by John McCain
Porter had not followed Waller’s trail. He had taken the seven marines in the best shape, including Quick, and six bearers on what seemed a suicidal attempt to retrace their circuitous route back to Lanang. The rest of the marines were in too poor condition to make the march; they remained behind with thirteen bearers under the command of Lieutenant Alexander Williams.
Porter thought they might reach Lanang in four days; it took them eight. That they made it at all was a Shackleton-like feat of endurance, walking barefoot in constant rain with only what they could forage to sustain them, repeatedly crossing raging streams and dragging themselves over mountains. He had to leave four men at the place where the original column had left their boats; they were too weak to continue. The rest of the party reached Lanang on January 11.
Captain Pickering immediately assembled a rescue party commanded by a young army lieutenant, Kenneth Williams, but torrential rains prevented it from navigating the river for two days. Finally, on the morning of January 14, Williams, ten soldiers, an army surgeon, and a number of Filipino porters set out to find the lost marines.
The other Lieutenant Williams and his party had followed after Porter as best they could, many so weak from hunger they were delirious. Ten men, one after another, dropped to the jungle floor and surrendered to their fate. The rest trudged on hopelessly, up and down mountains, with nothing to eat but a few wild tubers, while the most stouthearted encouraged them on. The marines suspected the bearers were hiding food and letting them die. Some of the Filipinos had refused to surrender their bolos at night, as they were required to do. And then three of them mutinied, refusing Williams’s order to cut firewood. When Williams drew his revolver, one of them slashed his arm with a bolo before running off into the bush with the other two. A marine coming to Williams’s rescue raised his carbine but was too weak to work the bolt. The ten remaining Filipinos, including the scout Slim, neither joined the mutiny nor intervened to stop it, and Williams feared greater treachery, which he would be too weak to prevent.
The army rescue party was battling through rapids on the morning of January 18 when they discovered ten marines, delirious and nearly naked, lying in a clearing next to the river. They had been sent ahead by Alexander Williams, who, along with the nine others, unable to walk, remained at the scene of the previous night’s mutiny on the top of a nearby mountain. A few of the soldiers stayed with the ten marines at the river while the rest hacked their way up the mountain hoping to find the others in time. They did, and just barely: Williams and his group appeared to be within hours of death. But by nightfall the rescue party had got everyone back to Lanang. That night a barely conscious Williams reported the mutiny to Captain Porter, who had all ten Filipinos arrested.
Porter sent the bearers to Waller, who was still recovering at Basey. They were accompanied by Quick, who had had altercations with some of the bearers earlier in the expedition. Porter and Williams recommended they all be executed; so did Quick, who told Waller he “would shoot them all down like mad dogs,” which is what Waller ordered done with no further adjudication other than a brief interrogation of the prisoners. That afternoon the ten, along with Victor, were shot to death by a firing squad. Their bodies were left to lie in the town square as a warning to the locals. When recovered from his fever, Waller sent a telegram to Smith to inform him of what he had done. “It became necessary to expend eleven prisoners. Ten who were implicated in the attack on Lieutenant Williams and one who plotted against me.”
Unfortunately for Waller and Smith, accounts of some of the atrocities committed on Samar and criticism of Smith’s undisguised preference for cruel reprisals over winning hearts and minds had reached the American newspapers and were being used by prominent anti-imperialists to stoke opposition to the war. The Senate convened hearings and called Taft as a witness, who almost casually conceded that Americans had used torture and had shot some people who had not deserved it. In the uproar that followed the hearing, Roosevelt, Secretary of War Elihu Root, and Taft scrambled to counter the belief that American soldiers at the direction of senior commanders were systematically abusing the rules of war. The guerrillas were an especially treacherous enemy, but incidents of cruelty beyond the pale were punished, they assured the public. Reports of atrocities were still coming in, however, and the hearings continued and public outcry mounted.
In early March Secretary Root sent General Chaffee a cable instructing him to stop the torture and summary executions of Filipinos. Chaffee had already begun worrying that the savagery he had allowed and, one could argue, encouraged after Balangiga, and which the obtuse Smith had practically bragged about, had fallen out of official favor. He informed Root he had felt it necessary to investigate reports of unsanctioned executions on Samar, and he had made discoveries that obliged him reluctantly to order the arrest and court-martial of Major Littleton Waller.
Waller’s battalion had been relieved on February 26 and returned to Cavite in Manila Bay to cheering crowds. Upon arrival Waller, still in his dress uniform, reported promptly to General Chaffee, who informed him he was under arrest for the murder of eleven men and asked for his sword. When the news broke, Waller became the number one target of the antiwar press. One headline called him the “Butcher of Samar,” and all manner of atrocities, many of them pure invention, were attributed to him.
The court-martial, composed of seven army and six marine officers and presided over by Army Brigadier General William Bisbee, convened on March 17, 1902, and would last nearly a month. One of the marine officers was an old rival; two others were friends. Waller didn’t know any of the army officers. It was probably for their benefit that he chose a West Pointer as one of his defense counsels. The judge advocate prosecuting the case was also a West Pointer, Major Henry Kingsbury.
Waller’s counsels first argued that the army didn’t have jurisdiction over the case since Waller was no longer subordinate to General Smith when he was arrested. General Bisbee, who appeared sympathetic to Waller, agreed the army probably didn’t have jurisdiction but referred the final decision to General Chaffee, who consulted with Root before ordering the trial to proceed.
The prosecution maintained that the facts of the case were not in dispute. Waller had ordered the execution of the Filipinos without a trial or much of an investigation. He had not asked Smith for permission and had informed his superior of his action only after the fact. As evidence Waller had assumed authority he didn’t lawfully possess, Major Kingsbury quoted from the instruction to punish “treachery with death” that Waller had sent his officers just after the battalion arrived in Samar. “Avenge our late comrades in North China, the murdered men of the 9th United States Infantry,” he had added.
Waller claimed his actions were consistent with orders given him by Smith, although the defense didn’t raise Smith’s verbal directive to “kill and burn.” They were also consistent with the authority granted to an area commander under General Orders Number 100, a Civil War measure signed by President Lincoln that permitted executions without trial of spies, saboteurs, and guerrillas when apprehended in the act of treachery. Captains Porter and Bearss appeared for the defense, as did a still recovering Alexander Williams, who dramatically recalled his ordeal for the court. Under cross-examination Porter conceded he had not believed the bearers were a threat when he left Williams. Bearss confirmed the unfortunate Victor had made an attempt on Waller’s life, but all he could provide to substantiate the allegation was the fact that the Filipino had been apprehended in possession of Waller’s bolo. The surviving scout, Smoke, was also called as a witness, and he testified that Victor had wanted to kill Waller and that the bearers had wanted to kill Williams and his men rather than share food with them.
Waller took the stand in his own defense and claimed he had issued his directive about punishing treachery with death only after conferring with Smith. But still he did not elaborate the details of their conversation. Nor would he have, it seems, had Smith not been called as a rebuttal witness and
denied he had given his area commanders the authority to punish treachery with summary executions. “Did you ever indicate to Major Waller that ‘he held power of life and death’ over prisoners?” Kingsbury asked him. “No,” Smith lied.
Waller returned to the stand the next day and revealed every detail of the seething Smith’s instructions to him, including the order to kill every man, woman, and child over the age of ten, which Waller had ignored. The sensation his testimony caused was immediate and overwhelming. Explosive headlines appeared in newspapers across the United States: “KILL ALL”; “SAMAR TO BE MADE A HOWLING WILDERNESS. KILL AND BURN.”
In testimony he gave the day after his shocking disclosures, Waller did not excuse his actions based on the ordeal his battalion had suffered, on the men he had lost, on his illness, or on any extenuating circumstance. Neither did he shift the entire responsibility to Smith. Rather he insisted he had acted lawfully irrespective of his superior’s orders. His familiarity with the rules of war and his experiences in Samar and elsewhere convinced him he had acted properly to safeguard the marines under his command. “I do not beg for mercy or plead extenuation,” he told the court. “I was either right or wrong. If I was wrong, give me the whole, full complete sentence required by the law. If I was right then I am entitled to the most honorable acquittal.”
The “full complete sentence” for a murder conviction was death, of course. But Waller had little cause to be worried after his shocking disclosures that such a fate would be his. He was acquitted by a vote of eleven to two a half hour after Kingsbury’s closing statement blamed the horrors and casualties suffered on the march across Samar on Waller’s “foolhardiness” and poor planning, and not on the Filipino bearers, who had been cruelly denied the protections they were owed by the country they had served.
The Roosevelt administration, under pressure from growing numbers of war critics in the wake of Waller’s damning testimony, ordered a “searching and exhaustive investigation” into army practices in the Philippines. The investigation resulted in Chaffee’s referring charges against five officers, including Hell Roaring Jake Smith, who was found guilty of “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline.” He was sentenced to be reprimanded, but Roosevelt demanded his resignation. The army would have to manage without him somehow.
Littleton Waller Tazewell Waller served another two decades in the Marine Corps. He was never appointed commandant, as he once expected to be, and it seems likely his court-martial figured to some extent in that disappointment. But otherwise his career was not adversely affected by his experiences in the nasty little war in the Philippines. He held other important commands during America’s comparatively brief history of empire building. He suppressed an uprising in Panama in 1904, where construction of the new canal had just begun. He commanded the occupation of Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914. A year later he put down a rebellion in Haiti. His old friend Smedley Butler served under him in all three actions and received Medals of Honor for heroism in Mexico and Haiti.
Waller was judged to be too old to serve in France, as were almost all officers of his generation, but all three of his sons served in the war. His oldest received the Navy Cross and would rise in the Corps as far as his father had. Waller commanded a marine base at the Philadelphia Naval Yard during the war and retired a major general in 1920. As is often noted, during his forty-year career he served in almost every major engagement where marines were deployed and was proud to have avoided a desk assignment until the end of his career. He preferred to command marines in the field, and for the most part he did.
He suffered a stroke in 1923, and three years later the man Smedley Butler called “the greatest soldier I have ever known” died from pneumonia while on a visit to Atlantic City. A newspaper obituary paid tribute to his many qualities and achievements, noting near the end, almost as an afterthought, “The General was a disciplinarian. In 1902 . . . he was ordered before a court-martial to defend himself against the charge of executing Filipinos without trial, but was exonerated.”
Corporal Elton Mackin, who fought in every major Marine Corps battle in World War I, in a portrait taken after the armistice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lost, Scared Kids a Long Way from Home
Elton “Lucky” Mackin, a marine, survived one of the most dangerous assignments in the trenches of World War I.
IT WAS NOW OR NEVER. With the collapse of the Russian Army and the success of the Bolshevik coup d’état, the war in the East was finished. Germany could bring an additional fifty infantry divisions to the Western Front, almost three-quarters of a million men. The Kaiser now had 192 divisions in the West, giving Germany a considerable numerical advantage over the French and British. But that was all the Kaiser had. There were no more German reserves. And America had entered the war.
Major General John “Black Jack” Pershing and the first wave of the American Expeditionary Force, elements of the army’s 1st Division, arrived in France in June 1917. To the despair of French and British commanders, Pershing insisted on taking the time to create an American field army rather than pour poorly trained battalions into depleted French and British ranks and see them fed piecemeal into the meat-grinder attacks across no-man’s-land that had incited the French Army to mutiny that spring. The 1st Division did not arrive at the front until October. By early 1918 there were no more than four combat-ready American divisions in France. But thousands more soldiers were arriving every day, and with the institution of the draft in the United States, two million Americans would eventually serve in France. A million doughboys would be there by May. The German commander General Erich Ludendorff knew he had to press his advantage that spring or see it matched soon after and then be overwhelmed by a steady stream of inexperienced but very game and very many Americans. He knew he had to win the war before Pershing built his army.
The first of a series of German offensives, Operation Michael, commenced with a massive, five-hour artillery barrage and gas attack before dawn on March 31, 1918, along a fifty-mile front encompassing the old Somme battlefield that was defended by the weakest of Britain’s armies, the Fifth. The Germans had seventy-two divisions to the Fifth Army’s twenty-six. The former swarmed out of their trenches with shock troops, called “Stormtroopers,” in the vanguard in a massed, rapid thrust. They punched a hole in the British lines, a salient the Germans hoped to expand until they cut off the British from the French and pushed the former into the sea. The first day had been a rout, and bloody. Ten thousand German soldiers were killed, and three times that number were wounded. But by the end of the fourth day it appeared the onslaught might succeed in separating French and British armies. By April 4 the Germans were just a few miles outside of Amiens.
But the advance slowed. The Germans outran their supply lines and were no longer massed in one compact advance but were striking in three places. A final German attack aimed at taking Amiens failed. The next day the British mounted a successful counterattack. The first offensive had run its course, and Ludendorff called it off. While Operation Michael had captured over a thousand square miles and plunged twenty-five miles inside British lines, it hadn’t achieved its strategic objectives. And it had cost Germany more than a quarter million dead and wounded, many of whom were from the Kaiser’s elite assault divisions.
Ludendorff quickly launched a second strike, this time against the British lines in Flanders to the north, its objective to drive the British past Ypres to the English Channel. This advance too was initially successful. But the British defenses in that sector were stronger than those around the Somme, as strong as any sector in the Allied front. By the end of April Ludendorff had to concede the Flanders offensive had failed to achieve its objectives, and German casualties in the six weeks of fighting exceeded four hundred thousand.
Determined to press what remained of his advantage before it was lost for good, Ludendorff shifted his focus to the south, where the extreme right of the British line joined the extreme left of the French line. T
he Germans attacked south and west from positions they had occupied in their March advance. In their path were sixteen Allied divisions, including British divisions depleted and exhausted from the fighting in March and April. The objective was to open the road to Paris and lure enough British reserves to the front that defenses in the north were hollowed and the Germans could resume their advance to the Channel.
The Third Battle of the Aisne began on May 27 with the heaviest artillery barrage of the spring and another poison gas attack. The infantry attack that followed was swift and successful, advancing thirteen miles on the first day as battered British divisions and poorly led French forces from Soissons to Rheims virtually collapsed. The Germans obtained their initial objective: the capture of the Chemin des Dames ridge. But rather than consolidate their gains and wait for the attack in the north to resume, as originally planned, they kept going, and by the end of the first week Stormtroopers were within forty-five miles of the French capital. As they reached the Marne River, however, problems of resupply and replacements that had plagued the earlier offensives began slowing their advance.
The Allies staged counterattacks on the German salient but were careful not to overcommit their reserve forces, as Ludendorff expected them to do, a discretion they were able to exercise thanks to the U.S. divisions Pershing had finally sent to the front. The 1st Division had proven its worth by capturing the little village of Cantigny near Amiens on the second day of the offensive. The 2nd and 3rd divisions arrived on June 1 to stop forward elements of the German advance crossing the Marne. The 4th Marine Brigade, commanded by an army brigadier, James Harbord, constituted half of the 2nd Division and included the 5th and 6th marine regiments.