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ANNALS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

THE WATER CUREDebating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.by Paul Kramer

FEBRUARY 25, 2008

A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote.

any Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturingFilipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and

freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars.The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba andthe Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown upmysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, mightserve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event ofwar, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returnedthe exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independentin June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

During the next half year, it became clear that American and Filipino visions for the islands’ future were at odds. U.S. forces seized Manilafrom Spain—keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city—and President William McKinley refused to recognizeFilipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talkingabout Filipinos’ need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a modelrepublic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mountingtensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified atreaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops wageda war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands ofFilipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear inAmerican newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored.Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers;and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, publishedin the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and otherscalled the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on eachhand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in anotherpail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

On occasion, someone—a local antiwar activist, one suspects—forwarded these clippings to centers of anti-imperialist publishing in theNortheast. But the war’s critics were at first hesitant to do much with them: they were hard to substantiate, and they would, it was felt, subject thepublishers to charges of anti-Americanism. This was especially true as the politics of imperialism became entangled in the 1900 Presidentialcampaign. As the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, clashed with the Republican incumbent over imperialism, which the Democratscalled “the paramount issue,” critics of the war had to defend themselves against accusations of having treasonously inspired the insurgency,prolonged the conflict, and betrayed American soldiers. But, after McKinley won a second term, the critics may have felt that they had little tolose.

Ultimately, outraged dissenters—chief among them the relentless Philadelphia-based reformer Herbert Welsh—forced the question of U.S.atrocities into the light. Welsh, who was descended from a wealthy merchant family, might have seemed an unlikely investigator of military abuse

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at the edge of empire. His main antagonists had previously been Philadelphia’s party bosses, whose sordid machinations were extensively reportedin Welsh’s earnest upstart weekly, City and State. Yet he had also been a founder of the “Indian rights” movement, which attempted to curtailwhite violence and fraud while pursuing Native American “civilization” through Christianity, U.S. citizenship, and individual land tenure. Anexpansive concern with bloodshed and corruption at the nation’s periphery is perhaps what drew Welsh’s imagination from the Dakotas toSoutheast Asia. He had initially been skeptical of reports of misconduct by U.S. troops. But by late 1901, faced with what he considered“overwhelming” proof, Welsh emerged as a single-minded campaigner for the exposure and punishment of atrocities, running an idiosyncraticinvestigation out of his Philadelphia offices. As one who “professes to believe in the gospel of Christ,” he declared, he felt obliged to condemn “thecruelties and barbarities which have been perpetrated under our flag in the Philippines.” Only the vigorous pursuit of justice could restore “thecredit of the American nation in the eyes of the civilized world.” By early 1902, three assistants to Welsh were chasing down returning soldiers fortheir testimony, and Philippine “cruelties” began to crowd Philadelphia’s party bosses from the pages of City and State.

At about the same time, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of Massachusetts, an eloquent speaker and one of the few Republican opponents of thewar, was persuaded by “letters in large numbers” from soldiers to call for a special investigation. He proposed the formation of an independentcommittee, but Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, another Massachusetts Republican, insisted that the hearings take place inside his own, majority-Republican Committee on the Philippines. The investigation began at the end of January, 1902, and, in the months that followed, two distinctvisions of the hearings emerged. Hoar had hoped for a broad examination of the conduct of the war; Lodge, along with the Republican majority,wanted to keep the focus on the present, and was “not convinced” of the need to delve into “some of the disputed questions of the past.” For thenext ten weeks, prominent military and civilian officials expounded on the progress of American arms, the illegitimacy of Aguinaldo’s government,its victimization of Filipinos, and the population’s incapacity for self-government and hunger for American tutelage.

Still, the subject of what was called, with a late-Victorian delicacy, “cruelties” by U.S. troops arose a few days into the hearings, at the outsetof three weeks’ testimony by William Howard Taft. A Republican judge from Ohio, Taft had been sent to the islands to head the PhilippineCommission, the core of the still prospective “postwar” government. He was speaking about the Federal Party, an élite body of collaboratingFilipinos who were aiding “pacification,” when Senator Thomas Patterson, a Democrat from Colorado, abruptly inquired about “the use of theso-called water cure in securing the surrender of guns.” Taft replied that he “had intended to speak of the charges of torture which were madefrom time to time.” He then allowed himself to be redirected by the young Indiana senator Albert Beveridge, an ardent imperialist who wanted todiscuss the deportation of Filipino “irreconcilables” to Guam. But antiwar senators proved persistent. Minutes later, Senator Charles A. Culberson,a Democrat from Texas, pushed again. This time, Taft conceded:

That cruelties have been inflicted; that people have been shot when they ought not to have been; that there have been in individual instances of water cure, that torture which I believe involves pouring waterdown the throat so that the man swells and gets the impression that he is going to be suffocated and then tells what he knows, which was a frequent treatment under the Spaniards, I am told—all these things aretrue.

Taft then immediately tried to contain the moral and political implications of the admission. Military officers had repeatedly issued statementscondemning “such methods,” he claimed, backing up their warnings with investigations and courts-martial. He also pointed to “some ratheramusing instances” in which, he maintained, Filipinos had invited torture. Eager to share intelligence with the Americans, but needing a plausiblecover, these Filipinos, in Taft’s recounting, had presented themselves and “said they would not say anything until they were tortured.” In manycases, it appeared, American forces had been only too happy to oblige them.

ess than two weeks later, on February 17, 1902, the Administration delivered to the Lodge committee a fervent response that was tonally atodds with Taft’s jocular testimony. Submitted by Secretary of War Elihu Root, the report proclaimed that “charges in the public press of

cruelty and oppression exercised by our soldiers towards natives of the Philippines” had been either “unfounded or grossly exaggerated.” Thedocument, entitled “Charges of Cruelty, Etc., to the Natives of the Philippines,” was an unsubtle exercise in the politics of proportion. A meagreforty-four pages related to allegations of torture and abuse of Filipinos by U.S. soldiers; almost four hundred pages were devoted to records ofmilitary tribunals convened to try Filipinos for “cruelties” against their countrymen. If the committee sought atrocities, Root suggested, it need lookno further than the Filipino insurgency, which had been “conducted with the barbarous cruelty common among uncivilized races.” The relativelyslender ledger of courts-martial was not, for Root, evidence of the unevenness of U.S. military justice on the islands. Rather, it showed that theAmerican campaign had been carried out “with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare, with careful and genuine consideration for theprisoner and the noncombatant, with self-restraint, and with humanity never surpassed, if ever equaled, in any conflict, worthy only of praise, andreflecting credit on the American people.”

The scale of abuses in the Philippines remains unknowable, but, as early as March, rhetoric like Root’s was being undercut by furtherrevelations from the islands. When Major Littleton Waller, of the Marines, appeared before a court-martial in Manila that month, unprecedentedpublic attention fell on the brutal extremities of U.S. combat, specifically on the island of Samar in late 1901. In the wake of a surprise attack byFilipino revolutionaries on American troops in the town of Balangiga, which had killed forty-eight of seventy-four members of an American Armycompany, Waller and his forces were deployed on a search-and-destroy mission across the island. During an ill-fated march into the island’suncharted interior, Waller had become lost, feverish, and paranoid. Believing that Filipino guides and carriers in the service of his marines wereguilty of treachery, he ordered eleven of them summarily shot. During his court-martial, Waller testified that he had been under orders from thevolatile, aging Brigadier General Jacob Smith (“Hell-Roaring Jake,” to his comrades) to transform the island into a “howling wilderness,” to “killand burn” to the greatest degree possible—“The more you kill and burn, the better it will please me”—and to shoot anyone “capable of bearingarms.” According to Waller, when he asked Smith what this last stipulation meant in practical terms, Smith had clarified that he thought thatten-year-old Filipino boys were capable of bearing arms. (In light of those orders, Waller was acquitted.)

The disclosures stirred indignation in the United States but also prompted rousing defenses. Smith was court-martialled that spring, and wasfound guilty of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” Yet the penalty was slight: he was simply reprimanded and madeto retire early. Root then used the opportunity to tout the restraint that the U.S. forces had shown, given their “desperate struggle” against “a crueland savage foe.” The Lodge committee, meanwhile, maintained its equanimity, with a steady procession of generals and officials recounting the

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success and benevolence of American operations.That is what, on April 14th, made the testimony of Charles S. Riley, a clerk at a Massachusetts plumbing-and-steam-fitting company, so

explosive. A letter from Riley had been published in the Northampton Daily Herald in March of the previous year, describing the water-curetorture of Tobeniano Ealdama, the presidente of the town of Igbaras, where Riley, then a sergeant in the 26th Volunteer Infantry, had beenstationed. Herbert Welsh had learned of Riley, and enlisted him, among other soldiers, to testify before the committee. Amid the bullying questionsof pro-war senators, Riley’s account of the events of November 27, 1900, unfolded, and it was startlingly at odds with most official accounts.Upon entering the town’s convent, which had been seized as a headquarters, Riley had witnessed Ealdama being bound and forced full of water,while supervised by a contract surgeon and Captain Edwin Glenn, a judge advocate. Ealdama’s throat had been “held so he could not preventswallowing the water, so that he had to allow the water to run into his stomach”; the water was then “forced out of him by pressing a foot on hisstomach or else with [the soldiers’] hands.” The ostensible goal of the water cure was to obtain intelligence: after a second round of torture,carried out in front of the convent by a “water detail” of five or six men, Ealdama confessed to serving as a captain in the insurgency. He then ledU.S. forces into the bush in search of insurgents. After their return to Igbaras, that night, Glenn had ordered that the town, consisting of betweenfour and five hundred houses, be burned to the ground, as Riley explained, “on account of the condition of affairs exposed by the treatment.”

iley’s testimony, which was confirmed by another member of the unit, was inconvenient, especially coming after official declarations aboutAmerica’s “civilized” warfare. The next day, Secretary of War Root directed that a court-martial be held in San Francisco and cabled the

general in charge of the Philippines to transport to the West Coast Glenn and any witnesses who could be located. “The President desires to knowin the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts, nothing concealed and no man being for any reason favored or shielded,” Root declared.Yet in the cable Root assured the general, well in advance of the facts, that “the violations of law and humanity, of which these cases, if true, areexamples, will prove to be few and occasional, and not to characterize the conduct of the army generally in the Philippines.” Most significant,though, was the decision, possibly at Glenn’s request, to shift the location of the court-martial from San Francisco to Catbalogan, in thePhilippines, close to sympathetic officers fighting a war, and an ocean away from the accusing witnesses, whose units had returned home. Glennhad objected to a trial in America because, he said, there was a “high state of excitement in the United States upon the subject of the so-calledwater cure and the consequent misunderstanding of what was meant by that term.”

The trial lasted a week. When Ealdama testified about his experience—“My stomach and throat pained me, and also the nose where theypassed the salt water through”—Glenn interrupted, trying to minimize the man’s suffering by claiming (incorrectly) that Ealdama had stated thathe had experienced pain only “as [the water] passed through.” Glenn defended his innocence by defending the water cure itself. He maintainedthat the torture of Ealdama was “a legitimate exercise of force under the laws of war,” being “justified by military necessity.” In making this case,Glenn shifted the focus to the enemy’s tactics. He emphasized the treachery of Ealdama, who had been tried and convicted by a militarycommission a year earlier as a “war traitor,” for aiding the insurgency. Testimony was presented by U.S. military officers and Filipinos concerningthe insurgency’s guerrilla tactics, which violated the norms of “civilized war.” Found guilty, Glenn was sentenced to a one-month suspension and afifty-dollar fine. “The court is thus lenient,” the sentence read, “on account of the circumstances as shown in evidence.” (Glenn retired from theArmy, in 1919, as a brigadier general.) Meanwhile, Ealdama, twice tortured by Glenn’s forces, was serving a sentence of ten years’ hard labor; hehad been temporarily released to enable him to testify against his torturer.

The vote of the court-martial at Catbalogan had been unanimous, but at least one prominent dissenter within the Army registered hisdisapproval. Judge Advocate General George B. Davis, forwarding the trial records to Root, wrote an introductory memorandum that seethed withindignation. Glenn’s sentence, in his view, was “inadequate to the offense established by the testimony of the witnesses and the admission of theaccused.” Paragraph 16 of the General Orders, No. 100, the Army’s Civil War-era combat regulations, could not have been clearer: “Militarynecessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding exceptin fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.” Davis conceded that, in a “rare or isolated case,” force might legitimately be used in “obtaining theunwilling service” of a guide, if justified as a “measure of emergency.” But a careful examination of the events preceding the tortures at Igbarasrevealed that “no such case existed.” Furthermore, Glenn had described the water cure as “the habitual method of obtaining information fromindividual insurgents”—in other words, as “a method of conducting operations.” But the operational use of torture, Davis stressed, was strictlyforbidden. Regarding a subsequent water-cure court-martial, he wrote, “No modern state, which is a party to international law, can sanction,either expressly or by a silence which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view to obtain confessions, as an incident to its militaryoperations.” Otherwise, he inquired, “where is the line to be drawn?” And he rehearsed an unsettling, judicial calibration of pain:

Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smouldering fire; shall he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet; shall he be beaten with rods; shall his shins be rubbedwith a broomstick until they bleed?

The questions were so vile and absurd—they were the kind that the Filipinos’ Spanish tormentors had once asked—that it seemed “hardlynecessary to pursue the subject further.” The United States, he concluded, “can not afford to sanction the addition of torture to the several formsof force which may be legitimately employed in war.” Glenn’s sentence, however, stood. This would be perhaps the most intensive effort by theWar Department to punish those who practiced the water cure in the Philippines.

Confronted with the facts provided by the Waller, Smith, and Glenn courts-martial, and with the testimony of a dozen more soldier witnesseswho had followed Riley, Administration officials, military officers, and pro-war journalists launched a vigorous campaign in defense of the Armyand the war. Their arguments were passionate and wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory. Some simply attacked the war’s critics, those whosought political advantage by crying out that “our soldiers are barbarous savages,” as one major general put it. Some contended that atrocities werethe exclusive province of the Macabebe Scouts, collaborationist Filipino troops over whom, it was alleged, U.S. officers had little control. Somedenied, on racial grounds, that Filipinos were owed the “protective” limits of “civilized warfare.” When, during the committee hearings, SenatorJoseph Rawlins had asked General Robert Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing U.S. troops was “within the ordinary rulesof civilized warfare,” Hughes had replied succinctly, “These people are not civilized.” More generally, some people, while conceding that

American soldiers had engaged in “cruelties,” insisted that the behavior reflected the barbaric sensibilities of the Filipinos. “I think I know whythese things have happened,” Lodge offered in a Senate speech in May. They had “grown out of the conditions of warfare, of the war that waswaged by the Filipinos themselves, a semicivilized people, with all the tendencies and characteristics of Asiatics, with the Asiatic indifference tolife, with the Asiatic treachery and the Asiatic cruelty, all tinctured and increased by three hundred years of subjection to Spain.” As the militaryphysician Henry Rowland later phrased it, the American soldiers’ “lust of slaughter” was “reflected from the faces of those around them.”

In his private and public considerations of the question of “cruelties,” Theodore Roosevelt—who had been President since McKinley’sassassination, in September of 1901—lurched from intolerance for torture to attempts to rationalize it and outrage at the antiwar activists whomade it a public issue. Writing to a friend, he admitted that, faced with a “very treacherous” enemy, “not a few of the officers, especially those ofthe native scouts, and not a few of the enlisted men, began to use the old Filipino method of mild torture, the water cure.” Roosevelt wasconvinced that “nobody was seriously damaged,” whereas “the Filipinos had inflicted incredible tortures upon our own people.” Still, he wrote,“torture is not a thing that we can tolerate.” In a May, 1902, Memorial Day address before assembled veterans at Arlington National Cemetery,Roosevelt deplored the “wholly exceptional” atrocities by American troops: “Determined and unswerving effort must be made, and has been andis being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even strongermeasures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.” But he deplored the nation’s betrayalby anti-imperialist critics “who traduce our armies in the Philippines.” In conquering the Philippines, he claimed, the United States was, in fact,dissolving “cruelty” in the form of Aguinaldo’s regime. “Our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order,” he said. “They bringfreedom.” Such wars were as historically necessary as they were difficult to contain: “The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilizationat the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity. Yet from its verynature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.”

There was, of course, an easier way than argument to end the debate. On July 4, 1902 (as if on cue from John Philip Sousa), Rooseveltdeclared victory in the Philippines. Remaining insurgents would be politically downgraded to “brigands.” Although the United States ruled over thePhilippines for the next four decades, the violence was now, in some sense, a problem in someone else’s country. Activists in the United Statescontinued to pursue witnesses and urge renewed Senate investigation, but with little success; in February, 1903, Lodge’s Republican-controlledcommittee voted to end its inquiry into the allegations of torture. The public became inured to what had, only months earlier, been alarmingrevelations. As early as April 16, 1902, the New York World described the “American Public” sitting down to eat its breakfast with a newspaperfull of Philippine atrocities:

It sips its coffee and reads of its soldiers administering the “water cure” to rebels; of how water with handfuls of salt thrown in to make it more efficacious, is forced down the throats of the patients until theirbodies become distended to the point of bursting; of how our soldiers then jump on the distended bodies to force the water out quickly so that the “treatment” can begin all over again. The American Public takesanother sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

“But where is that vast national outburst of astounded horror which an old-fashioned America would have predicted at the reading of suchnews?” the World asked. “Is it lost somewhere in the 8,000 miles that divide us from the scenes of these abominations? Is it led astray by thedarker skins of the alien race among which these abominations are perpetrated? Or is it rotted away by that inevitable demoralization which thewrong-doing of a great nation must inflict on the consciences of the least of its citizens?”

Responding to the verdict in the Glenn court-martial, Judge Advocate General Davis had suggested that the question it implicitly posed—howmuch was global power worth in other people’s pain?—was one no moral nation could legitimately ask. As the investigation of the water cureended and the memory of faraway torture faded, Americans answered it with their silence. ♦

PHOTOGRAPH: ATTRIBUTED TO CORPORAL GEORGE J. VENNAGE/OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY RARE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS LIBRARY

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HomeBackgroundBattle of Manila BayEmilio AguinaldoReturnsPhilippine IndependenceMock Battle of ManilaMalolos CongressTreaty of ParisThe Philippine RepublicThe Philippine ArmyFIL-AM WAR BREAKSOUTUS Ratifies Paris TreatyBattle of San RoqueBattle of CaloocanThe War In The VisayasSecond Battle of ManilaManila to Laguna de BayAdvance To MalolosLawton's LakeExpeditionAdvance To SanFernandoAdvance To San IsidroFilipinos NegotiateBattles at San FernandoSpanish holdoutsAmericans Take AntipoloLuna AssassinationSouth of ManilaCampaign"Ilustrados" CollaborateCapture of CalambaBattle of AngelesStalling Moro ResistanceThe War Rages, 1899Trapping Aguinaldo,1899Guerilla Warfare, 1899Ilocos and Cagayan, 1899Gen. Lawton dies, 1899The War in 1900-1901Capture of Aguinaldo,1901Collapse, 1901Balangiga Massacre, 1901The Last Holdouts

Feb. 10, 1899: Battle of Caloocan

Brig. Gen. Arthur C. MacArthur, Jr. (central figure) and staff near Caloocan. At extremeleft is Capt. Charles G. Sawtelle Jr., Asst. Quartermaster; 2nd from left is Colonel (laterBrig. Gen.) Frederick Funston; 3rd from right is Maj. Putnam Bradlee Strong, Asst.Adjutant General; and 2nd from right is Maj. John Mallory, Inspector General.

After capturing La Loma, Brig. Gen. Arthur C. MacArthur, Jr. pushed toward Caloocan, animportant railroad center 11 miles (17 km) north of Manila. For several days, trainloadsof Filipino soldiers were seen landing in the town.

Old Spanish gun mounted by the Filipinos near Caloocan to control the railroad betweenManila and Malolos.

It also barred the way to Malolos, Aguinaldo's capitol. General Antonio Luna togetherwith a Belgian-trained engineer, Jose Alejandrino had constructed trenches to defendCaloocan.

La Loma Church: General MacArthur's headquarters before the Battle of Caloocan.PHOTO was taken in February 1899.

Philippine-American War, 1899-1902by Arnaldo Dumindin

Brig. Gen. Arthur C. MacArthur, Jr. directing the American advance on Caloocan.

20th Kansas Volunteers digging trenches just before the engagement at Caloocan

1st South Dakota Volunteers and a section of a light battery behind entrenchments justbefore the battle of Caloocan

Original caption: "The Montana Regiment Waiting The Order To Advance On Caloocan."

Original caption: "Idaho volunteers near Caloocan, waiting to be called to the Front"

Edward Stratemayer in his article entitled UNDER OTIS IN THE PHILIPPINES described thecapture of Caloocan: "On to the town! was the next cry and into the city they advanced,the Filipinos contesting every step stubbornly but unsuccessfully. A stand was taken at achurch and at several public and private buildings; but the blood of the Americans wasnot up and they forced the rebels out, in many cases at the point of the bayonet.Compelled to give up the city, the Filipinos tried their best to burn the main portion ofthe town, and soon the smaller houses were a mass of flames. An attempt was alsomade to burn the church and the city hall, but here the Americans interferred and manyof the rebels were caught and taken prisoner. The general advance had begun at oneo'clock in the afternoon. At half past five, Old Glory was swung to the breeze from theflagstaff of the city hall and rebel sway in Caloocan became a thing of the past. Whenthe smoke of war cleared out, the inhabitants of the town found their homes in ashes,the buildings razed to the ground and only the Casa Tribuna, the church, and theconvent remained standing."

Original caption: "The trenches before Caloocan afforded the best test of soldierly nerveunder the strain of constant expectation of attack. The guns are here being placed inposition for the coming battle. The defense is admirable."

US Battery at Caloocan

1899 painting, drawn from eyewitness accounts, by G.W. Peters. Title: "The BattleBefore Caloocan, February 10, 1899--View from the Chinese church". Maj. Gen. ArthurC. MacArthur, Jr., is the khaki-clad officer with binoculars; the battery of Utah Artillery is

C. MacArthur, Jr., is the khaki-clad officer with binoculars; the battery of Utah Artillery ison the middle foreground, while the 10th Pennsylvania Volunteers occupy the ground behind the wall. This print came from the book, "Harper's Pictorial History of the Warwith Spain", published in 1899.

Describing the Caloocan battle, Charles Bremer, of Minneapolis, Kansas, wrote:

"Company I had taken a few prisoners, and stopped. The colonel ordered them up in toline time after time, and finally sent Captain Bishop back to start them. There occurredthe hardest sight I ever saw. They had four prisoners, and didn’t know what to do withthem. They asked Captain Bishop what to do, and he said: 'You know the orders', andfour natives fell dead.”

Capt. David S. Elliot, of the 20th Kansas Volunteers, said: "Talk about war being 'hell,'this war beats the hottest estimate ever made of that locality. Caloocan was supposedto contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, andnow Caloocan contains not one living native. Of the buildings, the battered walls of thegreat church and dismal prison alone remain. The village of Maypaja, where our firstfight occurred on the night of the fourth, had five thousand people on that day—nownot one stone remains upon top of another. You can only faintly imagine this terriblescene of desolation."

Original caption: "The Advance On Caloocan --- On The Firing-Line Of The KansasVolunteers."

Volley firing by the 20th Kansas Volunteers, 1899

20th Kansas Volunteers advancing across an open field, 1899

Arthur Minkler, of the 20th Kansas Volunteers: ""We advanced four miles and we foughtevery inch of the way;... saw twenty-five dead insurgents in one place and twenty-sevenin another, besides a whole lot of them scattered along that I did not count.... It waslike hunting rabbits; an insurgent would jump out of a hole or the brush and run; hewould not get very far.... I suppose you are not interested in the way we do the job. Wedo not take prisoners. At least the Twentieth Kansas do not".

During the battle, the Kawit Battalion from Cavite refused to attack when given theorder by Gen. Antonio Luna. Because of this, he disarmed and relieved them of theirduties. Soldiers from this same Cavite battalion later assassinated Luna in Cabanatuan,Nueva Ecija on June 5, 1899.

Igorot POWs

The Igorots --- hardy mountaineers from the Cordilleras ofnorthern Luzon island---sent a contingent of men to fightthe Americans at Caloocan. The warriors were armed onlywith spears, axes, and shields.They were commanded by Maj.Federico Isabelo "Belong" Abaya (LEFT), a native of Candon,Ilocos Sur Province. He was a member of the Espiritu deCandon, a revolutionary group in Candon. On March 25,1898, he led the so-called Ikkis ti Kandon (Cry ofCandon), drove away the Spaniards from the town andbeheaded the Spanish parish priest (Fr. Rafael Redondo) andtwo visiting friars. He served in the Philippine Army underGeneral Manuel Tinio, and later became guerilla commanderin southern Ilocos under Col. Juan Villamor of Bangued, AbraProvince

Abaya was born in 1854 to a well-to-do family and died inbattle on May 3, 1900. He and 10 men were at themountain village of Guilong, Galimuyod, 11 miles east ofCandon, when they encountered a 30-man patrol of CompanyG, 33rd Infantry Regiment of United States Volunteers (USV).The Americans were led by 2Lt. Donald C. McClelland. Abayadied with 2 of his men and 3 were captured. There were nocasualties on the American side. [Guilong has been renamed

"Abaya" in honor of the hero].

The Igorots soon fell out with the Philippine army and became U.S. allies, acting asguides for American troops in the rugged highlands of northern Luzon. A TingguianIgorot, Januario Galut, led U.S. troops to a position where they could surround anddefeat the forces of Gen. Gregorio del Pilar at Tirad Pass on Dec. 2, 1899.

Many of the Igorots who served in Aguinaldo's army later joined the colonial PhilippineConstabulary

The mortal combat at Caloocan killed Luna's Chief of Staff, Major Bautista of theTerritorial Militia, and Captain Licero of Malolos.

The Annual Report of the U.S. War Department listed 5 American dead and 45 wounded;200 Filipinos killed and 800 wounded.

10th Pennsylvania Volunteers atop captured Filipino blockhouse

Original caption: "Flags of truce in the streets of Caloocan"

(LEFT) Caloocan Church after bombardment by Admiral George Dewey's fleet. (RIGHT)Americans set up a field telegraph station inside the church

Caloocan Church, after the battle. The American photographer wrote: "Caloocan, sixmiles north of Manila, bombarded by guns of the 'Charleston' and 'Monadnock' andleveled to the ground by fire, was a sorry sight as the Twentieth Kansas regimentadvanced. The insurgent dead lay in great numbers for it was here that the Kansans wontheir first great victory. What was a prosperous town was in a few moments wiped out ofexistence. The church was afterwards used as headquarters."

A US soldier signals from the tower of Caloocan church to Manila Bay, spelling out amessage to the monitor Monadnock over the intervening Filipino lines

Original caption: "View of Caloocan, showing burned district"

Conveying wounded American soldier, February 1899

Trainload of dead and wounded Americans at Caloocan

Original caption: "On the road to Caloocan --- the aftermath. Photograph by Lieut. C.F.

Original caption: "On the road to Caloocan --- the aftermath. Photograph by Lieut. C.F.O'Keefe, U.S.A."

Dead Filipino soldier at Caloocan

Filipinos killed by the Utah Light Battery at Caloocan. Fred D. Sweet, of the Utah LightBattery: "The scene reminded me of the shooting of jack-rabbits in Utah, only therabbits sometimes got away, but the insurgents did not."

Theodore Conley, 20th Kansas Regiment: "Talk about dead Indians! Why, they are lyingeverywhere. The trenches are full of them...There is not a feature of the whole miserablebusiness that a patriotic American citizen, one who loves to read of the brave deeds ofthe American colonists in the splendid struggle for American independence, can lookupon with complacency, much less with pride. This war is reversing history. It places theAmerican people and the government of the United States in the position occupied byGreat Britain in 1776. It is an utterly causeless and defenseless war, and it should beabandoned by this government without delay. The longer it is continued, the greatercrime it becomes—a crime against human liberty as well as against Christianity andcivilization..."

Americans with captured Filipino smooth-bore cannon at Caloocan

The station at Caloocan, on the Manila to Dagupan railroad, captured by the Americans

The station at Caloocan, on the Manila to Dagupan railroad, captured by the Americanson Feb. 10, 1899.

Train captured from the Filipinos at Caloocan. The Americans secured 5 engines, 50passenger coaches, and 100 freight cars. Photo was actually taken shortly before theBattle of Quingua, Bulacan Province, on April 23, 1899

The Atlanta Constitution of Georgia reports on the capture of Caloocan, issue of Feb.11, 1899

Feb. 17, 1899: Founding of Philippine Red Cross

Emilio Aguinaldo's first wife was Hilaria del Rosario (LEFT, 1898 photo) of Imus, Cavite Province, whom hemarried on Jan. 1, 1896. She was born in 1877. Theyhad five children: Miguel, Carmen, Emilio Jr., Maria andCristina.

Hilaria organized the Hijas de la Revolucion (Daughtersof the Revolution), which later became the AsociacionNacional de la Cruz Roja (National Association of theRed Cross), considered a kind of precursor of thepresent Philippine National Red Cross.

On Feb. 17, 1899, the Malolos Republic approved theConstitution of the National Association of the RedCross. The Republic appointed Hilaria delRosario Aguinaldo as President of the Association. In itsfirst five months it had thirteen chapters. She andothers helped to organize and distribute the neededfood and medicines to wounded Filipino soldiers.

On Oct. 5, 1899, Mrs. Aguinaldo spoke to the soldiersassembled in Tarlac:

"...Were it not ashocking thing

for us to wear trousers and to carry rifles ... we[the women] members of the Philippine RedCross -- would aid you in the struggle and die byyour side, for what would our lives amount to ifwe should still have to live in slavery? Though Iam a weak woman, I can assure you that myprayer is for all the Filipino people..."

She accompanied her husband in his long andarduous trek to northern Luzon, from Nov. 13,1899 in Bayambang, Pangasinan, until Dec. 25,1899 in Talubin, Bontoc, Mountain Province; onthat Christmas day, Emilio Aguinaldo, wishing tospare the 5 women in his entourage from furtherhardships (Hilaria, Aguinaldo's sister,Col. Manuel Sityar's wife and Col. Jose Leyba's 2sisters) ordered Colonel Sityar and anotherofficer to accompany the women and surrenderto the Americans in Talubin. Hilaria was reunitedwith her husband soon after his capture by theAmericans on March 23, 1901.

Hilaria and son Miguel. Photos taken in 1901.

Hilaria del Rosario Aguinaldo died of tuberculosis in Kawit, Cavite on March 6, 1921.

A view of the native hut used as a hospital during the Philippine-American War by theInternational Red Cross Society

Francis A. Blake, of California, in charge of the Red Cross, wrote after a battle:

"I never saw such execution in my life, and hope never to see such sights as met me onall sides as our little corps passed over the field, dressing wounded. Legs and armsnearly demolished; total decapitation; horrible wounds in chests and abdomens,showing the determination of our soldiers to kill every native in sight. The Filipinos didstand their ground heroically, contesting every inch, but proved themselves unable tostand the deadly fire of our well-trained and eager boys in blue. I counted seventy-ninedead natives in one small field, and learn that on the other side of the river their bodieswere stacked up for breastworks."

©2006

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