The American Occupation of the Philippines 1898-1912

by James H. Blount

Between pages 1916 and 1917 of Senate Document 331, part 2[17] may be found a photo-lithograph of the celebrated alleged order of the Filipino Revolutionary Government of February 15, 1899, to massacre all foreign residents of Manila. In his report for 1899[18] General Otis himself describes this order as one “which for barbarous intent is unequalled in these modern times in civilized warfare,” and speaks of it as “issued by the Malolos Government through the responsible officer who had raised and organized the hostile inhabitants within the city.” After Aguinaldo was captured in 1901, according to an account given by General MacArthur to the Senate Committee in 1902, of a conversation with the insurgent leader, the latter was shown a copy of this document purporting to have been signed by General Luna, one of his generals. He disclaimed having in any way sanctioned it, in fact disclaimed any prior knowledge of it whatsoever,[19] a disclaimer which General MacArthur appears to have accepted as true, frankly and entirely. At page 1890 of the same volume, Captain J. R. M. Taylor, 14th U. S. Infantry, a gallant soldier and an accomplished scholar, who was in charge in 1901 of the captured insurgent records at Manila, states that he was “informed” that the document was originally “signed by Sandico, then Secretary of the Interior” of the revolutionary government. Captain Taylor made an attempt to run the matter down, but obtained no evidence convincing to him. A like investigation by General MacArthur in 1901 had a like result.[20]

On the other hand, Major Wm. H. Bishop, of the 20th Kansas, was credited in a soldier’s letter written home, which first came to light in this country, with killing unarmed prisoners during the advance on Caloocan. The charges originated with a private of that regiment. Major Bishop denied the charges.[21] An investigation followed, in the course of which somebody made an innuendo, or charge—it is not important which—that other officers used their influence to prevent a full ventilation of the matter, specifically, General Funston, then Colonel of the 20th Kansas, and Major Metcalf, of the same regiment. These last two also made a most vigorous general denial, and nothing whatever was established against them. The whole matter was finally disposed of by being forwarded to the War Department at Washington by General Otis on July 13, 1899, some six months after the occurrences alleged, with the remark that he (General Otis) “doubted the wisdom of a court-martial” of the soldier who had made the charge against Major Bishop, “as it would give the insurgent authorities a knowledge of what was taking place, and they would assert positively that our troops practised inhumanities, whether the charges could be proven or not” and that they would use the incident “as an excuse to defend their own barbarities.”[22] The last endorsement on the papers preceding General Otis’s final endorsement was one by Colonel Crowder, now (1912) Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, in which he said: “I am not convinced from a careful reading of this report, that Private Brenner has made a false charge against Captain Bishop”; adding that “considerations of public policy, sufficiently grave to silence every other demand, require that no further action be taken in this case.”[23] The “considerations of public policy” were of course those indicated in General Otis’s final endorsement on the papers, already quoted. They were compellingly controlling, in my judgment, independently of the merits. Washing one’s soiled linen in public is never advisable, and placing a weapon in your enemy’s hand in time of war is at least equally unwise. Some shreds of this once much mooted matter doubtless still linger in the public memory. It has been thus briefly ventilated here solely to trace the genesis of the bitterness of that war, and of numerous later barbarities avenged in kind. The bitterness thus early begun grew as the war went on, until every time a hapless Filipino peasant soldier speaking only two or three words of Spanish would falsely explain, when captured, that he was a non-combatant, an amigo (friend), it usually at once filled the captor with vivid recollections of slain comrades, and of rumored or sometimes proven mutilation of their bodies after death, and these reflections would at once fill him with a yearning desire to blow the top of the amigo’s head off, whether he yielded to the desire or not. Of no instance where he did so yield am I aware. But I do know that the invariable statement of all Filipinos unarmed and un-uniformed when captured, to the effect that they were amigos, became to the American soldier not remotely dissimilar to the waving of a red rag at a bull. Of course this was also due, largely, to the guerrilla practice of hiding guns when hard-pressed and actually plunging at once into some make-believe agricultural pursuit. As for Major Bishop, it is inconceivable to me that he gave any order to kill unarmed prisoners. Even admitting for the sake of the argument that he is a fiend, he is not a fool. As a matter of fact, he was a brave soldier, as all the reports show, and is a reputable lawyer, having many warm friends whose opinion of any man would command respect anywhere. The truth of the whole matter probably is that just before going into battle, when our troops were in an ugly temper by reason of the rumors of barbarities alleged to have been perpetrated by the enemy, or contemplated by him, the word was passed along the line to “Take no more prisoners than we have to,” and that that thought originated with some irresponsible private soldier of the line inflamed by stories of mutilation of our dead or of maltreatment of our wounded. Such a “word,” so passed from man to man, can, in the heat of conflict, very soon evolve into something having for practical purposes all the force and effect of an order.

Through the foregoing, and like causes, including the “water cure,” later invented to persuade amigos to discover the whereabouts of hidden insurgent guns or give information as to the movements of the enemy,[24] our war with the Filipinos became, before it was over, a rather “dark and bloody” affair, accentuated as it was, from time to time, by occasional Filipino success in surprising detachments from ambush, or by taking them unawares and off their guard in their quarters, and eliminating them, the most notable instance of the first being the crumpling of a large command of the 15th Infantry by General Juan Cailles, in southern Luzon, and the most indelibly remembered and important example of the second being the massacre of the 9th Infantry people at Balangiga, in Samar, in the fall of 1901. Certainly more than one American in that long-drawn-out war did things unworthy of any civilized man, things he would have believed it impossible, before he went out there, ever to come to. Personally, I have heard, so far as I now recollect, of comparatively few barbarities perpetrated by Filipinos on captured American soldiers. Barbarities on their side seemed to have been reserved for those of their own race whom they found disloyal to the cause of their country. Personally I have never seen the water-cure administered. But I once went on a confidential mission by direction of General MacArthur, in the course of which I reported first, on arriving in the neighborhood of the contemplated destination, to a general officer of the regular army who is still such to-day.[25] That night the general was good enough to extend the usual courtesy of a cot to sleep on, in the headquarters building. Toward dusk I went to dine with a certain lieutenant, also of the regular army.[26] As we approached the lieutenant’s quarters a sergeant came up with a prisoner, and asked instructions as to what to do with him. The lieutenant said: “Take him out and find out what he knows. Do you understand, Sergeant?” The sergeant saluted, answered in the affirmative, and moved away with his prisoner. We went in to the lieutenant’s quarters, and while at dinner heard groans outside. I said “What is that, Jones?”[27] Jones said: “That’s the water-cure he’s giving that hombre.[28] Want to see it?” I replied that I certainly did not. Returning that night to the general’s headquarters, after breakfast the next morning I met my friend Jones coming out of the general’s office. I said: “What’s the matter, what are you doing here,” he having mentioned the evening before an expedition planned for the morrow. He said: “Well, I’ve just had a talk with the general to see if I could get my resignation from the army accepted?” “Why?” said I. “Well,” was the reply, “that ——” (designating the prisoner of the night before by a double barrelled epithet) “died on me last night.” Just how the matter was hushed up I have never known, but Jones was never punished. More than one general officer of the United States Army in the Philippines during our war with the Filipinos at least winked at the water-cure as a means of getting information, and quite a number of subalterns made a custom of applying it for that purpose. It was practically the only way you could get them to betray their countrymen. Did I report the incident to General MacArthur? Certainly not. It was the business of the general commanding the district. The water-cure, though very painful, was seldom fatal, and when not fatal was almost never permanently damaging, and it was about the only way to shake the loyalty of the average Filipino and make him give information as to hidden insurgent guns, guerrilla bands, etc. It was a part of Benevolent Assimilation.

Let us now return to the early battlefields about Manila which we left, initially, to analyze the extreme bitterness of the feeling between the combatants that very early began to develop.

We left war correspondent John F. Bass among the dead and dying on one of these fields, supposedly musing on the White Man’s Burden, or Land-Grabbing, or Trust-for-Civilization theory, or whatever it was that moved the fifty-seven senators whose votes had ratified the treaty by a majority of just one more than the constitutionally necessary two-thirds.

The reason the writer lays so much stress on Mr. Bass’s letters to Harper’s Weekly on the early fighting in the Philippines, is because his remarks come direct from the battlefield, and are, as it were, res gestæ. They were made dum fervet opus, to use a law Latin phrase which in plain English means “while the iron is hot.” They reflect more or less accurately the feelings of the men whose deeds he was recording. He, and O. K. Davis, now Washington correspondent of the New York Times, and John T. McCutcheon, of Chicago, the now famous cartoonist (who was with Dewey in the battle of Manila Bay), and Robert Collins, now London correspondent of the Associated Press, and “Dick” Little of the Chicago Tribune,—a little man about six feet three,—and lots of other good men and true, were all through that fighting, and we will later come to an issue of personal veracity between them and General Otis which culminated in the retirement from office of Secretary of War Alger, and ought to have resulted in the recall of General Otis, but did not, because to have acknowledged what a blunderer General Otis had been and to have relieved him from command, as he should have been relieved, would have been to “swap horses crossing a stream,” as Mr. Lincoln used to put it in declining to change generals during a given campaign. The object here is to bring out the truth of history as to how the men who bore the brunt of the early fighting felt about it. Testimony as to what the officers and men of the army said would be of no value, because a complaining soldier’s complaints are too often only a proof of “cold feet.”[29]

These newspaper men, not under military orders, were daily risking their lives voluntarily, just to keep the American public informed, and the American public were kept in darkness and only vouchsafed bulletins giving them the progressive lists of their dead and wounded, and this last only on demand made upon Secretary Alger by the people of Minnesota, the Dakotas, etc., through their senators. The War Department did not want the people to know, did not want to admit itself, how plucky, vigorous, and patriotic the resistance was. The period of the fighting done by the State Volunteers from February until fall, when public opinion finally forced the Administration to send General Otis an adequate force, is slurred by Secretary of War Root in his report for 1899. I do not mean that it was slurred intentionally. But the Philippines were a long way off, and Mr. Root and Mr. McKinley naturally relied for their information on their commanding general on the spot. There were gallant deeds done in the Philippines by those Western fellows of the State regiments which volunteered for the war with Spain, that would have made the little fighting around Santiago look like—well, to borrow from “Chimmie” Fadden’s fertile vocabulary, “like 30 cents.” But General Otis was not in a position to get the thrill of such things from his office window, so very few of them were given much prominence by him in his despatches to the Adjutant-General of the army. This was wise enough from a political standpoint, seeing that a presidential campaign was to ensue in 1900 predicated on the proposition that American sovereignty was “in accord with the wishes and aspirations of the great mass of the Filipinos,” to use the words of the President’s message to Congress of December, 1899.

Caloocan was taken by General MacArthur on February 10th. The natural line of advance thereafter was of course up the railroad, because the insurgents held it, and needed it as much as we would. Throughout February there were engagements too numerous to mention. The navy also entertained the enemy whenever he came too near the shores of Manila Bay. One incident in particular is worthy of note, and worthy of the best traditions of the navy. I refer to the conduct of Assistant Engineer Emory Winship off Malabon, March 4, 1899. Malabon is five miles north of Manila, on the bay, not far from Caloocan. On the day named, a landing party of 125 men from the U. S. S. Bennington went ashore near Malabon to make photographs, in aid of navy gunnery, of certain entrenchments and buildings that had been struck by shells from the Monadnock. They foolishly failed to throw out scouts ahead of their column, and were suddenly greeted with a withering fire from a whole regiment of insurgents who had seen them first and lain in wait for them. They retired with considerably more haste than they had gone forth. The insurgents advanced, firing, at double quick, toward the comparative handful of Americans, and would undoubtedly have killed the last man jack of them, but Engineer Winship, who had been left in charge of the tug that brought the landing party shoreward, to keep up steam, saw the situation and promptly met it. He unlimbered a 37mm. Hotchkiss revolving machine gun which stood in the bow of the tug, and opened up with accurate aim on the advancing regiment of Filipinos. Naturally he at once became a more important target than the retreating body. Nevertheless, he kept pumping lead into that long howling murderous advancing brown line until, when within two hundred yards of where the tug lay, the line recoiled and retreated, and the landing party got safely back to the ship. It was, literally, a case of saving the lives of more than a hundred men, by fearless promptness and dogged tenacity in the intelligent and skilful performance of duty. The awnings of the tug were torn in shreds by the enemy’s rain of bullets, and her woodwork was much peppered. Winship was hit five times, and still carries the bullets in his body, having been retired on account of disability resulting therefrom, after being promoted in recognition of his work.

Soon after March 25th, General MacArthur, commanding the Second Division of the Eighth Army Corps, advanced from Caloocan up the railroad to Malolos, the insurgent capital, some twenty miles away. Malolos was taken March 31st. Our February killed were six officers and seventy-one enlisted men, total seventy-seven, and a total of 378 wounded. By the end of March the list swelled to twelve officers and 127 enlisted men killed, total 139, and a total of 881 wounded, making our total casualties, as reported April 1st, 1020. Also 15% of the command, or about 2500, were on sick report on that date from heat prostrations and the like.[30] For these and other reasons, farther advance up the railroad was halted for a while.

Meantime, General Lawton, with his staff, consisting of Colonel Edwards, Major Starr, and Captains King and Sewall, “the big four” they were called, had come out from New York City by way of the Suez Canal, bringing most welcome reinforcements, the 4th and 17th Infantry. These people arrived between the 10th and the 22d of March. What happened soon after, as a result of their arrival, must now become for a brief moment, a part of the panorama, the lay of the land General Lawton first swept over being first indicated.