MASSACRE IN THE CLOUDS : AN AMERICAN ATROCITY AND THE ERASURE OF HISTORY

By  Kim A. Wagner

Public Affairs. 352 pages. $35. ISBN 978-1-55417-0149-6

Reviewed by Jim Burns

In March, 1906 American soldiers worked their way up Bud Dajo, a mountain on the island of Jolo, located in the southern part of the Philippines. Their object was to attack a large concentration of Moros, a native people who were looked on as “hostiles” by the authorities. But why were American troops in action in the Philippines? It’s perhaps necessary to provide at least a brief background to the events of 1906.

The United States went to war with Spain in 1898 largely over the question of Cuba, then ruled by the Spanish. The war didn’t last long and the result was that Spain left Cuba, and  Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines (all previously Spanish territories) were transferred to the Americans. The Filipinos had for some years been fighting the Spanish in a war of independence, and initially saw the Americans as liberators. They quickly realised that, in fact, they were now their new rulers. Fighting then took place between the Filipinos and the Americans, ending in 1902 with the defeat of the rebels. One area held out and that  was Jolo, where the Moros were the dominant people. They were Muslims, whereas the rest of the Philippines was mainly Catholic. And the Moros would have preferred to be independent of both the Catholic majority and the Americans.

That’s a very quick summary of the situation in 1906, but it does perhaps explain why the American army was taking action against the Moros who were generally seen as bandits, pirates, and other categories of troublemakers who refused to pay what was to them a form of poll tax. There had been fighting between the two sides prior to 1906, but matters had come to a head and a new governor, Major General Leonard Wood, was determined to inflict what Kim Wagner refers to as a “key tenet of colonial warfare”, a “moral” lesson. The Moros had to accept that the Americans always knew best and were there to civilise them.

The United States was not alone in asserting this message – known as “the white man’s burden” – and the examples Wagner mentions of “civilising missions” by British, German, Belgian, and Dutch forces are striking. When Kitchener and his Anglo-Egyptian army mowed down thousands of the Khalifa’s ill-armed supporters at Omdurman in 1898 he was, presumably, teaching them that “moral” lesson. Very few of Kitchener’s troops were killed or wounded. European armies had artillery, machine guns and high-powered rifles. Native forces were often armed with swords, spears, shields and sometimes a few old guns.

A large body of Moros had retreated to Bud Dajo, a mountain with an extinct volcano at its peak. There they had constructed a series of small forts, with a defensive perimeter of trenches and fences around the crater, and various barricades on the paths leading up the mountain. Dense jungle surrounded it, and it was, seemingly, quite an impregnable position, or so the Moros appeared to have thought. They had their wives and children with them and had prepared for a siege by building up stocks of food.

The Americans, infantry and dismounted cavalry, with local guides and a contingent of Philippine Constabulary to support them, eventually reached the top of the mountain, though they suffered some casualties on the way. They had managed to get a machine gun and three mountain guns into position and between them they accounted for many of the deaths among the Moros. Wagner refers to a Second-Lieutenant Mack who commanded a gun on the eastern side of Bud Dajo:  “Shrapnel was typically used against enemy personnel and was designed to cause maximum bodily injury.  Mack’s gun fired some 150 shrapnel shells on the Moros’ entrenchments”. A later report said, “many dead... were found horribly mutilated with shrapnel fragments”.  The crater had offered a form of shelter until the shells started to land among the people hiding there.

As for the machine gun, its use is illustrated by the following account from an observer who watched as a large group of Moro women and children appeared. The officers overseeing the machine gun “plainly saw these women and children arrange themselves in line, and that they were unarmed  and that their action meant surrender; but that after a few moments’ observation they turned the guns on them and mowed them down to the very last one. Some after being shot down once, struggled to their feet and were again shot down. They were afterwards found in line with dead babies in their arms and not a weapon of any kind in their possession”.

Wagner’s description of the assault on the Moro stronghold is quite detailed and I’ve simply selected one or two points to highlight the one-sided nature of the “battle”. As well as the machine gun and the mountain guns, there were several hundred soldiers and constabulary armed with modern rifles and revolvers able to maintain  a consistent fire on the Moros. It’s probable that around 1,000 Moros were killed. A few women and children were captured. No men survived. Any wounded found on the battlefield were finished off by the soldiers. That wasn’t unusual in colonial warfare. Kitchener’s men had done the same after Omdurman, and I recall reading that Zulu wounded at Rorke’s Drift were given similar treatment. Casualties among the soldiers at           Bud Dajo were, according to General Wood, 18 dead and 59 wounded. He didn’t include any dead or wounded Constabulary in his figures. It would seem that three Constabulary died during the fighting.

When news of the defeat of the Moros reached America it was, on the whole, received with acclaim. President Theodore Roosevelt (a personal friend of General Wood) sent a message of congratulations in which he referred to a “brilliant feat of arms”,  and newspapers generally praised what the army had done. The Washington Post did say that the “Battle of Mount Dajo was one of Extermination”. And there were some exceptions among the general public, mostly among members of the Anti-Imperialist League, and Mark Twain described the fight as a “slaughter”. But many Americans, if they were interested, most likely believed that their army had acted well against “terrorists” and “savages”. It was a small action in a distant country, and not much different from the Indian wars that were within living memory. The Seventh Cavalry had taken its revenge on the Sioux for “massacring” Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn in 1876 by carrying out a real massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 when the Indians were, according to the authorities, reluctant to give up their traditional way of life. Wagner notes that some of the older officers at Bud Dajo had served in campaigns against various Indian tribes. Campaigns that can be seen as genocidal in intent : “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice”, one officer was reported to have said. Many of his soldiers quite happily did just that.

There were photographs taken on Bud Dajo, some during the fighting, others in its aftermath. One in particular stands out and is reproduced in the book. It shows a trench full of dead Moros, including women, with American soldiers standing around and obviously aware that what they had done was being recorded for posterity. When it began to circulate, along with other photos, sometimes on postcards, there were attempts to suppress it.  General Wood even visited the photographer who’d taken the original photo and “accidentally” dropped the glass negative and shattered it. He assumed that it would limit further circulation, but there were already prints made from the original, and the photographer managed to piece the smashed negative together in usable form.

Wagner links what happened on Jolo not only to the genocide practised against Indians in the United States, but also to “lessons derived from European colonial warfare in Africa and Asia, which provided countless precedents of punitive campaigns in which villages had been burned, crops and livestock destroyed, and men, women, and children killed indiscriminately”.  It shouldn’t be thought that Bud Dajo was an isolated example of the  methods used against the Moros, though it was the one with the largest number of dead. In 1904 the Americans attacked the fort of a  Moro chief called Usap. They killed everyone inside (226 Moros including women and children) at the cost of seven wounded soldiers. Some years later, in 1913, General John J. Pershing attacked Moro warriors on a mountain called  Bud Bagsak : “Although there were no women and children among the Moros at Bud Bagsak, the disparity in casualties was no less striking than it had been at Bud Dajo. Pershing’s forces suffered fourteen dead and twenty-five wounded, whereas it was estimated that some four hundred Moros were killed”. The Americans had all the usual modern armaments, including hand grenades.

Massacre in the Clouds is an impressive book. Wagner’s research took him not only to libraries and other establishments, but also to the Philippines and particularly to Jolo despite warnings that it was not safe. The Moros were still fighting a war against the rest of the Philippines in an effort to secure independence. I doubt that many people in the West know too much about it, or about its background in the Spanish occupation of the Philippines, the American imperialist takeover, and the fighting at Bud Dajo and elsewhere. Kim Wagner has provided a real service by bringing this history to our attention.