The Roughest Riders (29 page)

It was a victory badly needed by the American forces, who had been getting cut up by the insurrectos' guerrilla tactics in other regions and had little to show for it. On December 7, 1899, they scored another telling victory when the commander of the one thousand insurrectos in the area, General Daniel Tirona, surrendered to Batchelor. The Buffalo Soldiers took them prisoner and confiscated their canoes and other supplies before continuing on. Batchelor advanced his 350-man contingent farther along the Cagayan River, reaching Tuguegarao, the capital of the province of Cagayan, on December 12. From there it was on to Solana and Amulung as they headed for the coast, encountering little opposition in this theater of operation. They made it to Aparri, their destination on the northern coast, on December 17, where they set up camp to rest and wait for badly needed supplies, including food and fresh clothing.

The swiftness of Batchelor and the Buffalo Soldiers' accomplishments was all the more astonishing considering that they had traversed three hundred miles of rugged, unknown territory inhabited by hostile forces; crisscrossed unfamiliar trails in variable weather conditions; forded back and forth over rushing streams and rivers more than one hundred times; and suffered for more than three weeks with limited food supplies and filthy and ripped uniforms. One of Batchelor's superiors, General Elwell Otis, commented afterward that the march was “memorable on account of the celerity of its execution, the difficulties encountered, and the discomforts suffered by the troops.”

For the men of the Twenty-Fourth, it was a victory worth savoring. But it was only one of many battles in a long and drawn-out campaign. The war to bring on the total collapse of the Spanish empire had barely begun.

J
ust before the year ended, on December 19, 1899, Lawton succumbed to enemy fire, taking a bullet in the chest and becoming the first American general killed outside of North America and the highest-ranking officer killed in the Philippines. In his characteristic style, he was striding over the ground at the head of his troops at 9:15
AM
within three hundred yards of an insurrecto trench near San Mateo. At six-foot-three, wearing a large white pith helmet and a yellow raincoat, he presented an easy target for enemy sharpshooters under the command of General Licerio Gerónimo. Lawton's men implored him to take cover, but shrinking in combat and leading from the rear had never been his style. The insurrectos fired a round of bullets, most of which clipped the grass around the general's feet. But one found its mark, drilling him through the chest. “I am shot!” were his last words as he fell dead into the arms of one of his staff officers. Not only was Lawton the highest-ranking officer killed in the Philippines, he was the only American fatality during this war.

The business of governing and maintaining order in the land now occupied would prove to be costly and hazardous. Early the following year, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth were sent in to
garrison other cities and villages, including Santa Cruz, Iba, and Subic Bay, on the western coast of Luzon. Part of their job was to erect and maintain the telegraph lines that provided links to other parts of the island and to the outside world. But no sooner did they put them up than the insurrectos tore them down. The Americans simply did not have enough manpower to guard the entire network, and the rebels moved in from their hiding places in the brush and wreaked havoc on their work as soon as the Americans left an area. Even worse, the rebels, who were familiar with the terrain, observed the Americans' every move as they themselves remained hidden, and the Buffalo Soldiers were in constant danger of having their men picked off one by one before the enemy scampered back into the jungle.

With their limited numbers, the occupiers resorted to stationing small units in each village, scarcely enough personnel to maintain law and order. They became, in fact, the only working government along the coastal towns, performing routine civil functions including serving as policemen, firemen, and even tax collectors to pay for ongoing expenses—the last of which hardly endeared them to the local populace. Keeping up morale in a war that many of the troops considered less than just, and in which they found themselves oppressing natives who had fought to free themselves from one group of colonialists only to find themselves attacked by others—others who they felt should have been sympathetic to their cause—was challenging in the extreme. Yet, the great majority of the Buffalo Soldiers loyally performed the tasks assigned to them by their white officers, even while they questioned the morality of what they had been sent to accomplish, a sentiment reinforced by constant criticism from home.

“I boil over with disgust when I remember that colored men from this country are fighting to subjugate a people of their own color,” wrote Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a leading voice in the
African Methodist Episcopal Church. “I can scarcely keep from saying that I hope the Filipinos will wipe such soldiers from the face of the earth.” Maintaining their loyalty in the face of such harsh, vitriolic rancor from their own religious leaders was simultaneously heroic and conflicting. “If it were not for the sake of the 10,000,000 black people in the United States,” wrote a Buffalo Soldier in a letter to the
Wisconsin Weekly Advocate
, “God alone knows on which side of the subject I would be.”

The longer the war dragged on, the more elusive the insurrectos became. One day early in the year, the Twenty-Fifth located a band of them in a swath of jungle near the western coast. The Buffalo Soldiers split up into two units, breaking camp at 4:00
AM
, one group moving along the coast and the other proceeding through rice fields toward the insurrectos' rear. When they had them enveloped, the two units moved in from both sides believing they had the guerrillas trapped between them—only to discover that their prey had vanished into the mist, as it were. They had simply disappeared into their environment. The Twenty-Fifth, Twenty-Fourth, and other black contingents attempted similar operations several times, with the same results. The enemy became invisible when the Americans thought they had trapped them, and sometimes managed to kill a few of the invaders before they vanished from sight.

Aquino and his men outnumbered the twelve thousand Americans committed to combat in the Philippines by more than three to one during the course of the war. After a string of frustrating encounters, the Twenty-Fifth turned the corner in late January 1900 when they “scaled heights of great difficulty” and crawled through dense brush in the region around Mount Arayat, an extinct volcano, to capture the rebels' barracks and free five American prisoners.
Around the same time, they seized the village of O'Donnell, taking 128 guerrilla fighters prisoner and confiscating more than two hundred of their rifles, plus ammunition and food. Suddenly coming across these extra supplies was especially fortunate, as the Americans—unlike the insurrectos, who enjoyed the support of the locals and were used to living off the land, hunting, fishing, and gathering food and other materials as needed—were otherwise dependent on supplies that had to be shipped across long stretches of ocean and then over arduous terrain to their scattered outposts.

Their victories in these skirmishes turned the men of the Twenty-Fifth into heroes in the eyes of their white comrades—at least temporarily—and earned them immortality, of sorts. One white writer who championed them was the novelist John Dos Passos in his bestselling trilogy of novels,
U.S.A.
, with the opening lines of a verse poem: “It was that emancipated race / That was chargin' up the hill / Up to where them insurrectoes / Was afightin' fit to kill.”

The battles raged on throughout the year, with the casualties mounting on each side of the conflict. On January 14 and 15, 1900, the warring parties fought the only artillery duel of the war on the summit of a mountain that climbed a little higher than three thousand feet above the Cabugao River along the northwest coast of Luzon. The American forces scored a decisive victory thanks to their greater firepower, but the elusive Aquino, who they thought was trapped in the area, managed to slip away across the mountain passes with a large band of his followers. Once again, he had pulled off the vanishing act for which he had become notorious, and which frustrated his American pursuers. The American troops who searched the battlefield after the last shot was fired discovered the bodies of twenty-eight rebels, but the commanders of the outpost had escaped with Aquino.

Later the same month, with the area north of Manila largely abandoned by the enemy, the Americans diverted some of their
forces, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth, to new hot spots erupting in the southeastern corner of the island around Bicol. Deep-water ports dotted the bays in the area, which made them ideal for freighters transporting hemp and other products to far-off countries. On the afternoon of January 18, Brigadier General William A. Kobbé sailed south with five ships with orders to take possession of Sorsogon Bay, which he captured with little opposition. He seized the town and posted a garrison of Buffalo Soldiers to maintain order while he continued on to the ports at Bulan and Donsol, then through the San Bernardino Strait to confront the rebels in Albay Province. They encountered heavy resistance from a determined band of insurrectos but forced the enemy to retreat on January 23. The skirmish cost the American forces seven wounded, and they killed or wounded fifty Filipinos.

Through the spring, the Americans recorded a series of small victories, taking villages including Albay, Nueva Cáceres, and Camarines. They once again had Aquino in their sights, with the insurrectos becoming increasingly desperate, forced to melt church bells and whatever metal objects they had in hand to make bullets. Aquino and his men appeared to be on the verge of collapse as the Americans moved in. Then, surprisingly, the insurrectos mounted a counterattack, impelling the invading troops to abandon a captured town, Catubig, on April 15 after a four-day siege. Aquino slipped the American stranglehold, vanishing from sight and falling back to Manila on May 19, where he dug in and regrouped his rebels. He launched what would later come to be known as Phase Two of the Filipino revolution against the Spanish empire—and the burgeoning American empire that was determined to replace it.

Through the summer and fall of 1900, the war for control of the Philippines continued—memorable battles included Macahambus, Pulang Lupa, Mabitac, and scores of others—while at home McKinley was reelected after a hotly contested campaign against William Jennings Bryan, whose party received Aquino's endorsement. As the Filipino resistance grew more intractable, the US commanders in the field adopted what amounted to a scorched-earth policy, burning down homes and villages and resorting to torture, including using a method that precursed the water-boarding technique used more than a century later in Iraq. Twenty towns in Bohol alone were razed to the ground, their most prominent citizens were tortured, and their cattle were killed and destroyed to deprive the insurrectos of food.