Jungle Patrol - Introduction

THE men who pacified the Philippines were a strange breed. They were world-weary gentlemen and their job was the taming of jungle. They were a fighting breed, of an age when combat was hand-to-hand, rather than the impersonal hatred at ten miles that is the rule of warfare today. Yes, they were strange men--they were battlers who negated the cautious principles of warfare that actuate the modern scientific soldier. Apparently absent from their make-ups were the fundamental emotions of fatigue and doubt and terror.

To call them "Men without Fear" would be a trite and a possibly inaccurate over-enthusiasm. And yet the fiery combat records of the Philippine Constabulary seem to substantiate that heroic label. The flame-flecked years of the early 1900's in the Philippine Archipelago are without parallel in the military history of our nation. These jungle soldiers accepted odds as a necessary evil of the military system. The ghastly gurgle from the slit throats of their sentries was often the first warning of the rush of the bolomen; the soldiers who died on the dreadful patrols were buried where they fell. The wounded struggled on through the swamps to die in turn, or to come back with the honorable scars of conflict.

The campaigns of the Philippine Constabulary, the regular army, and the Philippine Scouts constituted America's first experiment in warfare in the jungle. In great measure, it was the bloody aftermath of the bloodless Spanish-American war that brought the United States into prominence as a world power. The Constabulary was a unique and successful application of the principle of employing native infantry, officered by white men, in the subjugation of their own tribesmen. Other nations had used the principle of recruiting native soldiers but the Constabulary developed a fundamental difference in the application of the force. This insular police unit fought the natives of a district with troops recruited in the same district.

They eliminated organized banditry in the Philippine Archipelago, and like terriers they pursued the scattered fragments of such bands until peace came to the Islands.

They accomplished this result with a loss, during that six-year period, 1901-1906 inclusive of 1,029 men. This casualty percentage is very high and is perhaps the best indication of the severity of the jungle campaigns. The Constabulary was never in excess of seven thousand men. They were consistently outnumbered as they conducted their punitive, offensive operations in the bush. Their foeman ambushed and slew from the shelter of that silent jungle.

Knowing the nature of their work, it would be easy to assume that the Constabulary was therefore a heavily armed force, with superior weapons to offset that disparity in numbers. Such was not the case. The pulajans of Samar were invariably better armed than was the opposing police force, which, until late in its career, was equipped with very deficient weapons. The massacre at Balangiga, by pulajans, of a company of the 9th Infantry, United States Army, in September 1901, provided the hillmen with more modern repeating rifles than were possessed by the Constabulary for some years.

Early constabulary officers - Allen with arms folded

In their beginning, the Constabulary was armed with single shot Remington shotguns, with an effective range of about one hundred yards. This arm was supplemented by the Colt single-action calibre .45 revolver. Against these short-range weapons, the pulajans brought to bear Mauser rifles of the Spanish army and the American Krag-Jorgensen. Later in its existence, the Constabulary was equipped with cast-off Springfield rifles, with black powder ammunition and a capacity of a single shot. This was the old calibre .45 army rifle. It was not until 1906, when the wars were dwindling to a close, that the Insular Police received repeating Krags and then only after the army had discarded the Krag in favor of the modern .30-06 Springfield.

During the fiercest of the campaigns, the Constabulary had time for but one shot before the melee became hand-to-hand. There was no time to reload and they had no bayonets to oppose the bolo rush. They fought with clubbed rifles, teeth, and fists. Their uniforms were nondescript; their commissary and medical divisions were practically non-existent and their reinforcements were nil. They occupied isolated stations--a few men with a Lieutenant, or fewer men under a Sergeant. They had no regimental organization, either then or later in their career. The company was the unit--more often, the platoon or the squad. They made long marches into the mountainous jungle in search of antagonists who fell back before the police advance until the moment came to strike.

The Constabulary lived off the jungle--on a diet of python and rat and fruit bat. They carried their wounded with them as long as was possible and then they retired to heal them to return to fight again. Their dead they buried in the sombre jungle that claimed them.

The Constabulary of this early day had no pension provision and no relief for the widows of the fallen. Their pay was painfully inadequate; it was not unusual for Lieutenants to spend pay vouchers for cigarettes for their men. A Brigadier-General, in the top spot, drew $3,000 annually. A Captain signed for $1,100. A Third Lieutenant contented himself with an annual award of $800. The private fought for $6 each month.

The marvel of it all was the splendid efficiency of these military orphans. By sheer merit, they won the respect of the regular army and of the administration that created them. They performed a service that no massed troop movement of the regular army could possibly have contributed and they did it with an average expenditure of $250 per year per soldier, in comparison to the $1,000 spent each year on the regular army trooper in the Philippines.

In undertaking the preparation of this record of the Philippine Constabulary, I do so with but one regret. That, the inadequacy of my pen. To the officers who have made possible this account, I convey my most sincere thanks. I am proud of the confidence with which they have turned over to me the combat orders, diaries, and personal memoirs of this most neglected chapter of American military history.

VIC HURLEY
Seattle, Washington
August,1938

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Transcription courtesy of Ashley Bass.