America’s First Guerrilla War
Although the Spanish-American War ended with the United States in official possession of the Philippines, actual control required America to engage in its first foreign war against guerrilla forces. McKinley sent Dewey against the Spanish and provided land forces to take control of the islands primarily to obtain a bargaining chip with Spain for negotiations over Cuba.53 Step by step, however, McKinley was drawn into a situation neither foreseen nor desired—namely, America’s first foray into imperialism. The Germans and British were interested in the islands, and McKinley built up his forces with the apparent intent to provide, as in Cuba, an orderly transition to self-rule. Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of an army of Filipino irregulars, proclaimed the independence of the Philippines on June 12, 1898, followed by the announcement of a revolutionary government eleven days later. General Wesley Merritt arrived in July to take command of the American forces, with an order from McKinley to issue a proclamation declaring that the United States came to protect the inhabitants and their property and to guarantee their individual rights.54 The Spanish governor agreed to surrender his men to the Americans, who in turn promised to keep the Filipino irregulars out of Manila. In June, the 15,000 American soldiers who had gone ashore to mop up Spanish resistance against a Spanish commander putting up token resistance to avoid a court martial back in Spain now faced Aguinaldo, who felt betrayed by his American allies. Negotiations with the Filipinos kept them at bay for a time, but on August 17, the War Department declared there would be no joint occupation between the Filipinos and the United States and that the “insurgents and all others must recognize the military occupation and authority of the United States.”55 When Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris on December 10, officially handing over the Philippines to American control, the situation became irretrievable. McKinley stated that “the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.”56 Others had a slightly less noble view of the affair. Speaker of the House Thomas Reed quipped, “We have bought ten million Malays at $2.00 a head unpicked, and nobody knows what it will cost to pick them.”57
Fighting with Aguinaldo, who had set up a republic at Malolos, broke out in February 1899, pitting some 15,000 actual U.S. combat forces against twice that number of insurrectos. It took only a month for the Army to slice through the Filipino resistance, capturing Malolos in March. But General Elwell Otis found that he could not extend his forces too far from the cities due to the monsoons and disease that eroded the fighting capabilities of units by up to 60 percent. When the state volunteers left in September 1899, Otis had only 27,000 men, and actual fighting units of perhaps half that. Resupplied and regrouped, Otis’s forces set out in the fall and defeated Aguinaldo’s troops again and again, though the leader himself always escaped. In November 1899, Aguinaldo dispersed his soldiers as organized forces and sent them into the jungles to engage in guerrilla warfare.
The United States added 34,000 more troops over the next two years, although an average of 24,000 to 44,000 were actual combat troops. Predating the tactics of al-Qaeda in Iraq over a century later, Aguinaldo quickly ascertained that he could not defeat the American military—even in guerrilla war—rather, he had to “sour Americans on the war and ensure the victory of the anti-imperialist William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election.”58 Filipino general Francisco Macabulos said the objective of the insurrectos was “not to vanquish the [U.S. Army] but to inflict on them constant losses” so as to affect public attitudes in the United States.59 The strategy failed with the application of a carrot-and-stick response from American commanders, who steadily separated villages from the guerrillas, then sequestered them so that the “fish,” as Mao Zedong would later put it, would have no “sea” to swim in. Regiments lived among the villagers, maintaining regular and reliable intelligence. They drew another 15,000 Filipinos to the U.S. side—the famed Philippine Scouts and the Philippine Constabulary.
At the same time, to win the confidence, respect, and loyalty of the population, Americans engaged in a great deal of what is today called “nation building.” English was added to Spanish as an official language in the islands, while Army engineers constructed dams and irrigation canals, cleared roads and ports, reformed the currency and laws, and produced medical near-miracles, including the elimination of cholera and smallpox and a drastic reduction in malaria. Perhaps the charge that the United States sought coaling stations or bases has a kernel of truth, as certainly Mahan’s doctrine had by then convinced most knowledgeable naval minds that ready access to coal was essential to protecting American interests. Not surprisingly, the United States—like the European colonizers—poured far more into the territories it acquired than it took out.
Rebel leaders, dispirited both by American advances in the islands and by McKinley’s reelection in 1900, surrendered. Aguinaldo himself was captured personally by Brigadier General Frederick Funston, who posed as a prisoner of war to find the rebel chief. Funston won a Medal of Honor by courageously rafting across the Pampanga River under fire, and after the war was picked by Woodrow Wilson to head the American Expeditionary Force if needed in Europe after World War I broke out. But Funston died of a heart attack before the U.S. declaration of war.
A new American commissioner, William Howard Taft, arrived in late 1900, setting up a Filipino political party and preparing the country for democratic institutions and elections. The last resistance was crushed on the Fourth of July, 1902, although the Muslim “Moros,” who still practiced slavery and polygamy, continued to resist until 1913. Placed under the military control of Governor General John “Black Jack” Pershing, the economy revived and employment rose—hemp and lumber exports increased more than 150 percent in Pershing’s tenure. Pershing did respect Islam, donating government land for the construction of mosques, but he also insisted on complete disarmament. When he handed control over Southern Mindanao to the Moros in 1913, Pershing had quashed the tribes’ martial inclinations (killing ten Moros for every American soldier lost). Pershing’s local civilian administration gained enough respect from the Moros that they made him a datto (tribal chief). In 1903, at age forty-five, Pershing left the Philippines with a case of malaria and a reputation as one of America’s best officers and most available bachelors. He returned a married man in 1907 as head of the Department of Mindanao and the civilian governor of the Moro Province for another tour that lasted until 1913 and solidified both American control of Mindanao and Pershing’s military reputation.
A Fighting Quaker in a Banana Republic
For several decades following the Spanish-American War, the United States would intervene in the affairs of Caribbean islands and Latin American countries. Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) was already in danger of being overrun by the Europeans for failing to pay its debts, and in 1903, rebels there fired on a U.S. ship, killing a sailor. When President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched troops to keep an eye on the rebellion, critics claimed the United States had designs on the island, whereupon Roosevelt retorted, “I have about the same desire to annex [Santo Domingo] as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.”60 A year later, confronted with Europeans demanding debt repayments from Venezuela, Roosevelt sent the fleet under Dewey to demonstrate in the eastern Caribbean, and invoked the Monroe Doctrine to keep the Europeans out. But Roosevelt realized that “If we intend to say ‘hands off’ to the powers of Europe, then sooner or later we must keep order ourselves,” as he told Secretary of State Elihu Root. Disorder and chaos in Central America, South America, or the Caribbean did affect American interests—and not just businesses—and could easily spill over into revolutions that might spread through Mexico. Recognizing the danger, TR later told Congress, “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation….” The
Monroe Doctrine could force the United States, “however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrong-doing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”61
Thus, the United States sent troops to Cuba in 1906 when the government fell apart (and withdrew them again in 1909 when a new government was stabilized); broke up a coup backed by the United Fruit Company in 1924 in Honduras; and governed Haiti and the Dominican Republic for several years prior to World War I. In 1917, the United States landed troops again in Cuba to quell a rebellion. About 3,000 troops remained in the Dominican Republic throughout World War I, patrolling and battling guerrillas, until finally, in 1922, the guerrillas agreed to surrender. By then there was a new flare-up in Haiti, sparked by the reinstitution of the French corvée (“forced work”). Although this resulted in the construction of almost five hundred miles of roads, it was a practice deeply resented by the Haitians and a source of much anti-Americanism. Local bandit-militias, the Cacos, led by Charlemagne Masséna Péralte, fought a series of battles with the Americans throughout 1919. Whereas in the past, the Marines had easily routed such groups, the new rebellion was more widespread and had greater popular support. A Marine sergeant, Herman Hanneken, who had been commanding a group of local gendarmerie as a “captain,” hired his own Cacos and conceived a brilliant ruse to infiltrate Péralte’s camp. Dressing Marines as Cacos, he managed to get into the camp, whereupon Hanneken shot the rebel leader himself. A few Cacos battled on, but by 1920, the Second Caco War was over. A few thousand Marines had succeeded where 27,000 of Napoléon Bonaparte’s troops had failed.
Major Smedley Butler, the “fighting Quaker” who had deep reservations about the benefits of military involvement in the region and who later in life became an outspoken critic of military adventurism, typified the American involvement in Latin American missions. Never lacking courage under fire, Butler won two Medals of Honor, his first in 1914 in Veracruz, after he led his men in a door-to-door battle to occupy the city.62 A year later, in Haiti, Butler and his patrol of 44 mounted Marines were ambushed by 400 Cacos. After holding their perimeter throughout the night, the Marines under Butler charged the larger enemy force from three directions the following morning and, convinced they were nearly surrounded, the Cacos fled. Notably, Butler’s exploits came when medals were seldom awarded for political purposes and when great bravery was common on the field of battle.
Sudan’s Jihad
Just a month before Dewey stunned the Spanish, in May 1898, England had mounted a powerful expedition to move up the Nile River to subdue the forces of Abdallah al-Taashi, known as the Khalifa. The Khalifa had emerged from a three-way struggle among the successors of the Mahdi (“expected one”)—whose men had killed British hero Charles “Chinese” Gordon, former governor of Sudan (though the Mahdi himself claimed credit). Gordon had suppressed the slave trade in Sudan from 1874 to 1875, earning him the title “Pasha.” Revered on two continents, Gordon was a larger-than-life figure who occasionally counted on his reputation to supersede reality. Often, it worked. In 1883, the Khedive (viceroy) of Egypt had undertaken a campaign against the fanatical Islamic sectarian Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, who called himself the Mahdi. Unmoved by oceans of blood and contemptuous of all non-Sudanese, the Mahdi viewed himself as a redeemer and strict adherent of the Koran, called to spread the word to Cairo, Damascus, and Constantinople; anyone who rejected him was to die.
The British sent an expedition of Egyptians commanded by Colonel William Hicks, which the Mahdi annihilated, killing all but about 300 of the 10,000 men.63 Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice said in a speech to the House of Lords that an “army has not vanished in such a fashion since Pharaoh’s host perished in the Red Sea.” While Hicks was incompetent and put his overconfident forces at extreme risk in a march through the desert with insufficient supplies, by the time he was attacked he was outnumbered four to one by the Mahdi’s men, some of them equipped with modern weapons. Subsequently, two more Egyptian armies were likewise routed.
Egypt ordered the withdrawal of its garrisons from Sudan, and the British government requested that Charles Gordon go to Egypt and supervise the operation from Khartoum. England doubted that even the Mahdi would make war on England by killing a British citizen of such visibility. Gordon arrived in Khartoum in 1884, but instead of evacuating the city, chose to stay and fight. After early successes, Gordon found himself surrounded inside Khartoum and under siege from the Mahdi’s forces. Finally, a relief force under Sir Garnet Wolseley set out from Cairo, but it reached Khartoum three days after the city fell on January 22, 1885. When two steamers Wolseley sent ahead arrived at the city, they found a massacre. Gordon’s head, which had been displayed on a pike, was already gone. The Mahdi died of typhus shortly after taking Khartoum; Gordon was honored with statues in Trafalgar Square and at the Gordon School in Surrey.
Britain’s Sudanese experiences, while perhaps superficially similar to the American struggles with the Plains Indians, were of a different type altogether, for this was an enemy whose religious fanaticism united large numbers of tribes and regions. Whereas the Sioux under Sitting Bull were fortunate to unite several of their own bands, plus the Cheyenne, the Mahdi had assembled massive armies all driven by a fanatical version of Islam. The Americans had experienced an early “War on Terror” with the Muslim Barbary pirates, but the Mahdist uprising constituted the West’s first brush with Islam as a unifying military force on a widespread basis since the 1500s.
Another contrast existed in the almost exclusively American tendency to make citizens out of all those in subjugated or colonized areas (although Indians were excluded for a long span). Virtually none of the Egyptians or Sudanese had any connection to the British Empire, and certainly little loyalty. It is a misperception that the British Empire was, in fact, “British” in any sense save that of purely military and political control. Subjects were not encouraged to “become British”—on the contrary, they were derided and scorned by the English when they attempted to do so. This proved all the more remarkable in that several of Africa’s loudest voices for independence came from natives educated in the British system, who had been viewed by fellow African revolutionaries as traitors.64
Nevertheless, elite Africans such as James Davies of the Nigerian Times and Ghanaian lawyer J. E. Casely Hayford “commonly believed as much as their European mentors in Western civilisation [sic], and commonly thought that disseminating it was what Africa urgently needed.”65 They were products of “the missionary movement upon whose arguments of the correlations between Western civilisation and Christianity rested the foundations of their outlook [and they] saw Christianity as the essential preliminary to the building in West Africa of a nation whose society would be modelled [sic] on that of the Western world.”66
Regardless of the services they performed for the Empire, and regardless of the European power in question, natives were never considered potential citizens. In 1918, after thousands of Africans and soldiers from other European empires had died on the Western Front, Senegalese writer Lamine Senghor observed, “When we are needed, to make us kill or make us work, we are French; but when it comes to give us rights, we are no longer French, we are Nègres.”67
Americans, on the other hand, thanks to the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance, rapidly made new settlers and those of newly colonized areas citizens. At first, these were mostly whites, although there are records of freed African indentures not only voting but, in one case, serving in the Maryland assembly in the colonial era. Even later when races such as southwestern Hispanics were denied full social and economic equality for a time, in the eyes of the law they were as American as the Vanderbilts. Had such a system been in place in Egypt or Sudan, the Mahdist armies might never have grown to such size, and local support for the British army would have differed substantially.
After the death of the Mahdi, the Khalifa took control over the desert tribes, and the British, having withdrawn most troops, could no longer ignore Egypt and Sudan.
Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener led a new expeditionary force, including 8,000 British regulars and 17,000 native troops from Sudan and Egypt, southward along the Nile. Unlike Hicks fifteen years before, Kitchener had no intention of separating himself from his supply line along the river, or from the additional firepower of his gunboats. Like Lord Chelmsford at Ulundi in 1879, Kitchener forced the Khalifa to attack him on ground of his choosing.
The Western Way of Victory
By the late 1890s, Westerners were beginning to realize that their style of fighting against non-Westerners, not just their technology, gave them a critical edge in battle. Americans had seen this on the frontier against the Indians, and would see it again in the Philippine campaigns against the insurrectos and the Moros, and it was already recognized by the British. The Europeans had perfected their military techniques over two centuries of conquest in Africa, India, and Latin America, but historians had downplayed the impact of military history in the Age of Imperialism, especially in the early 1800s before steam and rapid-fire weapons were available. This was a mistake, however. As early as the 1500s, Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru demonstrated that a handful of well-trained, decently armed Europeans could defeat a hundred times their number of natives, who lacked the basic concepts of volley fire, rank and order drill, and individual autonomy of the warriors. Even when cultures did encourage fighters to act independently—such as among some of the Plains Indian tribes in North America—the result was not autonomous soldiers willingly subjecting themselves to the greater discipline of the unit, but a ragtag, helter-skelter approach to fighting.
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