"As the primary object of a patrol is usually to gain information, its members will be
instructed to make independent observation as the country is traversed,
conversing freely with the inhabitants of the barrios concerning
local affairs. Where a patrol is not in active pursuit of ladrones
it is better not to traverse the country rapidly . . ."
--Constabulary Manual
AS the months succeeded each other, and the calendar reached into the year 1906, the Philippine Constabulary began to acquire a firmer grip on the northern islands of the Philippines. Only an occasional disturbance marred the serenity of the north. In April the old Santa Iglesia came to life under the leadership of Manuel Garcia. The Constabulary station at Malolos was battered by a wave of fanatics, and twenty-two rifles were lost, with 1,800 rounds of ammunition. All of the police force but three were killed or wounded.
Lieutenant Jose de los Reyes went in pursuit of Garcia, nineteen men supported by twenty men under Lieutenant Walker. They came to grips with Garcia at dawn in a misty rice field on the ninth of July, and in the engagement that ensued Garcia and most of his men were killed.
In Tayabas a religious-military organization called the Ejercito Libertador National flared briefly with a burst of murder and robbery. Pantaleon Villafuerte set himself up as the defender of the expiring Filipino liberty. A young Filipino lawyer named Manuel Quezon, who was Governor of Tayabas, took the field with a Constabulary force commanded by Major Borseth. On July 11, Villafuerte was killed and nineteen of his officers surrendered. The Ejercito Libertador National movement fizzed and went out. This secret society had as its aim a complete independence for the Philippines, and a pretentious military organization had been built which expected arms shipments from Japan. Two Lieutenant Generals were captured by Borseth and Quezon, a "Vi-Rey" and a Commandante General. Included in the batch of prisoners was one Lieutenant . . . possibly the only Lieutenant in the organization.
On May 20, 1906, the gallant old fighting Colonel, Wallace Taylor, was in the field with two officers and fifty-five men in the Province of Jautna, on Samar. Days of strenuous march had brought him into contact with Otoy, and the fortress of the pulajans was located and attacked after days of search in the deep forest. As the Constabulary moved in beneath the walls, Taylor was struck in the neck and jaw by a .45-caliber bullet that carried away a portion of the jawbone. Although greatly weakened by the shock and the loss of blood, the Colonel remained actively in the fight until the pulajan fortress was taken and destroyed.
It was five days before Taylor could receive proper medical attention, and he was kept alive by feeding him eggs found in the nests of wild chickens. He was awarded the Medal of Valor by a General Order dated September 21, 1906.
On Leyte Island the United States regulars were engaged in the final months of active operation against the small detachments of hill guerrillas. Basilio Sampson led a pulajan force against Lieutenant James of the 8th U.S. Infantry on August 9, and in the indecisive engagement that followed Lieutenants Treadwell and James were killed. The pulajans closed the year with an attack on Captain Ham, also of the 8th Infantry, and a detachment of twenty-five Constabulary under Lieutenant Yates. A bloody fight at La Paz resulted in the death of Sampson and forty of his men. Five American soldiers were killed and Lieutenant Yates was wounded.
Leaderless, the pulajans withdrew to a stronghold deep in the mountains where they were attacked by Captain Chrisman of the 16th Infantry and Lieutenant Hemmett with a Constabulary force. Hemmet was wounded in the assault which carried the pulajan fortress. This action at Dagami quieted the island of Leyte.
Across the channel on Samar, the back of the pulajan resistance was breaking. The pulajans no longer stood to fight. The warfare developed into a tedious man hunt conducted by small detachments of Constabulary. The year 1906 saw the extermination of the last of the hill chiefs. De La Cruz was killed in a Constabulary operation in November of that year. Major Murphy of the Constabulary killed "Papa" Pablo during the same month. Picardel was killed by Lieutenant Edmondson in January, 1907.
No longer did the red-shirted pulajans descend in force from the mountains. The last raid to the lowlands occurred in November, 1906. The opening of the year 1907 saw Otoy, Faustino, and Felipe Salvador at large. They alone, of all the great mountain chiefs, had survived the campaigns of that terrible year on Samar Island. Otoy, the genius who had inspired the massacre at Mugtaon, was killed by Lieutenant Puno of the Constabulary, who had been one of the survivors of the Mugtaon affair. Faustino was killed on June 11 by a detachment of regulars of the 8th Infantry under the command of Lieutenant Jones. Felipe Salvador remained at large, but inactive, until 1911.
The official reports of the Chief of Constabulary show the year 1907 to have been the turning point in the northern and middle island campaigns. Pulajanism was crushed. During that year, too, the complaints against the Constabulary ceased, and discipline and equipment was greatly improved. There were but twenty desertions during the year in a force of 4,748 men and 305 officers. The Insular Police were maintaining 167 stations, and were no longer in collaboration with Scouts and regular army.
One hundred and five thousand pesos had been appropriated for the purchase of Krag rifles, equipped with bayonet, and of six-shot capacity. Of these, 2,120 had been issued to the Constabulary.
The older officers were beginning to give way now. General Allen returned to his regiment, to be relieved as Chief by H. H. Bandholtz. Scott and Baker were relieved, to be replaced with W. C. Rivers and M. L. Hershey.
The scene of action changed as peace came to the north. All of the resources of the Constabulary were turned to the south, to Mindanao and Sulu, where the Moro wars were but beginning.
The initial subjugation of the Moros had been undertaken by United States regulars, who had waged desultory and not too effective warfare against the Mohammedans since 1899. Here again the large-scale operations of the army were not effective, as the army posts controlled only the immediate area surrounding the station. The regulars had been uniformly successful against the Moros, who had chopped viciously at the army flanks and dissolved into the jungle. The result was a great, unpacified jungle, filled with small roving bands of malcontent Moros, and completely out of the reach of the army brigades.
True, Captain McCoy had exterminated the Datu Ali in a bitter and bloody affair in Mindanao, and Pershing was well on his way to his ultimate post as commander of the army in France, through a series of operations in interior Lanao. But in the main, Mindanao and Sulu had yet to feel the hand of America.
As the pulajan campaigns in Samar had faltered to a close, the Constabulary detachments in Mindanao and Sulu had been gradually strengthened, and a new fighting force began to make itself felt in the Moro country. New faces appeared, reckless youngsters who began to lead small combat patrols deep into the heart of Mindanao. Mass troop movements gave away then to that more primitive hand-to-hand combat which was the only solution to the problem of the Moros.
As the Constabulary patrols began to penetrate deeper into unexplored country, the temper of the Moros became more surly. A brand of fighting developed that for sheer ferocity surpassed the best efforts of the bloody days in Samar. The war was carried to the Moros, and right nobly they met the challenge of the Constabulary patrols.
In that desperate struggle for their home soil the Mohammedans won the respect of every officer of Constabulary who faced them. They were a valiant, minor group of disorganized tribesmen who found themselves in the path of the steam roller of conquest. They offered the most stern quality of resistance that America has encountered in our military history. They were defeated by schoolboys who combined tact and bayonets to accomplish what Spain had failed to accomplish.
It was not until the year 1906 that the Philippine Constabulary was a potent civilizing force in the Moro country. They arrived in time to be the spearhead of a terrible decade of jungle war. By February, 1906, the greatest uprising against American authority yet experienced was coming to a head in Sulu. The Moros had formed a coalition after ten months of dissatisfaction with the cedula and tax laws, and had entrenched on the summit of Bud Dajo. One thousand Mohammedans had fortified the extinct crater on the mountain top, defying all law and order. By March 2, it was apparent that only force could dislodge the Moros, and General Wood gave orders for the summit to be taken by assault. A force of 738 Scouts and regulars, and 51 men of the Sulu and Zamboanga Constabulary moved to the attack. Captain John R. White led the Constabulary, and in a desperate charge on the cottas was severely wounded. For this engagement he was awarded the Medal of Valor.
To many observers, the battle of Bud Dajo remains a blot on the American military occupation of Sulu. The engagement was strictly an Army attack, supported by a small detachment of Constabulary. In this largest battle of the Moro wars, 994 of the defending Moros were slain; but six Moros left the mountain at the close of the battle. The Constabulary detachment suffered the highest percentage of casualties of any troops engaged, 40 per cent of the men and officers being killed or wounded. With Captain White, Sergeant Arcadio Alga was awarded the Medal of Valor.
Although great criticism was directed against the American military authorities for this slaughter of natives, the facts seem to indicate that General Wood had no alternative. When the Joloano Moro sought a mountain top, he did so with the expectation of a fight to the finish. With their women and children about them, the Moros calmly went about the business of dying, and there was no thought in their minds of compromise or surrender. It was a messy business.
But Bud Dajo, with its slaughter, was only the beginning of the Moro resistance. Following the battle in the crater, the scene of activity shifted deeper into the bush,--detached warfare, a platoon of Constabulary against a Moro cotta.
The Sulu Moro usually constructed this cotta on level ground, in the center of an open field of cogon grass. This means of defensive warfare was constructed with great military skill. The walls were of rock or packed earth, raised to a height of ten feet, and penetrated at intervals with bamboo tubes through which the Mohammedans directed rifle fire. Under the walls the Moros constructed their fire pits, protected from above by the walls. Just outside the fort and circling it, the Moros were accustomed to erect loosely woven bamboo stockades intended to delay storming troopers long enough for the defenders to pour in a withering close-range rifle fire.
The cotta itself was usually encircled with a deep moat, sometimes filled with water, and the only means of entrance would be long bamboo poles across the moat. As their last means of defense, the Moros had their barongs and krises for close-order work if the Constabulary succeeded in crossing the moat to the walls.
Over the face of the Moro country the cottas began to spring up by the hundred. The story of the Moro wars is one of constant assault, destruction, and rebuilding of the cottas.
Against the cottas, the Constabulary patrols went into immediate action. Among the earlier combat officers Lieutenant Leonard Furlong had no peer. He fought all over the Moro country, with stations at Davao, Cotabato, Lanao, Siasi, Cagayan, Dansalan, and elsewhere. His record shows six years of combat without a furlough, and he was admitted to have been one of the greatest combat officers to see service in the Philippines.
As early as 1904, this slight officer of Constabulary had acquired a reputation as a relentless fighter. It was said of him that he would go with half a dozen of his Moro Constabulary where a company of infantry would hesitate to penetrate. In July, 1904, Furlong had been a Second Lieutenant of the Cotabato Constabulary on station at Kudarangan. There were also three companies of infantry and two of Scouts at Kudarangan, and every time they ventured from the camp the Moros would kill one or two and make away, unhurt, with rifles. General Wood had requested that a scouting party be sent out to determine the strength of the Moros. The country around Kudarangan was all swamp, with tigbao grass ten to twenty feet in height, networked by narrow trails. It was a terrain where a dozen men who knew the trails could lie in wait and massacre a hundred. Only a few weeks previous to Wood's request for a scouting party, Company F of the17th Infantry had been slashed by the Moros, losing two officers and seventeen men out of a company of thirty-six, without ever seeing the attacking force.
Leonard Furlong took over the scouting detail for General Wood. With fourteen Constabulary (all new recruits less than two months in the service), he penetrated seven miles into the heart of the territory of Datu Ali's best general, one Bapa ni Manakup; killed the Moros who opposed him; captured several rifles; lost two men killed and brought their bodies back; and fought to the very edge of the encampment at Kudarangan. His service record is filled with dozens of such back-to-the-wall victories.
Furlong was loved and feared by his Moros. He was a remarkable revolver shot, and was the best map maker in the Constabulary; he had a camera eye for details of terrain. In appearance he was slight and dark, and of seeming frailty, but his endurance on the trail was not surpassed by any officer of the corps. His recklessness in action gave him the reputation of bearing a charmed life. Today, he is known to the Moros as the possessor of a charm against bullets in battle. His custom was to enter a cotta far in advance of his men, there to go berserk at close quarters. He was one of the few men of all the magnificent ones who saw service in the Philippines who was credited with supernatural powers by the Moros, and feared as an unearthly being.
With his fierce Moro soldiers at his back, Furlong would approach the walls of a cotta filled with hostile Moros. Sailing his campaign hat over the walls he went into action, with the understanding that the retriever of the hat became its owner. His soldiers vied with him in scrambling over the walls to recover the headpiece, but it is of record that Furlong never lost his hat.
He is the only man of the Philippine Constabulary to be recommended for the Medal of Valor on four different occasions. In July, 1906, he was sent into the field with orders to apprehend or kill the murderers of Private McDonald of the 19th Infantry. Furlong received word that the killers (a force of Moros commanded by the Sultan Dimbara) were at the barrio of Bugasan in Cotabato, Mindanao. With five Constabulary, two Scout soldiers and four Moros, Furlong arrived at Bugasan at daylight on the morning of July 9. He had but six rifles in his party. He called to the inhabitants of the house to surrender, and found, not a few Moros, but a gang of 100 armed bandits who surrounded his small force. In one of the most dramatic hand-to-hand combats of the period, Furlong personally killed six of the Moros, and extricated his men without injury to his force. He personally broke a passage through a wall of krismen as point of that compact group of soldiers who battled hand to hand with the odds ten to one against them.
One of the most striking examples of Furlong's policing activities was his extermination of Kali Pandopatan, the Sultan of Buldung. The Kali had been playing double with the American government, and Furlong, with a dozen Constabulary, had gone to the cotta of the Kali for a conference. Once inside the cotta, he was set upon by more than 400 Moros, armed with barongs. Furlong backed his party into an angle of the walls and was in possession of the field after a terrible hour of slaughter.
From April 28 until July 5, 1907, Furlong was on the extended campaign that culminated in his winning the Medal of Valor. On April 28, records show him in the Taraca Valley of Lanao in an advance on a cotta. As the men crossed the open country before the cotta walls, First Lieutenant James L. Wood received a bullet through the left thigh which knocked him to earth directly in the path of advancing barong men. Corporal Malaco, at his side, stood over the fallen officer and beat off the attackers until the hostile fire was silenced by an advance that deployed to the right and left of the trail. Furlong was leading with his customary dash.
A few weeks later, while in the same vicinity, Furlong's men, divided into two columns, were fired upon from a cotta on the left flank. Furlong detached one column and led the advance through a thicket of bamboo. The cotta was found to be defended by a wall fifteen feet in height, protected on three sides by a deep moat and on the fourth by the banks of the Rumayas River. The wall itself was shielded by a chevaux-de-frise of sharpened bamboo stakes.
Furlong's summons to surrender was greeted by taunts from the Moros and a renewal of the rifle fire. The gateway of the fort was chosen as the point of attack, and Furlong, with Corporal Malaco and four privates, attempted to break it in with a log. They were fired directly upon by the defenders, with the result of the death of one soldier and the wounding of two others. The attacking force made the top of the walls, but were unable to gain the inside of the cotta. A retirement was made under heavy fire and the fort was examined for a more favorable point of attack. A private crawled through the underbrush and located a small opening in the chevaux-de-frise on the river side.
A general assault was made, with Furlong first through the opening and into the fort. Seventeen Moros were killed, and Furlong suffered three additional casualties in his force.
By a General Order of September 2, 1907, Malaco and Furlong were awarded the Medal of Valor.
During 1906 and 1907 the names of other great fighting men began to fill the combat reports of the Moro wars. Furlong's first rank as fighting genius of the corps began to be disputed by Wood, Tarbell, Merrill, Fultin, Whitney, Tiffany, Bell, and Preuss. Under the leadership of these officers the patrols spread across Mindanao and Sulu.
The resistance of the flaming cottas in 1906 and 1907 set up a specialized variety of warfare. The tactics usable against pulajan in Samar did not apply in Mindanao and Sulu. The Constabulary were obliged to develop a special attack and defense against the juramentado Moro. With few exceptions, the Moros made no massed attacks . . . their strategy was stealthy night attacks of maniacal krismen, or silent penetration of the camps for weapons. Only in times of great emotional pressure did the Moros seek their mountain tops and offer up a quality of organized and sustained resistance. Their tactics were hit and run, with advantagetaken of every natural condition of the terrain. They flowed through the jungle in small bands of ten to a hundred men; often they killed and pillaged a column with the despairing soldiers allowed no glimpse of their attackers.
Against the Moros the Constabulary used no advance guards, or points, to warn of ambush. Had they sent scouts ahead of the main column they would have been slashed to death and their rifles stolen long before the main body would be aware of the attack. In Moroland the men traveled in a compact group, and they walked stolidly into ambush with no warning and no preparation for the repelling of the attackers.
The Constabulary inheritance in Mindanao and Sulu was 45,000 square miles of jungle, peopled by Mohammedan tribesmen of great military ingenuity. The story of the conquest of the southern islands is one of three decades of guerrilla warfare.
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Original publication © 1938 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
Filipiniana Reprint Series © 1985 Cacho Hermanos, Inc.
This publication (HTML format & original artwork) © 2001 Bakbakan International.
Transcription courtesy of Ashley Bass.