War of Frontier and Empire by David J Silbey

Author:David J Silbey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Tirono’s surrender was to foretell the gradual co-optation of many Filipinos by the American forces and the gradual whittling away of Aguinaldo’s support. The transition from conventional to guerrilla warfare left each commander, for a moment, his own man, free to make his own decisions. Until formal lines of communication and command could be constructed, Aguinaldo—or whoever was in command—could have great difficulty bringing such commanders to heel.

Tirono had more freedom than most. For the majority of the Army of Liberation, stuck in Luzon with the American forces closing around them, the choice was much more limited and unpleasant. Melting away into the mountains meant abandoning any equipment they could not carry personally, meant leaving the most densely populated areas of the Philippines and heading into the difficult terrain of the mountains, meant becoming, essentially, fugitives.

Nonetheless, thousands of insurrectos tried to slip out of the closing trap, while American units worked to bring them to heel. Both were, to some extent, successful. American forces moving throughout the central Luzon plain captured or killed hundreds of Philippine insurgents and took enormous quantities of their equipment. This was small-scale warfare, as the giant net swept in hundreds of tiny fish.

For a sense of the action, let us look at a particular unit, the Twenty-fifth Regiment, the African-American soldados negros, as some Filipinos called them. On November 19, 1899, 400 men from the Twenty-fifth Regiment captured the town of O’Donnell and the insurgent garrison there: 105 men, 273 rifles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “No casualties on either side,” said the official report, an indication that the garrison most likely surrendered without a fight.3 This was not always the case; units of the same regiment were attacked on January 5 by an insurgent force estimated at around one thousand men (although that estimate was likely exaggerated). They repulsed the insurrectos without loss. The combat itself was confused, frequently at close quarters, and marked (as always) by confusion and chaos. The American army depended on its small-unit leaders—lieutenants and captains—to wage such war effectively.

It is worth quoting one of those small-unit leaders at length to give a sense of the experience. Lt. William T. Schenck of the Twenty-fifth Regiment wrote of a battle on Mt. Arayat in central Luzon in which he led a scouting detachment. They were scouting a hill on January 6 when unseen insurgents opened up, killing a corporal and wounding several other soldiers. Schenck continued forward:

When we got within forty or fifty feet of the top I saw one of the insurgents, and he seemed to locate me at the same time, and let drive, and the bullet went right over me. I yelled at one of the men on my right to kill the “hombre,” and two of the scouts let drive and missed. Then I took a rifle away from one of the men and fired. The bullet struck a root in front of the insurgent and went through, missing him by not more than six inches. I thought I had him sure and crept up a little higher.

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