War of Frontier and Empire

by David J Silbey

  So some of this was semantics. But such semantics nonetheless reflected a reality on the ground. Guerrilla wars rarely end with a climactic moment or a definitive battle. No bang, but rather the whimper of slow attrition. By July 1902, the insurrectos had lost most of their leadership and the bulk of their soldiers. Perhaps most importantly, they could no longer manage to attack the Americans with any kind of sustained intensity. In retrospect, Balangiga had been the last effective blow rather than the start of a new campaign. In a conventional war, there would have been someone to surrender the effort, to explicitly end the war. In the guerrilla campaign, the clearest mark of victory was that there was no one left to surrender the flag of the Philippine Republic.

  Conclusion

  A MOST FAVORED RACE

  The war was over. What remained, in the aftermath, was the peace. The Filipinos, of different religions, ethnicities, and ideas, had to figure out a way to live with their new imperial overlords. The Americans, for their part, had to figure out how to rule their first colony. Early signs were not promising. Though Roosevelt declared that the war had ended in July 1902, sporadic resistance continued for more than a decade, and the American army undertook major campaigns in Leyte and Samar from 1905 to 1907 and in Cavite Province in 1905. Fighting against the Moros continued until 1913. In 1911, army strategists assumed that upon the start of a war between the United States and another power in the Pacific, “insurrection of the native population” would occur “quite generally.”1 But in fact that evaluation was almost exactly wrong. What is remarkable is how quickly both sides found out how to live together peaceably, to the point that even after Philippine independence in 1946, a remarkably strong alliance, political and cultural, endured between the United States and the Philippines.

  Part of the reason for that smoothness was the simple fact that many of the same people were ruling the Philippines before and after the arrival of the Americans. The local elites in many cases had come to an accommodation with the Americans, either early or late in the process. Gen. Daniel Tirono had done so in the fall of 1899, an early convert to American rule; Aguinaldo himself had done so in the spring of 1901; and even holdouts like Miguel Malvar came around in early 1902. As these elites negotiated their surrender to American rule, they were in essence agreeing to integration rather than submission. For the most part, despite their opposition to American forces, they remained part of the power structure in their areas, and were allowed to continue their economic, political, and social dominance.

  The result was a fairly rapid adjustment on both sides. The American government in the Philippines used a relatively light touch in its rule, and included a fair range of Filipino voices in its administration. It was nowhere near a representative government and the great mass of the Filipinos remained confined by economic and political bonds, but it was more than an imperial government that ruled by fiat and force majeure.

  The Filipinos, in fact, became something of a “favored race” in American eyes. By the 1920s they were a culturally acceptable minority, an ethnic group viewed with condescending approval rather than simple contempt. Most Asians were regarded by the United States with great suspicion: immigration from China and Japan was severely curtailed in the 1910s and 1920s. Filipinos did not experience that same organized exclusion. Thus, for example, in 1923, when the U.S. Navy reopened recruitment after years of post–World War I cutbacks, it continued to forbid the enlistment of African-Americans. In their place as mess stewards and assistants, Filipinos were brought in. They enjoyed the status of an inferior but favored race.

  For their part, the Filipinos seem to have shared a general acceptance of, and even affection for, American rule. By the time World War II started, four decades later, Filipino loyalties proved to be—pretty unswervingly—to the Americans. The rapid Japanese victories in 1941–42 did not sway the inhabitants of the archipelago to the side of Nippon; nor did a determined Japanese propaganda campaign to portray the Americans as imperial overlords and themselves as liberators.

  Instead, the Filipinos, after the flight of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the surrender of the last American garrison on Corregidor Island, started another guerrilla war, one that they sustained for the four years of Japanese occupation. They fought, and they waited for MacArthur’s promised return. Contrast that with the situation in India, where the British found that the threat of Japanese invasion either had little effect on colonial populations or actually encouraged anti-British defiance. Thus, Mahatma Gandhi refused to help defend India for the British, and other anti-British Indians formed the Indian National Army, a force that aimed to overthrow British rule with the help of the Japanese.

  During this time, there was never any move to make the Philippines a U.S. state—race and nationalism made sure of that—but they were much more than a colony, and the Philippines’ postwar independence seemed right to everyone, American and Filipino together. It was the just reward for loyalty. For that, and for being raised up, the Filipinos felt in many ways that they owed the United States. As Raymond Ileto wrote, Filipino perception was that the Filipinos “owed a lifelong inner debt, or utang na loób” to “ ‘Mother America.’ ”2

  That America’s presence in the Philippines had originated in violence and bloodshed was, if not forgotten, at least set aside. The Philippine-American War became something of a lost history during most of the twentieth century, as the two sides in that war found themselves working and living together amicably. So amicable was the negotiation that Filipino revolutionary symbols could easily be appropriated for an American audience, without a ripple of discontent on either side. In the 1945 John Wayne film Back to Bataan, the Wayne character, left behind by American forces, helps lead a guerrilla war against the Japanese occupiers with the help of a valiant Filipino, played by Anthony Quinn. Quinn’s character is named Andres Bonifacio. The casualness of naming such a character after a major revolutionary leader, albeit one who never fought the Americans, is remarkable.

  And yet, oddly, the war remained to be rediscovered as a nationalist totem. The decade of the 1890s, in which the Filipinos fought and won and lost several revolutions, against both the Spanish and the Americans, provided ten years of universal national experiences for the islands. Although different in specifics, every region had its war stories from that period, its victories and losses. The Philippine-American War was part of a Filipino experience, one that had the potential to bring a national vision to an archipelago full of people of different races, creeds, religions, cultures, and languages. There was a nascent nationalism in that experience, one waiting for the right moment to flower.

  The Americans assisted in the creation of a Filipino nationalism as well, by training a large number of Filipinos in the English language. English essentially became the national tongue, and the colonial government created a system of education that raised literacy rates to over 50 percent in 1941 (up from 20 percent in 1901).3 The practical utility of that was obvious: by imposing a language that spanned the archipelago, the Americans facilitated trade and governance. But a common language brought with it cultural unification, and created a class of Filipinos—civil servants, merchants, and others—who thought of themselves as Filipino first and Tagalog or Moro second. Interestingly, Aguinaldo himself steadfastly refused to learn English, perhaps sensing that his Philippines were being rewritten by the new idiom.4 Any nation is, of course, imagined, and the United States facilitated the creation of that construct by building economic, social, and linguistic ties among the islands.5

  The teasing ambiguity thus remains. America helped the Philippines become a nation, by violence and education: blood and words. Nowhere is that clearer than in the last years of World War II, when the signal of the Philippines’ liberation from yet another conqueror was the striding ashore of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, “returning,” as he had promised. That the son of Arthur MacArthur, the man responsible for the final breaking of Aguinaldo’s Philippine Republic and the insurgency it fostered, was seen decades
later as a symbol of Filipino deliverance is astonishing. In a sense, it completed the journey started in the 1890s. At one end of that journey was Arthur; at the other was Douglas. The independence that almost immediately followed MacArthur’s wade ashore simply confirmed the journey and the arrival of the Philippines as a nation in the Western sense.

  America as a World Power

  The Philippine-American War did not affect only the Philippines. For the United States, it—even more than the Spanish-American War—was the concrete assertion of a global American reach. After the Philippine-American War, the United States was, like it or not, a critical actor in the world’s affairs. These first steps onto the broader world stage did not escape the notice of other powers. There was a general sense that the United States was taking its proper place among the Western powers. It was an era of small wars and colonial uprisings. The Philippine-American War could be compared to the Boer War in South Africa between the British and Afrikaner farmers (1899–1902), and Samar could be paralleled with the Congo, where the Belgian king treated his colony with such genocidal ferocity that he outraged even the normally complacent Europeans and inspired Joseph Conrad to write Heart of Darkness. The world was being split down to its last parcel among the Western powers, and the Philippines were one more chunk to be absorbed.

  But a particular point remains critical. The United States had been an Atlantic power already. The consolidation of U.S. control over the West Coast and the lands in between and the acquisition of the Philippines demanded that the United States commit to becoming a Pacific power as well. The archipelago gave the United States a foothold in Asia, close by to the rising power of Japan and the voluminous markets of China. But it was an outpost a long distance from continental America. Such an outpost demanded a substantial defensive effort to protect it.

  It quickly became clear that the defensive effort required was simply not sustainable. The Philippines were impossible to defend without the commitment of resources at a level that the United States was not willing to make. As the strategic analyst Robert Johnson would say in 1915:

  The taking of the Philippines from Spain may be ranked among the worst military blunders committed by any American government—it is difficult to put the matter more strongly. It is a weak, ex-centric military position, fundamentally indefensible against any strong transpacific power, but inevitably a magnet to draw troops and ships away from our shores.6

  It took only twenty-six years for Johnson’s words to be proven deeply prophetic. The ease with which Japanese forces in 1941–42 overwhelmed the American defenses makes Spanish efforts in 1898 look a bit better. The critical difference, of course, was that the Americans were able to rebuild and return in a way that the Spanish never did.

  Philippine independence after the war was over was thus not merely a recognition of the new Philippine nation. It was also a sensible strategic move. The new configuration, in which the United States held on to such outposts as the naval base at Subic Bay, resembled one of the options that McKinley had considered in the aftermath of the victory over Spain. The Philippines in the Cold War were independent, but something of a protectorate of the United States, and the reach provided by American bases there enabled the United States to maintain its authority in the Pacific without the drain of resources that defending the islands would have required. That reach allowed the United States to protect Taiwan and to intervene in Korea and Vietnam, supplying and sustaining large land and naval forces.

  Strangely, the reach that allowed the United States to wage war and lose in Vietnam brought the Philippine-American War back to historical consciousness. The history of 1899–1902 had been treated in a number of works in the immediate aftermath, but it had largely faded from American view in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, lost in the shadow of the conventional wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45. It never emerged from those shadows, but the United States instead followed it into the darkness during the guerrilla war in Vietnam. Suddenly Americans were again fighting a war of outpost, patrol, and ambush, and unlike in the Philippines, losing that war. Counterinsurgency there roused interest in earlier counterinsurgencies. Atrocities there roused interest in earlier atrocities.

  But the reasons for interest sometimes overwhelmed good history, and shaped the conflict from 1899 to 1902 in ways that obscured rather than explained what happened in those three years. The war became wholly one of guerrilla fighting and atrocities, an oversimplified fin de siècle Vietnam, useful primarily for mining lessons for future such conflicts. Lost was the rich complexity of the real war.

  That was a grievous loss, for the convoluted density of the Philippine-American War remains a historical phenomenon in its own right. It was a revolution before all, as Filipino groups sought to fight off the imperial masters who had ruled them, if somnolently at times, for nearly four hundred years. That revolution, we should not forget, was ultimately a Filipino victory. The assistance given by Dewey at Manila Bay was small enough, as such assistance goes. It was the Army of Liberation that overwhelmed Spanish resistance in most of the islands and the Army of Liberation that would likely, although probably with heavier casualties, have overwhelmed Spanish resistance in the city of Manila itself. What we might call the Philippine Rebellion came to an end in August of 1898, when the last major center of Spanish resistance in the islands surrendered.

  That that surrender was to an American force should not obscure the depth of the Filipino victory. The Army of Liberation had defeated the Spanish. But, of course, the conflict was not over. The American decision to take the islands made further conflict inevitable. The choice, fueled by the old long-standing sense of manifest destiny that had pushed American settlers, society, and government westward through the nineteenth century and by a new manifest destiny that saw the United States as too powerful to confine itself to one continent or hemisphere, started what would best be labeled the First Philippine-American War. Despite arguments by people at the time, as well as later historians, this was classically a war, and remarkably unlike an insurgency. The two sides were both states substantially sovereign, using conventional armies, fighting conventional battles, with conventional lines and weapons. The conflict of 1899 simply was not a guerrilla war; it was as conventional a conflict between two legitimate states as was any other American war of the nineteenth century and more so than some.

  That the U.S. Army overwhelmed the Filipino Army of Liberation in relatively short order does not change this fact. Overwhelm it it did, in a series of effectively planned, supplied, and contested campaigns in the spring and fall of 1899. The credit on the American side for the successful execution lies at all levels of the army. Otis put together ambitious plans, his subordinates carried them out, sometimes with great difficulty, and the ordinary soldiers fought with both bravery and intelligence. Most impressively, the American officers and enlisted men learned the early lessons quickly and used them to great effect. For an army still loaded with Civil War veterans, whose memories of that war told them firmly that frontal assaults against entrenched positions were organized suicide, to learn as fast as it did that frontal assaults against entrenched positions were in fact likely to be successful against the soldiers of the Army of Liberation demonstrates a remarkable tactical flexibility. That flexibility won the war.

  On the Filipino side, blame for the loss can accrue at all levels, as well. Aguinaldo certainly demonstrated little that resembled military genius. His officers often seemed more concerned with advancing their own causes than the causes of the army or the republic. The ordinary Filipino soldiers frequently fought with great resolution, but many times they did not, and even that resolution was often not matched by skill. There are reasonable explanations for all these things, but the fact remained that a Filipino army that had done well against the Spanish could not sustain the effort against the Americans.

  The desperate realization of that fact led Aguinaldo to turn to guerrilla tactics. He has been criticized for not doing so earlier, but we should recog
nize that by so doing he was essentially abdicating the sovereignty of the Philippine Republic. Guerrilla war gains anonymity for its users, but it sacrifices all territory and public government. The Philippine Republic went underground when the war did, never to see the light of day again.

  It is hard to say that the guerrilla war—which truly was an insurgency—went any better for the Filipinos. Certainly, it extended the conflict. But there were only a few moments in which it appeared as if Aguinaldo’s forces could truly inflict such heavy casualties on U.S. forces as to compel them to leave. The fall of 1900 was one such time, and if William Jennings Bryan had won the presidency in November of that year, there is some chance that the United States would have withdrawn.

  But other than this, while the guerrilla campaign was somewhat more effective than the conventional one, in the end the result was the same. By the fall of 1901, with Aguinaldo imprisoned, other political leaders exiled to Guam, and the surrenders of many of the remaining rebel leaders, the campaign was winding down. The catastrophic American response on Samar seems more like frustration expressed as brutality than a reasoned military response. It was a bitter coda to what had been, by the standards of counterinsurgency or, for that matter, late-nineteenth-century colonial wars, a relatively moderate conflict.

  Both sides committed atrocities, some large and some small, but for the most part the war was executed without the kind of wholesale slaughter that was all too common in that period. One of the few exceptions to this were the ravages of cholera in 1902. Despite the fact that cholera outbreaks had occurred at regular intervals in Philippine history, the United States must shoulder a substantial portion of the blame. The concentration policy was an effective one militarily, but it helped create sanitary conditions that, once the weather eased, inexorably led to an epidemic. Hundreds of thousands died as a result.