by John McCain
Insurrectos controlled the interiors of Samar and Leyte Island, mostly because of the expense and manpower it would require to establish American authority in the roadless wilderness that existed beyond the islands’ coastlines. Chaffee would create a new military sector encompassing the two islands and allow the harshest pacification policies yet in what would prove to be the last campaign of the war.
In a prelude to that campaign American infantry was deployed to several of Samar’s ports to interdict supplies intended for the insurgents. On August 11 the seventy-four soldiers of Company C of the 9th U.S. Infantry Regiment, most of them veterans of Cuba and China, disembarked from a coastal steamer and established a base in the town of Balangiga on the southern coast of Samar. They were commanded by a twenty-eight-year-old West Point graduate, Captain Thomas Connell. According to the letters some of the soldiers sent home, they were warmly welcomed by the local population.
The welcome lasted about a month, until the locals began to resent the treatment they received from the officers and men of Company C, which included forced labor, the confiscation of food stores, and the molestation of a young girl by two drunk soldiers. Relations became steadily more hostile, and Balingiga’s outwardly friendly mayor, Pedro Abayan, and police chief, Valeriano Abanador, were soon conspiring with Vicente Lukbán’s guerrillas.
Only four sentries were on duty in the early morning of Sunday, September 28. The rest of the men were unarmed, eating breakfast in mess tents. The company’s officers, Captain Connell, his second-in-command, First Lieutenant Edward Bumpus, and the company surgeon, Major Richard Griswold, were still in their quarters in a convent. Women and children were nowhere evident, nor was the town priest; they had disappeared into the jungle. Men disguised as women carrying coffins they claimed held the bodies of children lost to a cholera epidemic had gained entry into the Catholic church the night before.
At 6:20, one of the sentries was crossing the town plaza on his way to his post when he encountered Police Chief Abanador, who suddenly wrenched his rifle away from him and slammed the butt into his head. As the sentry fell and Abanador shouted a signal, the church bells began tolling, and guerrillas armed with bolos (a long machetelike knife, the guerrilla’s weapon of choice), which had been secreted in the otherwise empty coffins, poured out of the sanctuary and a contingent raced toward the convent. Men who had been pressed into work at various public works projects drew concealed weapons and set upon the soldiers. Others joining in the slaughter hastened to the plaza from barrios just outside town. Few of the soldiers were able to retrieve their rifles. Those who did had to fight off swarms of attackers and suffered multiple wounds to their extremities from slashing bolos.
After an hour of hand-to-hand fighting, most soldiers having no other weapons than their fists or an iron pan or a chair leg they used for a club, the Americans who managed to retrieve their rifles and revolvers drove off their attackers, who got away with most of the company’s weapons and ammunition. By then forty-four soldiers were dead or dying, twenty-two others were seriously wounded, and four men were missing. Their assailants had lost twenty-eight killed. The bodies of all three officers were found hacked to pieces. Two had been killed in their rooms. Captain Connell had managed to escape the convent but had died in the plaza. Only a few soldiers were able-bodied by the time they set off with the wounded in canoes. They paddled several hours until they reached Basey, another southern coast port, where Company G of the 9th Infantry was based.
The next day Company G’s commander, Captain Edwin Bookmiller, led a party of volunteers back to Balangiga, hauling a Gatling gun and a Hotchkiss field artillery piece with them. They found the bodies of the fallen Americans strewn about the plaza. All had been mutilated. Captain Connell had been beheaded. The soldiers had interrupted a funeral in progress for the Filipino dead. Bookmiller had his soldiers round up twenty local men, who were ordered to haul the Filipino bodies out of the uncovered graves and replace them with the American dead. After presiding over a brief graveside service for the Americans, Bookmiller had the Filipino dead piled in a heap and burned. Then he ordered the town put to the torch and handed over the Filipino gravediggers to survivors of Company C, who shot them dead. Later that day Bookmiller wired a report to Manila: “Buried dead, burned town, returned Basey.”
That was not sufficient retaliation, however, for Adna Chaffee. The 9th Infantry had served under him in China, and he meant to avenge it. He blamed the ambush on the “false humanitarianism” and “soft mollycoddling of treacherous natives” practiced by his predecessor, MacArthur, and Chaffee’s civilian rival in Manila, Taft. Nor was it enough for most Americans, who regarded the massacre at Balangiga as the most notorious military disaster since the massacre at the Little Bighorn. Nor did it placate their new president, Roosevelt, sworn into office two weeks earlier after McKinley succumbed to the two gunshot wounds in his stomach he had received from the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Roosevelt was close to Taft and might have shared at least some of Taft’s concern that the harsh tactics advocated by Chaffee would prove counterproductive. But he couldn’t afford to let the war he had been repeatedly assured was over drag on and claim more American casualties. He ordered Chaffee to employ “in unmistakable terms” the “most stern measures to pacify Samar,” which Chaffee was prepared to do with celerity and with the help of his old friend Jacob Smith. Chaffee recalled Smith from Luzon, handed him his star as a newly promoted brigadier, and ordered him to Samar to “get the savage island under control.”
According to some, “Hell Roaring Jake” Smith received his nickname for having a booming voice that could be heard over the din of the battlefield despite its owner’s slight stature. Others claim it was bestowed to mock Smith’s habitual bombast. Whatever its meaning, its owner doesn’t seem to have objected to it. Smith had a long and checkered army career. He suffered a disabling wound at Shiloh, which kept him out of subsequent Civil War battles. For the balance of the war he served as a recruiting officer, in which occupation he enriched himself by pocketing the bounties paid for freed slaves he provided to fill recruitment quotas. Scandals seemed to follow him throughout his career, much of it spent in the West fighting Indians. (He is said to have been present at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.) His persistent misconduct and notorious attempts to cover it up were often reprimanded, and on at least two occasions he was brought before courts-martial. Yet he had enough well-placed connections that he remained in uniform for forty years. He led a battalion into battle at the San Juan Heights and took a Spanish bullet in the chest. The wound wasn’t fatal or disabling, and it won him a regimental command.
Smith made no secret of his intentions on Samar. In a notice sent to all post commanders in his sector and made known to the press, he declared that he intended to “wage war in the sharpest and most decisive manner”: “Every native will henceforth be treated as an enemy until he has conclusively shown that he is a friend.”
To help accomplish this task, Smith asked for a battalion of marines in addition to the two army battalions Chaffee had sent with him. The navy’s commanding officer in the Philippines, Rear Admiral Fred Rogers, offered Colonel Waller’s battalion. That was a fortuitous turn of events for Waller. He had spent much of his time since returning from China in a peaceful and boring backwater of the war, the naval base at Subic Bay, where he seems to have gotten drunk one time too many. An admiral had pronounced him unfit for duty and suspended him for ten days. Samar was an opportunity to regain his good reputation.
Waller’s battalion boarded the cruiser USS New York and arrived at Carbalogen on Samar’s west coast on October 24. His new commanding officer was waiting there to brief him on his assignment. Smith told Waller the marines would be responsible for pacifying the southern half of the island, where Balangiga and Basey were located and where Smith seemed to consider the entire native population to be insurgents. Then Waller listened to an emphatic Smith order him to murder men, women, and children. “I want no prisoners,”
Smith explained. “I want you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”
“I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir,” Waller queried in response.
“Ten years,” Smith replied.
“Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?” the marine asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Smith confirmed.
As American columns swept around the island’s coastline Smith’s decrees were put into effect. Villages suspected of harboring enemy fighters were put to the torch, their food supplies destroyed, crops burned, and livestock shot. Suspected guerrillas were executed on the spot or tortured for information and then shot. Concentration camps were created for the dispossessed. To interdict the insurgents’ food supplies, trade between Samar and Leyte was curtailed, and any native “found passing between these two islands . . . [was] fired upon and killed.” Local officials in the south were given a week to turn over anyone who had participated in the Balangiga massacre and all captured arms or see their towns destroyed. No prisoners were taken in firefights with guerrillas. Of the thousands of Filipinos killed in the campaign, many, probably most, were noncombatants.
The slaughter of all natives over the age of ten did not occur, however, because most of Smith’s subordinate officers ignored the order. After their conference aboard the New York, Smith traveled with Waller first to Basey, where Waller would make his headquarters, and then to Balangiga, where they were appalled to discover that hogs had dug up the graves of the American dead. A raging Smith turned to Waller and repeated his command to “kill and burn.”
Waller left two companies of marines in Balangiga under the command of Captain David Porter. Before he returned to Basey with the nearly hysterical Smith, he took his subordinate aside and countermanded the order: “Porter, I’ve had instructions to kill everyone over ten years old. But we are not making war on women and children, only men capable of bearing arms. Keep that in mind no matter what other orders you receive.”
Excluding women and children still allowed a wide scope for making war, however. Waller instructed his marines to “place no confidence in the natives and punish treachery with death.”
The marines initially limited their patrols to clearing the jungle along the coast, and though they had little success locating and engaging many of the enemy, Waller could report that after eleven days they had burned “255 buildings, shot 13 carabaos [water buffalo] and killed 39 people.” When they started probing the interior, skirmishes with the enemy were more frequent, and the marines picked up a trail to an enemy stronghold on the cliffs above the Sohoton River, where Lukbán had made his headquarters. Waller planned an attack using three columns. Porter led one column overland from Balangiga, Captain Hiram Bearss marched a second overland from Basey, and Waller led an amphibious assault team up the river, towing a raft that carried a cannon. The three columns were to rendezvous on November 16 and stage a combined water and land assault on the cliffs.
Porter and Bearss got there first. Waller’s party was held up downriver by enemy defenses, and his two subordinate commanders decided to make the assault without him. Porter turned to Sergeant John Quick, who had received the Medal of Honor for his actions in Cuba, and told him to lay down covering fire with his Colt machine gun as marines scaled the two-hundred-foot cliffs. When they reached the top, they killed the guerrillas they could catch, estimated to be about thirty men, while the others fled into the jungle. The marines didn’t suffer a single casualty. They destroyed the camp before fatigue and dwindling rations obliged them to make the difficult trek back to base.
The victory was impressive, but not as important as a boasting Smith and American newspapers made it out to be. It would take more than one successful battle for the Americans to pacify the island’s forbidding interior. Both Smith and Waller recognized this. Smith’s instructions to Waller, who was planning another expedition, sent by unsigned note, were to make the swamps, jungles, and mountains of Samar’s interior “a howling wilderness.”
The marines spent most of December working their way eastward along the southern coast, skirmishing occasionally with small bands of guerrillas and destroying villages along the way. “Unless we meet something much more serious than we have during this march,” Waller reported to Smith, “I think it safe to say that the southern part of the island of Samar is as quiet as many parts of Luzon, where peace is supposed to reign.” Smith wanted the marines to venture deeper into the interior and cut a trail from east to west across the island. Waller appeared eager to do it. His famed “March across Samar” began on December 28 at the army base in Lanang on Samar’s east coast. The base commander, Captain James Pickering, tried and failed to dissuade him from making the march. Two previous attempts had been made, and both had turned back, daunted by the impenetrable terrain. Waller brushed aside Pickering’s pessimism. In bright sunshine after days of heavy rains, the party of six officers, including Captains Porter and Bearss, fifty enlisted marines led by the capable Sergeant Quick, two Filipino scouts called Slim and Smoke, and thirty-three cargadores (native bearers) set out in long canoes up the Lanang River.
Waller planned to travel by river as far as possible and then hope to find a trail the Spanish were thought to have blazed that would take them to a supply camp Waller had ordered established near the scene of the marines’ earlier triumph, the Sohoton cliffs. From there they would travel by boat to Basey, where the expedition would end. They made seventeen miles on the river the first day while the weather held, although not many miles westward. They paddled another eight the next day before encountering rapids at the village of Lagitao. They camped there for the night and set out on foot the following morning. The rains returned and the terrain proved as daunting as Pickering had warned. The marines made little progress. They were forced repeatedly to ford the winding, swollen river, their uniforms constantly soaked and covered in leeches. There was no trail to speak of, Spanish or otherwise, and they had to hack their way through the dense undergrowth, which grabbed at their boots and tripped them as they climbed hills steeper than they had expected to encounter. It seemed they were forced to march several miles in every direction to progress a single mile westward. They encountered not a single guerrilla or any other human being.
Because they were far off schedule Waller cut their rations after the third day, and cut them again after the fourth. On New Year’s Eve 1902 the rains prevented them from lighting cooking fires. By New Year’s, the fifth day, all were exhausted and hungry. That day and the next they climbed one mountain after another. Their situation was dire, and Waller thought their survival in doubt. Starved, their wet uniforms in shreds, their boots destroyed and their feet bloodied, covered in sores and leech bites, the men were growing ill and despondent. Surprisingly, given he was the oldest man on the march, Waller was in better shape than most. He decided to proceed to Sohoton with two of the lieutenants and thirteen of the fittest marines. The rest of the company, under Captain Porter’s command, would follow their trail at a slower pace. When Waller reached the supply camp he would send a relief party to them.
Accounts of what transpired next are somewhat confused. Some have it that, after discovering the way ahead was as difficult as the terrain they had already traversed, Waller sent word to Porter to build rafts and try to navigate the river back to Lanang. Others claim a feverish Porter despaired of ever reaching their destination and decided on his own to build the rafts; when they wouldn’t float, he chose to march back to Lanang. All accounts agree, though, that Porter dispatched Captain Bearss and an enlisted man to catch up to Waller’s column and inform him of his decision.
By the times Bearss reached them, Waller’s party were enjoying their first bit of good fortune. They had wandered into a grove with sweet potatoes, bananas, and coconuts and were busy consuming their bounty. When Waller learned
Porter was going to march his men back to Lanang, he sent one of his bearers, Victor, with a message not to attempt it. Instead Porter was to follow Waller’s trail to the clearing, where they would find food, and remain there. Waller would press on to the Sohoton and return as quickly as possible with food, fresh uniforms, and boots. But Victor never delivered the message. He returned to the column as it made camp, claiming that he had encountered insurgents. That night Victor attempted to steal Waller’s bolo as its suspicious owner pretended to be asleep. To Victor’s surprise, Waller drew his revolver and had him placed under arrest.
Waller assumed Porter would change his mind about returning to Lanang once he had started back overland, so he continued on, expecting Porter would follow his trail. On January 5 the marines stumbled onto a hut inhibited by five Filipinos. They pressed into service a young boy who claimed he could take them to Basey. He led them across a river to the elusive Spanish trail, which they followed across another river and through a valley to a third river, the Cadacan, where, on the morning of the 6th, after ten days in hell, they encountered the resupply party coming up the river on a navy cutter. “The men,” Waller recorded, “realizing that all was over and that they were safe once more near home, gave up. Some quietly wept; others laughed hysterically.”
They reached Basey that afternoon, and a relief party was organized and sent off on the cutter back up the Cadacan. They made camp at the place where the marines had found the Filipinos’ hut, and Waller joined them there on the 8th. For eight days they searched for Porter’s column until, their rations depleted and Waller having succumbed to fever, they reluctantly returned to Basey.
