#150: A Tale of Two Soldiers, Part II

Today we continue this tale of two sldiers and learn more about Marine Corps officer Littleton "Tony" Waller who rose through the ranks fighting in Africa, Cuba, and China before leading troops in The Philippines. It was Waller who tried to countermand his boss's order to kill everyone ten and older his troops came across, but a massacre of a US Army company made stopping violence against civilians much more difficult. 

The introduction and transition music heard on the podcast is composed and recorded by the eldest Ghosts of Arlington, Jr. While the rest of his catalogue is quite different from what he's performed for me, you can find his music on bandcamp.com under the names Caladrius and Bloodfeather.

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Transcript

Welcome back to Ghosts of Arlington and thank you for joining me for Episode 150: A Tale of Two Soldiers, Part II.

Last week, we met Jacob Hurd Smith, an army officer who was wounded during the US civil war and served as a recruiter while recovering. During this time, he became pretty astute at scamming volunteers out of their enlistment bonuses, an act that eventually cost him an assignment with the Judge Advocate General corps, but did not otherwise adversely affect his military career. Legal problems continued to plague him throughout the years but he continued to receive promotions despite all the lawsuits brought against him.

When the Spanish American war ended in 1898 and the US took possession of the Philippines, now-Colonel Smith was sent to the new possession commanding infantry soldiers. The US were initially seen by the locals as liberators who had freed them from Spain, but soon realized that instead of giving them their independence, the Americans seemed like they were there to stay.

Because of this, the guerillas who had been fighting the Spaniards took up arms against their new overlords which led Smith to giving the infamous order to <<QUOTE>> "I want no prisoners. I wish 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."

When pressed at what age Smith thought one was capable of bearing arms, he said ten.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

We're not finished with Smith, but now that he has been mentioned, it's time to properly introduce Littleton Waller - better known as Tony.

Littleton Waller Tazewell "Tony" Waller (yes, the first of his two middle names was also his family name) was born on his doctor father's tobacco plantation on the Virginia peninsula on September 26, 1856. Waller was bright, but indifferent to education. He was an outdoorsman, fond of hunting, fishing and riding, and uncomfortable in the classroom. 

Both sides of his family - the Wallers and the Tazewells - had an extensive history of public service from the time they arrived in Virginia colony in 1635 and down through the American Revolution and US Civil War but it had always been exclusively civilian. Tony's decision to become an officer may have surprised his family but they were supportive of his ambitions. In his teens, he was a corporal in the Norfolk Light Artillery Blues, a local militia unit following the Civil War. When he came of age he sought a commission in the cavalry but was told he was too short - he stood five feet four inches (about 162 centimeters). He was, however, accepted into the Marine Corps. He was commissioned a second lieutenant of Marines on June 24, 1880 at the age of 23 and served initial tours of successive shore duty at the Marine Barracks in Norfolk, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Waller first went to sea as the Executive Officer of the Marine Detachment aboard the sloop-of-war USS Lancaster, the flagship of the European Squadron and a veteran of the Civil War, in 1881. The Commanding Officer of the Detachment, also a veteran of the Civil War, was the legendary Captain Henry Clay Cochrane. The following year, Waller was present at the British Naval bombardment of Alexandria, Egypt during a serious local uprising in the summer of 1882 and participated in the landing of a mixed bluejacket and Marine force during the operation. The Naval landing force of sixty-nine sailors and sixty-three Marines was formed, with Lieutenant Commander Charles Goodrich in command and Captain Cochrane as executive officer. The force comprised two companies, the sailors under Navy Lieutenant Frank L. Denny and the Marines under Waller.

The timely arrival of the ships of the European Squadron and their landing force gave protection to the American consulate and to American citizens and interests caught up in the fighting, and also afforded a refuge for the citizens of other nations, who had been displaced from their homes or businesses. Advancing cautiously through the burning and rubble strewn streets, the Americans reached the Grand Square of Mehmet Ali, at the heart of the city. The American Consulate was there, and it became the headquarters of the force. Although the French troops had abandoned the city and cautiously returned to their ships, the Marines secured the Grand Square and began to patrol the streets of the European Quarter, as the international business and consular area was named. Cochrane, Waller and their Marines were assigned to Lord Charles Beresford's British force for the protection of the European Quarter. The anticipated rebel counterattack never came, and a ten-day standoff ended with the arrival of the four thousand-man British relief force. 

According to the Times of London:

Lord Charles Beresford states that without the assistance of the American Marines he would have been unable to discharge the numerous duties of suppressing fires, preventing looting, burying the dead, and clearing the streets.

As there was no wireless radio in those days, and the telegraphic cable office in Alexandria was not functioning, the Squadron Commander had approval to land the naval force, but once ashore Goodrich had been on his own. It was he who made the decision to stay with the British rather than leave with the French. Waller, as one of only four officers in the landing force, would have been present when the decisions were made. He learned, as a 24-year-old lieutenant, the habits of independence in command that he would exercise throughout his career.

By the time of the Spanish-American War, now-Captain Waller was present for the culminating Battle of Santiago on July 3, 1898. In the first major battle of the war - in Manila Bay in the Philippines, Spain had lost a naval squadron. Now Admiral Pascual Cervera was desperately trying to save Spain's Caribbean Squadron - which he had the honor to command - from the same fate.

It was anchored in Santiago Bay, Cuba, protected by Spanish artillery from the American fleet that prowled the waters just outside the harbor. Now that the Americans had taken the San Juan Heights, Santiago and its guns could no longer guarantee Cervara safe harbor so he attempted a breakout. Rear Admiral William Sampson, commanding the American fleet, had taken his flagship with a torpedo boat as an escort... for a meeting with the V Corps commander, Major General William Shafter. That opened a small gap in the blockage line. Between 9:30 and 10:00, 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 was the pride of the US Navy, the newly build battleships Iowa and Oregon, and the oldest of their class, America's first battleships, 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. US Marines under the command of Captain Waller manned her guns... 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 and in four hours, the battle was over - Spain's Caribbean fleet was destroyed. It was a decisive victory. No US ships had been lost and only one American had been killed in action.

In the chaos, Spanish sailors jumped off their burning decks into shark infested waters while Cuban rebels on the shores took potshots at them. Indiana's skipper, Captain Henry Taylor, dispatched Waller and a party of Marines, along with the ship's surgeon to rescue as many prisoners as they could. Heroically working all day and into the night, by Waller's estimate they rescued 243 men from the water, pulling them aboard the Indiana. He later recalled, "We issued clothes to the naked men, and the officers gave up their beds to the Spanish officers." Over the years he would receive many tokens and letters in appreciation for the mercy shown and the Navy gave him a medal.

After the war, Waller spent what he considered a dull year as a recruiter in Norfolk, Virginia when, to his great relief, he was promoted to major and given command of a battalion of marines headed to the Philippines - where he arrived in November 1899 (one month before Smith).

The duty was barely more exciting at Cavite naval station in manila Bay, where his battalion spent most of the 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 overall command of US troops on the islands, had repeatedly asserted that the rebellion was nearly finished after suffering several early defeats.

History has painted Otis as a fool who rarely left his palatial quarters in Manila to ascertain the war's progress first hand. And his stubborn belligerence bore much of the responsibility for starting the war. He had rejected a peace proposal from Emilio Aguinaldo - the president of the First Filipino Republic, which existed in from 1899-1901 (the brief time after the defeat of the Spanish in Cuba and before the arrival of the Americans) in the early days of the conflict. In rejecting Aguinaldo's peace proposal, Otis insisted <QUOTE> "fighting, having begun, must go on to the grim end."

Otis seems to have disliked one of his division commanders, Major General Henry Lawton, who had commanded the 2nd Infantry Division in Cuba and led the fight at El Caney. Lawton's early success in the field, which drew praise from President William McKinley, and his popularity among Americans and Filipinos incited his superior's jealousy.

Unlike Lawton, Otis thought little about how to wage war in that would accomplish McKinley's stated preference for the <<QUOTE>> "benevolent assimilation" of Filipinos. Instead, he tolerated atrocities committed by American soldiers not just against insurgents, but against civilians as well.  

Savagery occurs in all wars, from antiquity to the present; all balligerants 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. The feeling was derived in part from the feeling that they were fighting quote/unquote "savages," not soldiers, and in part from American soldiers' alienation in strange physical and moral circumstances from all they recognized as civilization.

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 Spains had encouraged would begin to subside in revolution over the means used to build it.

News of incidents of shocking brutality reached officials in Washington, and the government demanded that Otis punish the perpetrators and take measures to ensure 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 Manila, became a guerilla war, as the insurgents, like guerilla 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 leader Geronimo, was killed in action in December 1899 in a firefight with insurgents commanded by a Filipino general also named Geronimo.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Not long after arriving in the Philippines, Major Waller's battalion was ordered to Guam - another new US acquisition - but before they could set sail, their orders were changed. They would now join an international expeditionary force organized by eight world powers - Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States - to quote "liberate" Peking form 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 Taki, 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 the Russians in the lead and US Marines in the rear, reached the outskirts of Tientsin on the morning of June 21st. 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 withdraw in good order, repulsing repeated flanking attacks until they reached a defensible position. 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 the 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 14th. The city's foreign quarter was liberated that afternoon, and the CHinese imperial court fled the forbidden city. By the afternoon of the 16th the battle for Peking was over, and so was the Boxer rebellion.

The allies imposed a harsh peach, and the brutal reprisals that followed nurtured the resentment of the Chinese nationalists for decades. Captured Boxers were usually executed without trial; some were beheaded and their heads impaled on the gates of foreign embassies. Palaces were plundered and civilians killed indiscriminately. The worst of the atrocities were the work of the Russians and Germans, but the Americans appear to have participated in some of it and they certainly took part in the looting.

Waller witnessed the mayhem, but there is no evidence the Marines contributed significantly 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 commander expected of them.

Waller left China in October 1900 with a brevet promotion to lieutenant colonel , the fulsome praise of his commanding officer and all the allied commanders, his reputation ascendent, the commandant's office in prospect, and a lifelong friendship with future Marine Corps legend, two-time Medal of Honor recipient, Smedley Butler, the massively tattooed, cockfight loving, heavily decorated "Fighting Quaker," who, though not a Ghost of Arlingotn himself, featured prominently back in Episode 10 when he spoke in support of the veterans who march on Washington, DC after the government failed to pay promised bonuses. When Waller returned to the Philippines in 1901 he would add new successes to his reputation, and almost destroy it.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

And now it's time to return to where Smith and Waller's paths crossed.

The Island of Samar lies in the middle of the Philippine 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, the before-mentioned Vicente Lukban. American forces stationed on Samar were confined to coastal cities.

By the time General Chaffee, who had commanded the China Relief Expedition, assumed command of VIII Corps in the Philippines, most Americans - including recently reelected President McKinley and his vice president Theodore Roosevelt - believed the war was winding down.Emiloi Aguinaldo had been captured in March 1901 and had declared his acceptance of US authority. On July 4th, General Arthur MacArthur (Douglas MacArthur's father) who had replaced the unlamented Otis in May 1900, transferred governing authority in the Philippines to a civilian delegation headed by, as I mentioned before, William Howard Taft and gave command of VIII Corps to Chaffee. Chaffee, however, didn't share the view that the insurrection was all but finished. He also didn't care for Taft, whose advocacy of lenient tactics that wouldn't alienate the Filipinos, Chaffee thought naive and feckless.

He sat 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 our boy - Colonel Jacob Herd Smith. They would fight a counterinsurgency on Luzon using extreme 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 technique called the "water cure," which is similar to waterboarding.

Insurgents controlled the interiors of Samar and Leyte Island, mostly because of the exposure 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.

To gear up for that campaign, US 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 US 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 28-year-old West Point graduate, Captain Thomas Connell. According to letters some of the soldiers sent home, they were warmly welcomed by the local population.

That warm 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 assault of a young girl by two drunk soldiers. Relations became steadily more hostile, and Balingiga's outwardly friendly mayor and police chief were soon conspiring with the guerrillas.

Only four sentries were on duty in the early morning of September  28. The rest of the troopers were unarmed, eating breakfast in the mess tents. The company's officers were still in their quarters in a convent: the commander, his executive officer, and the company surgeon. Women and children were nowhere to be seen, neither 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... You can probably guess where this is going.

At 6:20 am, one of the sentires was crossing the town plaza on his way to his post when he ran into the police chief, who suddenly snatched away the soldier's rifle and smashed him over the head with it. As the American soldier collapsed, the police chief shouted a signal. The town's church bells began to toll and guerrillas armed with bolos - a long machete-like knives popular with the insurgents - which had been smuggled in inside the otherwise empty coffins, poured out of the sanctuary and made for the mess tents, except for the contingent that broke off 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, stacked outside the mess tents. 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 combat, which saw most soldiers armed only with their fists, cooking pans, or chair legs wielded like clubs, the Americans managed to drive away their attackers - who escaped with most of the company's rifles and ammunition. By then, forty-four soldiers were dead or dying and twenty-two others were seriously wounded, with another four men missing. The assailants had lost twenty-eight killed. The bodies of all three officers were dead. Two had been killed in their rooms. The commander - Captain Thomas Connell - has escaped the convent but 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 still struen about the plaza. All had been mutilated. Captain Connell had been beheaded. The arriving soldiers interrupted a funeral in progress for the dead guerillas. Bookmiller had his soldiers round up twenty local men who were ordered to haul the Filipino bodies out of the still-opened graves and replace them with the American dead. After presiding over a brief graveside service for the Americans, Bookmiller had the Filipino bodies piled in a head and burned. He then ordered the town razed and handed over the Filipino grave diggers to the members of his party from Company C who shot them dead. Later that day, Bookmiller wired a succinct report to Manila: <<QUOTE>> "Buried dead, burned city, returned Basey."  

That was not sufficient retaliation for General Chaffee, though. The 9th Infantry had served under him in China, and he meant to avenge it. He blamed the ambush on the <<QUOTE>> "false humanitarianism" and "soft mollycoddling of treacherous natives" practiced by his predecessor, Arthur MacArthur, and his 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 Little Bighorn. Nor did it placate the new president, Theodore Roosevelt,  sworn into office two weeks earlier after McKinley succumbed to two gunshot wounds received at the hand of an anarchist assassin. 

Roosevelt was close to Taft and might have shared at least some of Taft's concerns 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 <<QUOTE>> "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 Jocob Smith. Chaffee recalled Smith from Luzon, handed him his star as a newly promoted brigadier, and ordered him to Samar to <<QUOTE>> "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 battle despite the owner's slight stature. Others claim it was bestowed to mock Smith's habitual bombast. Whatever its origin, Smith seemed to embrace it. He 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 sent with him. The Navy's commandeering officer, Rear Admiral Fred Rogers... no, not THAT Fred Rogers [play a clip from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood intro?] - offered Colonel Waller's Marine battalion. That was a stroke of luck for Waller. He had spent most of his time since returning from China in a peaceful and boring backwater of the war (I know that might sound nice to a rational human being, but remember Waller was a Marine so this was literal torture)! 

While assigned to the tranquil Subic Bay Naval base, where it seems that with nothing better to do, he had gotten drunk one too many times. An admiral had pronounced him unfit for duty and confined 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 the mission. 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." 

We heard his conversation back in episode 148, but I think it bears repeating here. After receiving this order, Waller sought clarification. "I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir." Waller asked. 

"Ten years," Smith replied.

"Persons 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 guerillas 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 were fired up and killed. Local officials in the south were given one week to turn over anyone who had participated in the Balangiga massacre and all captured arms or their towns would be destroyed. No prisoners taken in firefights with guerillas. 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 one of Smith's subordinate officers ignored that order. 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 order to kill and burn.

Waller left two companies of Marines at Balangiga under the command of Captain David Porter, but before he returned to Basey with the hysterical Smith he took the captain 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, children, and the elderly still allowed a wide scope for making war, however. Waller instructed his Marines to <<QUOTE>> "place no confidence in the natives and punish treachery with death."