent menace was initially slight in many places such as Albay, military service in the Philippines often
featured a boring routine of uneventful guard duty interrupted by occasional, usually ineffectual, insurgent sniper attacks.
Soldiers could leave camp to swim, forage, visit town, or even take horseback rides across the country without fear. But as
Private Edwin Segerstrom of the Colorado National Guard observed, “You can’t trust them though, for in the daytime they may
be friendly when you meet them and have your gun along, but in the night they are different I guess.”
1
In the unpacified provinces, American officers at all levels of command found themselves thrust into the unfamiliar task of
establishing civil government as the occupation made the transition from military to civilian rule. Yet they still had to
fight the insurgents. In order to accomplish this, the army dispersed into small garrisons. In November 1899—at a time when
the insurgents were still trying to fight as a regular military force—some 43,000 American effectives occupied 53 dispersed
bases (called stations in official reports). In response to the outbreak of guerrilla warfare, reinforcements arrived, increasing
American strength to about 70,000 effectives. As of October 1900 they manned 413 stations.
In other words, to contest dispersed guerrillas the Americans also had to spread out, and by so doing they encountered a classic
counterinsurgency conundrum. To provide civilian security and find the guerrillas, the army had to operate in the most remote,
inhospitable terrain. Garrisons in such places could not live without supplies from the main bases. Supply convoys, in turn,
moved along narrow, unpaved roads through jungle and densely planted cropland. Numerous rivers and streams bisected the landscape,
funneling the convoys onto primitive bridges, a natural choke point for ambushes. When it rained, which was often, the so-called
roads dissolved into deep, cloying mud. Then, soldiers had to substitute themselves for weary draft animals to haul bogged
wagons from the mud. All of these factors made supply convoys so vulnerable that they became the insurgent target of choice.
In response, U.S. commanders had to increase the number of men providing security along the lines of communication, which
took away from the number available to hunt for the guerrillas.
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.
