War of Frontier and Empire

by David J Silbey

  Colonel Smith, with his Californians, had not halted at San Pedro Macati, but had pursued the fleeing enemy up the Pasig River. No one seemed to know definitely [their] location, except that it was somewhere in the vicinity of the town of Pasig, Pateros, or Taguig.15

  In addition, there were a fairly large number of Filipino soldiers caught behind the lines as the Americans advanced, and many of them turned to “bushwhacking,” sniping, or other attacks. Otis detailed troops to clear them out.16

  As soon as Otis had organized the mopping up, he turned his attention to a renewed offensive. The first priority was securing Manila’s connections to the rest of the Philippines. Its sea-based communications were, of course, assured by Dewey’s ships, but there was a critical land-based connection: the Manila and Dagupan Railway, which rode the shoreline of Manila Bay up to the marshaling yards at Caloocan, a few miles north of the city.

  The marshaling yards gave access to the great inner plains of Luzon. Capturing the railway yard there would secure Manila’s position for the foreseeable future, and it would allow the American forces to push forward toward the most economically important areas of Luzon. Further, it would bring the Americans closer to the insurgent government in Malolos, and force Aguinaldo to consider his own safety. Caloocan was the bottleneck; if the insurgents could hold it, they could potentially corral the Americans in the Manila area.

  At least for a moment; given the absolute naval superiority the United States possessed, there was little hope of holding them to Manila forever. But holding Caloocan would be a start. And they did not have to hold it for that long. The summer rainy season started in June and essentially made sustained campaigning impossible for several months. If the insurgents could hold for that long, the weather would relieve them, and give them time to plan, rebuild, or negotiate.

  It is worth looking at the geography of Luzon before discussing MacArthur’s campaign. The southern half of the main part of the island consisted of flat plains bracketed on either side by mountain ranges. The great bay at Manila pushed into that plain and left a narrow corridor between the southern province of the Batangas and the rest of Luzon, a corridor further pinched by the Laguna de Bay. Directly to the east of Manila was the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, which extended from the Batangas all the way to the northern tip of Luzon at Escarpada Point. North of Manila ran the railway and the open plains halfway up the island to the regional capital at Dagupan on the Lingayen Gulf.

  The military implications of this in the spring of 1899 were fairly obvious to everyone. I have already discussed the situation with Malolos and Caloocan. The American goal—as both Otis and MacArthur recognized—had to be to disperse the insurgent army in the area around Manila, take control of the spit of land that connected Cavite to the Batangas in the south, and ensure that the route to the north was open for further campaigning in the fall. Otis could not hope to end the war before the rainy season; he had neither the time nor the soldiers. But he could create a solid starting point for the campaign that would end the war. Reinforcements were on their way from the United States that would triple and quadruple the size of his command. Starting from Malolos, those reinforcements could conceivably sweep through the rest of Luzon before 1899 ended, and resolve the war as quickly as the campaign in Cuba. But first MacArthur had to take Caloocan.

  MacArthur moved forward on February 10 with the Second Division of the Eighth Corps. At Caloocan were about four thousand Filipino soldiers under the command of Gen. Antonio Luna, perhaps Aguinaldo’s most trusted military subordinate. As they moved, John F. Bass, the correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, watched:

  From La Loma church you may get the full view of our long line crossing the open field, even, steadily, irresistibly, like an inrolling wave on the beach. Watch the regiments go forward, and form under fire, and move on and on, and you will exclaim, “Magnificent,” and you will gulp a little and feel proud without exactly knowing why. Then gradually, the power of that line will force itself upon you, and you will feel that you must follow, that wherever that line goes you must go also.17

  MacArthur planned carefully, and used all the resources at his disposal. After conferring with Dewey, he had the admiral bring up a number of ships to provide fire support. In addition, he located some of his own artillery close to La Loma Church and used that to pound the insurgents. From the left wing, under the guns of the fleet, MacArthur had the Twentieth Kansas and the First Montana advance in a line that started north and then wheeled east, putting the soldiers’ backs to the ocean. As the insurgents responded to that threat, the Tenth Pennsylvania, positioned to the right of Blockhouse 2, overlooking Caloocan, opened up flanking fire upon the Filipinos. Some of Luna’s forces stood and fought vigorously; others refused to go into battle or retreated without orders. The result, by the end of the day, was that Americans had taken the town and, most critically, the railyards.

  Luna had an interesting reaction to the failure. He began gathering troops for a counterattack, but he also began imploring Aguinaldo to reform the Army of Liberation. Luna’s ideas, which developed over the next several weeks, were to create a military academy to train Filipino officers, to recruit more of the experienced men from the 1896 revolution, and to impose draconian discipline on the ordinary soldiers. He seems to have recognized some of the fundamental deficiencies of the Army of Liberation, and hoped to set about correcting them as quickly as possible.

  The question in that mid-February week was whether he could convince Aguinaldo, and whether the Americans would give them the time needed to re-create their army on the fly. The omens were not promising. By the end of the week, Filipino dead for the Manila campaign numbered around three thousand, while American deaths were between two hundred and three hundred. The Army of Liberation had been summarily and efficiently evicted from its lines around Manila. Filipino morale was shaky; many of the government workers in Malolos had abandoned their desks and fled to the countryside in anticipation of an American assault on the capital city. The Americans were positioning themselves in a way that allowed both easy defense and a return to offensive operations whenever necessary. They still controlled little of the Philippines itself, but no one—not the Spanish and not the Filipinos—had been able to slow down, let alone stop, the American assault.

  And, though the rainy season was coming on, Otis was not done. The next jump after Caloocan was a target as valuable politically as Caloocan was geographically: Malolos, the home of Aguinaldo’s government. The city was about ten miles up the railroad along the coastline, near the northern edge of Manila Bay. Here were Aguinaldo and his councilors and the main structure of the Philippine Republic. Taking Malolos before the rainy season would not materially improve the American strategic or tactical position but it would make a substantial political statement. The news of battles and casualties could be rewritten or censored. The sight of a government fleeing its capital city could not, and it would put an exclamation point on what was turning into a thoroughgoing rout by the Americans.

  Otis was not immediately in position to move on Malolos. He had sent the Tennessee Regiment to occupy the port city of Iloilo after its abandonment by the insurgents, and, though he was expecting reinforcements from the United States at any moment, he did not feel that he could risk thinning his defensive line around Manila to undertake a further offensive. This proved a sensible decision, as the insurgents made a series of efforts to break through the American lines in late February and early March. The most threatening of these occurred on February 22, when a force of about one thousand insurgents infiltrated through MacArthur’s line in the north (there were swampy areas that were hard to cover) into the Manila suburb of Tondo. That night, the force set numerous fires in the suburb and tried to start a general uprising. American forces came up from the south and pushed the insurgents northward into MacArthur’s troops, now alerted. Filipino losses were roughly five hundred, 50 percent of the force, while American losses were slight.

  After the twenty
-second, the Filipinos continued to attempt to build up forces outside the American perimeter, but they had great difficulties in getting much more than regimental-sized units into place. The Americans, including the First Nebraska, the First Wyoming, and the Oregonians, were aggressive about protecting themselves. Upon spotting the gathering of a Filipino force opposite their positions, they would undertake spoiling attacks to break up the insurgent forces with almost universally the same success as they had had on February 5.

  As this was going on, the two sides were also building up their forces. General Luna had begun the construction of fortifications between Caloocan and Malolos and the gathering of troops and ammunition in the city and in the town of Calumpit, to the north of Malolos. But his task was made more difficult by an increasing number of desertions from the Army of Liberation. Perhaps worse, they were throwing away or selling their weapons, whose scarcity made them as valuable as the soldiers. Aguinaldo was forced to issue a decree on March 12, threatening that “any private in the Army who shall willfully damage the gun or ammunition which he has in his charge, or who shall abandon, throw away, or sell the same, shall be punished with the penalty of death.”18

  Meanwhile, there were several important arrivals from the United States. First, on March 4, were the members of the first Philippine Commission. Having traveled by way of Japan and Hong Kong (where one commissioner, Dean C. Worcester, had interviewed Filipino junta members, while the leader of the commission, Jacob Schurman, went on a shopping trip to Shanghai), the commissioners came ashore knowing that their original mission—to ease frictions between the Americans and the Filipinos—had evaporated. Nonetheless, they settled in and began to interview a range of people: army, navy, and Filipino. Dewey they found congenial. Otis they found abrupt.

  The other important arrival from the United States in early March was reinforcements. American troops started arriving on transports from the United States, including the Fourth and Seventeenth U.S. Infantry, commanded by Maj. Gen. William Lawton. Lawton relieved Brig. Gen. Anderson, who had been promoted to Major General and posted back to the United States. These new forces allowed Otis to build up an assault force for a drive on Malolos. He launched two columns northward, each a brigade, on March 24. MacArthur commanded the overall assault, which though slowed by terrain and fighting, made steady progress northward. The terrain, MacArthur reported,

  was found to be in every respect quite equal to the worst anticipations. The density of the jungle, which prevented seeing any distance, made it impossible to keep the troops together, and thereby embarrassed, impeded, and at times entirely interrupted their movement.19

  Luna’s forces dropped back in front of MacArthur, defending every practical line and burning the villages that they had to leave behind.

  The encounters resembled closely the ones around Manila. The Americans would come upon a Filipino defensive line and storm it, forcing the insurgents back. For example, on March 27, the South Dakota Regiment came upon a Filipino line in woods just south of the Marilao River. The South Dakota advance guard, bolstered by their reserve, pushed the Filipinos out of the woods, “forcing them back across the river into a strong line of entrenchments on north bank, from which they again routed them, wading the stream waist deep and capturing the entrenchments,” as General Hale put it.20 As before, the Army of Liberation could slow the Americans, but they could not stop them. Even more critically, they could not inflict heavy casualties on them.

  MacArthur expected “desperate resistance” from the Filipinos at Malolos. It was the capital city of the Philippine Republic, MacArthur wrote, and thus “a battle was a political necessity.” The first reports he received seemed to confirm that idea. American scouts described “formidable fieldworks, well filled with men.”21 But, much to his surprise, when his forces entered Malolos on March 31, they did so “with little opposition and very small loss.”22 Many of the defensive lines were found abandoned and were occupied without a fight, and even in the city itself, the Americans were subject mostly to sniping. The provincial government had fled and the Army of Liberation’s units had fallen back on Calumpit, deciding to make a stand there.

  MacArthur took stock of the situation. Casualties had been light, numbering 56 killed and 478 wounded in nearly a month of campaigning. As a result, MacArthur thought to push further north. Though the original plan had been for him to stop at Malolos, now that he looked at the geography, MacArthur wanted to take Calumpit. He telegraphed Otis back in Manila: “Calumpit is … a strategic point of importance which, in my opinion, should be secured at once as the natural limit of the first stage of the campaign.”23 Otis refused permission for the advance the next day, which was likely a good decision. MacArthur’s forces—though combat casualties had been light—had nonetheless been worn down by the long march and disease, and he was low on supplies. MacArthur turned to restocking and rebuilding his troops, and was finally able, after three weeks, to persuade Otis to let him resume his attack. He did so on April 24.

  By now, American officers had learned tactical lessons from the first months of fighting. Aggression paid off: the insurgents fired high, their bullets hitting behind the American front lines, making it safer to be up front rather than behind. Most units of the Army of Liberation would crumble if the assault was carried home with vigor. Some officers had learned the lessons very early on. Gen. Charles King, commanding the First Brigade in the defense of Manila, used that knowledge to great effect, as one of his soldiers remembered:

  Until time to charge or do rush work, or things like that, [General King] would make us all lie down or go behind a tree or a stone, while he himself would walk daintily along the line, a target for the whole fire of the enemy, because of his conspicuous uniform, and because he was the only one of us in sight. He was all the time talking to us … “Lie down, [expletive deleted in original] it, my boy! Do you want to get your head shot off? Be careful there; don’t expose yourself too much, man! Do you want to get what little sense you have shot out of you?” and such talk, with the expletives in just the right places and all the time the bullets whistling around him. … you should hear him order a charge; yes, and see him lead it, too.

  “That man will never see America again,” said another soldier, but King in fact lived until 1933.24 It is no imputation on his courage to suggest that King had a solid idea that the risk to him was rather less than he made out to his soldiers. It was not an unreasonable ploy, and it was not unusual, either. From here on, it is remarkable how many times American units carried out assaults against prepared positions and at a numerical disadvantage, and yet triumphed. What would have been suicidal against a resilient enemy was just good sense against the Army of Liberation.

  This is nowhere more in evidence than in the battle to take Calumpit. General Luna had stationed his main line of defenses just north of the town itself, on the far side of the Rio Grande: four thousand infantry in entrenchments centered on the railway line. The American forces reached the town on April 25 and occupied Calumpit. At the Rio Grande, the Twentieth Kansas and the First Montana edged up to the riverside and traded volleys with the Filipino defenders on the other side. The next morning, Col. Frederick Funston, the commander of the Kansas regiment, took forty-five men half a mile south to a potential crossing point in the river. Under fire, the men managed to get across and launch a flanking assault against the Filipino lines. As they brought enfilading fire to bear, supplemented by volleys from the Americans across the river, the Filipino lines simply crumbled and insurgents began streaming north. American dominance was complete, and there could be little doubt about the future outcome of any battle. Pvt. Walter Combs of the Fifty-first Iowa Volunteers summarized the American battle tactics at Calumpit in a letter to his parents on May 2, 1899:

  The new method of fighting this war is to fire a few rounds—then advance toward the enemy—firing as we go. Using this tactic, the Filipinos cannot shoot at us without exposing themselves—which they seldom do—and they soon lea
ve in a hurry.25

  Until the Filipinos could hold a position, they had little hope of defeating the Americans in a conventional war.

  The Ratification Fight

  Back in the United States, news of the outbreak of war reached a Washington, D.C., locked in argument over the ratification of the Treaty of Paris. McKinley needed a two-thirds vote in the Senate—fifty-six “ayes”—for ratification. Early reports in January 1899 indicated that he was short of votes. This anti-imperialist sentiment in the United States came largely, though not entirely, from elite groups in the East. They consisted mostly of Republicans, and were, in essence, the first generation of that party, who remembered the founding of the party in the 1850s and believed that the spirit of liberation and emancipation of that founding was being betrayed by McKinley’s base annexation of the Philippines.

  As George Frisbie Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts, put it:

  You have no right at the cannon’s mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence and your Constitution and your notions of freedom and notions of what is good.26

  Some opponents—such as Sen. Donelson Caffery, a Democrat from Louisiana—argued that taking the Philippines would create a commercial and economic problem for the United States, as cheap goods and materials from the islands flooded into the American market and undercut American industries. Some argued against acquiring a foreign colony when domestic concerns were still pressing, and domestic groups still ill-treated. As Booker T. Washington put it: “Until our nation has settled the Negro and Indian problems, I do not believe that we have a right to assume more social problems.”27