Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  He died alone in San Francisco three years later and was buried in Los Angeles, where his wife and children resided. His name slipped back into obscurity. His headstone made no mention of the fact that once, in a confused and terrible battle, where death was as likely as survival, he had commanded men with skill and courage and risked his life to save another. He did not receive his Medal of Honor until he had disappeared into the fog of another war. And the memory of what his regiment’s colonel praised as a “fearlessness that was wonderful” was carried only in the hearts of those who witnessed it.

  Major General Littleton Waller “Tony” Tazewell Waller, whom his protégé and Marine Corps legend Smedley Butler called “the greatest soldier I have ever known.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Howling Wilderness

  Littleton Waller “Tony” Tazewell Waller, a court-martialed Marine officer, refused to massacre Filipino civilians.

  IN THE FIRST MAJOR BATTLE of the Spanish-American War, in Manila Bay in the Philippines, Spain had lost a naval squadron. Now Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete wished to avoid losing the Caribbean Squadron, which he had the honor to command. It was anchored in Santiago Bay, Cuba, protected by Spanish artillery from the American fleet that prowled the waters outside the harbor. Now that the Americans had taken the San Juan Heights, Santiago and its guns could no longer guarantee Cervera safe harbor. He attempted a breakout on Sunday morning, July 3, 1898. Rear Admiral William Sampson, commanding the American fleet, had taken his flagship with a torpedo boat as an escort to Siboney for a meeting with the V Corps commander, Major General William Shafter. That opened a small gap in the blockade line. Between nine thirty and ten o’clock, Spanish warships began steaming out of the bay in single file with Cervera’s flagship, the Infanta Maria Teresa, in the lead.

  Among the American warships waiting for them were the pride of the U.S. Navy, the newly built battleships Iowa and Oregon, and the oldest of their class, the USS Indiana. The cruiser USS Brooklyn signaled the fleet that enemy ships were leaving Santiago Harbor, and the Indiana, at the eastern end of the blockade, cleared for action. U.S. Marines manned her guns. They were commanded by Captain Littleton Waller Tazewell Waller, “Tony,” to his family and friends. Waller had been an officer in the Marine Corps for nearly two decades and had been in a few overseas scraps, but this was his first real war and his first real naval battle. As soon as the Maria Teresa emerged from the harbor, the American line closed around her and marine gunners sent shells smashing into her hull. In less than an hour she struck her colors. In four hours the battle was over. Spain’s Caribbean fleet was destroyed. Cervera had lost hundreds of men killed and wounded. Only one American sailor had died.

  Spanish sailors jumped off the burning decks of their ships into shark-infested waters or huddled miserably on the beach while Cuban rebels took potshots at them. The Indiana’s skipper, Captain Henry Taylor, dispatched Waller and a party of marines with the ship’s surgeon to rescue as many prisoners as they could. They worked all day and into the night, heroically, and in Waller’s estimate managed to save 243 men and bring them aboard the Indiana. “We issued clothes to the naked men, and the officers gave up their clothes and beds to the Spanish officers,” Waller recalled, adding that he had “received many tokens and letters . . . in grateful acknowledgement of the mercy shown.” The navy gave him a medal.

  With the destruction of Cervera’s fleet, the war in Cuba drew to a close. The Spanish formerly surrendered Santiago two weeks later. On the other side of the world, Admiral George “You may fire when ready, Gridley” Dewey, hero of Manila Bay, welcomed Major General Wesley Merritt and an army expeditionary force to the Philippines. Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the Philippine revolution, greeted Merritt’s army warily, wondering whether its purpose was limited to driving the Spanish from the Philippines or it intended to deny the national independence Aguinaldo and the insurgent army were fighting for. Dewey had brought Aguinaldo to the Philippines from exile in Hong Kong, provided arms to his rebel army, and formed at least an informal alliance with the Filipino leader against their common enemy. According to Aguinaldo, Dewey also promised him the Philippines would be independent once the Spanish were gone.

  The Treaty of Paris, ending the Spanish-American War and ceding the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars, was signed in December 1898. The Philippine-American War began with the Second Battle of Manila on February 4, 1899, two days before the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty. It would last three years (and sporadic fighting would continue after that). Over four thousand Americans would be killed; five times that number of Filipino fighters would die. Many thousands of civilians would perish in the violence and from the famine and disease the war helped cause. And the Philippines wouldn’t gain genuine independence until 1946.

  Savagery occurs in all wars, from antiquity to the present; all belligerents are parties to it. But the Philippine-American War is remembered and was seen at the time as particularly brutal. Some Americans thought the rules of war, as changeable as they are, did not apply to any great extent in the Philippines. That attitude was derived in part from the feeling they were fighting “savages,” not soldiers, and in part from American soldiers’ alienation in such strange physical and moral circumstances from all they recognized as civilization. H. G. Wells, who reported from the Philippines for the New York Evening Post, quoted one soldier’s succinct explanation of their transformation: “There is no question that our men do ‘shoot niggers’ somewhat in the sporting spirit, but that is because war and their environments have rubbed off the thin veneer of civilization.”

  That is the psychological and moral risk inherent in every war, including the wars Americans have fought in this century. Atrocities may not be as frequent or as easily overlooked as they were in past conflicts, but war can still rub off the “veneer of civilization” and the memory of the experience can still trouble a veteran’s sleep long after he has come home.

  Both sides committed atrocities in the Philippines. Filipino atrocities would inflame American public opinion, and the American resort to concentration camps, torture, and summary executions would trouble its conscience. Ultimately America’s dreams of empire that the triumph over Spain had encouraged would begin to subside in revulsion over the means used to build it.

  TONY WALLER WAS BORN on his father’s tobacco plantation on the Virginia peninsula in 1856. His parents, Mary Waller Tazewell and Matthew Page Waller, were third cousins, hence the redundant name they gave their fourth child. The Wallers were an old and prominent Virginia family. Both sides of the family claimed generations of elected officeholders, eminent jurists, and respected professionals dating to the colonial period, but no tradition of military service.

  Matthew Waller was a physician who practiced in Williamsburg, and later in Norfolk, where he moved his family in 1860. Tony learned to ride and hunt in the Virginia countryside, where he spent his first few years and many happy childhood days on the plantation. Years later his fellow marines would admire his superior marksmanship and dignified bearing in the saddle as well as the self-confidence and social graces he had acquired and the air of command he exuded that made him appear taller than the five feet four inches God had given him.

  The pastoral pleasures of the young country squire gave way to the allure of international commerce in the port city of Norfolk. Tony’s father died of typhoid in 1861, when the Confederacy still held the city. Not long afterward the Army of the Potomac occupied Norfolk, and held it until war’s end. The Wallers remained there after the war, although, as with many planter families, in reduced circumstances. Tony did not go to college and had not found a profession that suited him until 1880, when he decided on a career in the Marine Corps.

  Like the South’s plantation aristocracy, the Marine Corps experienced a decline in its fortunes after the war. In the thirty-three years that passed between Appomattox and the sinking of the USS Maine, the country’s only fights were on the frontier with Native Ame
ricans, and those were almost exclusively army shows. The marines were a very small, poorly funded, and insular service in those days, and advancement was exceptionally slow. Waller wouldn’t rise much in the first two decades of his career, but he would steadily advance his reputation. His record would have blemishes, not the least of which were a couple of embarrassing incidents with alcohol and a reprimand for publicly insulting an assistant secretary of the navy. But by the turn of the century many knowledgeable observers would view him as a prospective Marine Corps commandant.

  He first went to sea in 1881 on the flagship of the European Squadron, the USS Lancaster, as executive officer to the fleet marine officer, Henry Clay Cochrane, the distinguished Marine Corps veteran and reformer. After a year of port calls in various Mediterranean cities, Cochrane and Waller observed as the British Royal Navy bombarded Alexandria, the opening conflagration in Britain’s suppression of an Egyptian nationalist rebellion. As commanding officer of a detachment of marines aboard the USS Nipsic, Waller returned to Alexandria in September 1882, when he got his first look at war with no quarter. He saw Arab cavalry parade the severed heads of captured Bengali Lancers on their spears. Every Arab horseman captured after that received the same fate.

  Waller came home to the Marine Barracks in Norfolk in 1884. He married the following year and started a family that would ensure the Waller name’s prominence in the country’s armed forces. His three sons would all have illustrious careers in the military. His eldest, Littleton Jr., would retire a major general in the Marine Corps. Another son reached the rank of colonel, and another would be a navy rear admiral.

  After returning to Norfolk Waller gained increasing recognition and respect over the next decade and a half for his demonstrated competence in various shore assignments and overseas deployments. He was promoted to captain two years before the war with Spain and returned from the war with the praise and respect of his superiors. He spent a dull year as a recruiter in Norfolk until, to his great relief, he was promoted to major and given command of a battalion of marines headed for the Philippines in November 1899.

  The duty was barely more exciting at Cavite naval station in Manila Bay, where his battalion spent most of its time guarding a coal heap as tropical diseases thinned its numbers. Waller fell ill with malaria in March. By the time he recovered, Major General Elwell Otis, who had replaced General Merritt as military governor, had repeatedly asserted the rebellion was nearly finished after suffering several early defeats. Waller’s battalion was ordered to the island of Guam.

  Otis appears to have been a fool who rarely left his palatial quarters in Manila to ascertain the war’s progress firsthand. And his stubborn belligerence bore much of the responsibility for starting the war. He had rejected a peace proposal from Emilio Aguinaldo in the early days of the conflict, insisting that “fighting, having begun, must go on to the grim end.” Otis seems to have disliked one of his division commanders, Henry Lawton, who had commanded the 2nd Division in Cuba and led the fight at El Caney. Lawton’s early successes in the field, which drew praise from President William McKinley, and his popularity among Americans and Filipinos must have incited his superior’s jealousy.

  Unlike Lawton, Otis thought little about how to wage war in a manner that wouldn’t make completely ironic McKinley’s stated preference for the “benevolent assimilation” of Filipinos. He tolerated atrocities committed by American soldiers not just against the insurgents, or insurrectos as they were known, but against civilians as well. News of incidents of shocking brutality reached official Washington, and the government demanded that Otis punish the perpetrators and take measures to assure similar breakdowns in discipline wouldn’t occur in the future. Otis dismissed the accusations and took steps to suppress information of other atrocities.

  Despite his manifest failings, Otis’s command of VIII Corps lasted nearly two years. The war, which had begun as a conventional conflict in a battle for the capital, became a guerrilla war, as the insurrectos, like guerrilla fighters before and after them, tried to outlast the patience of the colonial power. General Lawton might have succeeded Otis had he lived long enough. Lawton, who had commanded the cavalry troop that captured the Apache Geronimo, was killed in action in December 1899 in a firefight with insurgents commanded by a Filipino general also named Geronimo.

  JUST BEFORE HE SET sail for Guam, Waller received new orders instructing his battalion to join an international expeditionary force organized by eight world powers—Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States—to “liberate” Peking from the Chinese Imperial Army and the fierce Chinese nationalists whom Western missionaries called Boxers for their mystical devotion to the martial arts.

  A large foreign armada had gathered off Taku, China, as the Boxers conducted a bloody terror campaign, burning foreign diplomatic missions and Christian churches, murdering missionaries and converts. Waller’s battalion came ashore at Taku on June 19, 1900, and set out the next day to relieve the besieged city of Tientsin. They joined a column of Russian infantry, and the combined force, numbering fewer than six hundred men, with Russians in the lead and marines in the rear, reached the outskirts of Tientsin on the morning of June 21. There they encountered a Chinese force three times their number. The Russians quickly fell back under fire, leaving the marines to bear the brunt of the attack. Waller’s men fought into the afternoon, only to retreat in good order, repulsing repeated flanking attacks until they reached defensible positions. Four marines were killed in action and their bodies had to be left behind. The day was a temporary setback saved from being a complete disaster by the marines’ steady professionalism and the cool competence of their commanding officer. Two days later the marines joined a larger allied force, this time composed mostly of British soldiers, and took Tientsin after an eight-hour battle.

  Waller’s marines distinguished themselves in a number of engagements in and around Tientsin, gaining a reputation as one of the hardest fighting units in the allied force. In August they joined the allied march to Peking, fighting a series of battles along the way. Additional army and marine units had augmented the American force by then, which had been placed under the command of the recently arrived Major General Adna Chaffee, a hard-bitten Civil War veteran and Indian fighter, who suppressed restive native populations with more force than required. He liked to make a lasting impression. Advance elements of the allied force entered Peking on August 14. The city’s foreign quarter was liberated that afternoon, and the Chinese Imperial Court fled the Forbidden City. By the afternoon of August 16 the battle for Peking was over, and so was the Boxer Rebellion.

  The allies imposed a harsh peace, and the brutal reprisals that followed nurtured the resentment of Chinese nationalists for decades. Captured Boxers were usually executed without trial; some were beheaded and their heads impaled on the gates of foreign missions. Palaces were plundered and civilians killed indiscriminately. The worst of the atrocities was the work of other nations’ soldiers, mostly Russians and Germans, although Americans appear to have participated in some of it and certainly in the widespread looting. Waller witnessed the mayhem, but there is no evidence his marines significantly contributed to it. Two years later he would have reason to recall the summary executions the allies ordered in China. Did that include orders by American commanders? Waller did not say. But he had not ordered any executions, and presumably his marines acted with however much restraint their commanding officer expected of them.

  Waller left China in October 1900 with a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel, the fulsome praise of his superior officers and allied commanders, his reputation ascendant, the commandant’s office in prospect, and a lifelong friendship begun with a future Marine Corps legend, Smedley Butler, the massively tattooed, cockfight-loving, heavily decorated “Fighting Quaker.” When he returned to the Philippines in 1901 Waller would add new successes to his reputation, and almost destroy it.

  THE ISLAND OF SAMAR lies in the middle of the Philippi
ne archipelago just northeast of Leyte Island. Prior to the war Samar was the center of the Philippine hemp trade. In 1901 it became the center of hostilities. There had been little fighting on the island the year before. Most of its interior was inaccessible; with few roads, dense jungles, and untracked mountains it was a safe haven for the local insurgents and their commander, Vicente Lukbán. American troops stationed on Samar were confined to coastal cities.

  By the time General Chaffee, late of the China Relief Expedition, assumed command of VIII Corps in the Philippines, most Americans, including a recently reelected William McKinley and his vice president Theodore Roosevelt, believed the war was winding down. Emilio Aguinaldo had been captured in March 1901 and had declared his acceptance of American authority. On July 4 General Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas, who had replaced the unlamented Otis in May 1900, transferred governing authority in the Philippines to a civilian administration headed by future president William Howard Taft and gave command of VIII Corps to Chaffee. Chaffee didn’t share MacArthur and Taft’s view that the insurrection was finished. He didn’t care for either man, particularly Taft, whose advocacy of lenient tactics that wouldn’t alienate the Filipinos Chaffee thought naïve and feckless. He set about pacifying with all necessary force provinces where insurgents still posed a threat or could pose one in the future. He sent two fellow cavalrymen from the Indian wars to Luzon Province, Brigadier General Franklin Bell and Colonel Jacob Hurd Smith. They would fight a counterinsurgency on Luzon using tactics they seldom troubled to hide from the press and that were anything but lenient, including summary executions, herding civilian populations into concentration camps, burning villages they suspected—with or without evidence—of having sympathy with the insurgents, and an interrogation practice called the “water cure,” which is similar to waterboarding.