Jungle of Snakes Read Online Free Page A

operated as a regular army and fought the Americans in stand-up combat. In the absence of a coherent
     strategy—the revolutionary cause never bred a first-class strategist; Aguinaldo proved himself in deep over his head as a
     military thinker—Filipino efforts focused on defending the territory they controlled. This defense lacked imagination, amounting
     to little more then trying to position units between the Americans and their objectives. The U.S. Army easily dominated the
     conventional war. The army could reliably find the enemy and bring him to battle. Once combat began, the army’s superior firepower
     dominated. The contest was so one-sided that General Otis reported that he could readily march a 3,000-man column anywhere
     in the Philippines and the insurgents could do nothing to prevent it. Conventional military history taught that when one side
     could not oppose the free movement of its enemy across its own territory, the war was all but over. Indeed, military pressure
     coupled with the army’s commitment to a policy of benevolent assimilation appeared to produce decisive results in the autumn
     of 1899, as Otis prepared a war-winning offensive scheduled to take advantage of Luzon’s dry season.
    Otis worked very hard but wasted endless time supervising petty details. A journalist observed that Otis lived “in a valley
     and works with a microscope, while his proper place is on a hilltop, with a spy-glass.” 4 MacArthur was even less charitable, describing the general as “a locomotive bottom side up on the track, with its wheels
     revolving at full speed.” 5 Unfortunately, members of the Filipino elite living in Manila had the measure of the man and they told Otis what he wanted
     to hear, namely, that most respectable Filipinos desired American annexation. This fallacy reinforced Otis’s instinct toward
     false economy, to cut corners and win the war without expending too many resources.
    His plan to capture the insurgent capital in northern Luzon and destroy Aguinaldo’s Army of Liberation was akin to a game
     drive writ large. One group of Americans acted as beaters, herding the Filipinos toward the waiting guns of a blocking force
     that had hurried into position to intercept the fleeing prey. By virtue of prodigious efforts—unusually heavy rains flooded
     the countryside, reducing one cavalry column’s progress to sixteen miles in eleven days—American forces broke up the insurgent
     army, captured supply depots and administrative facilities, and occupied every objective. As if to confirm what the Manila
     elite had told Otis, soldiers entered villages where an apparently happy people waved white flags and shouted, “ Viva Americanos. ”
    An American officer, J. Franklin Bell, reported that all that remained were “small bands . . . largely composed of the flotsam
     and jetsam from the wreck of the insurrection.” 6 Otis cabled Washington with a declaration of victory. He gave an interview to Leslie’s Weekly in which he said: “You ask me to say when the war in the Philippines will be over and to set a limit to the men and trea sure
     necessary to bring affairs to a satisfactory conclusion. That is impossible, for the war in the Philippines is already over.” 7
    It certainly appeared that way to eighteen-year-old George C. Marshall. The volunteers of Company C, Tenth Pennsylvania, returned
     from the Philippines to Marshall’s hometown in August 1899. Marshall recalled, “When their train brought them to Uniontown
     from Pittsburgh, where their regiment had been received by the President, every whistle and church bell in town blew and rang
     for five minutes in a pandemonium of local pride.” The subsequent parade “was a grand American small-town demonstration of
     pride in its young men and of wholesome enthusiasm over their achievements.” 8
    Victory enormously pleased the McKinley administration. Now benevolent assimilation could proceed unhindered by ugly war.
     The