Showing posts with label Philippine Insurrection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philippine Insurrection. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

"America's longest war. . . wasn't"

By now, everyone on the face of the globe has heard that the war in Afghanistan was "America's longest war".


It wasn't.

The long war, regarded as a series of wars, but nonetheless a continual thing involving continual deployment of American troops, ran from 1848 until the tragic end at Wounded Knee in 1890, a total of 42 years.  This doesn't represent the totality of combat against Native Americans, however, as I, and others have pointed out. Consider this recent letter to the Wall Street Journal.

America’s real longest war was the conflict against Native Americans, called the American Indian Wars, which most historians characterize as beginning in 1609 and ending in 1924.

Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, Wall Street Journal letter.

Total involvement in the Vietnam War, FWIW, was shorter only by a period of months. That may seem unfair, but if you consider that involvement in Afghanistan has actually been very minimal for a period of years, I'd argue it is a fair comparison.

The point is this.  We've fought long wars before.  The Indian Wars were epic in length.  The Philippine Insurrection was long, 13 years by some measures.  What's really notable about Afghanistan. . . and Vietnam, is that in the post television era, the country doesn't endure long wars well.  Before we seemingly had them out of sight and mind, most of the time they were being fought.

Oh, and technically the Korean Conflict, which started in 1950, is still on.  No final peace has been reached, and it's in a state of armistice.

Sunday, February 23, 2020

February 23, 1920. The death of Maj. Gen. LeRoy Springs Lyon.


You've likely never heard of  him, and for that matter, I hadn't either.

Rather, I'm posting this item on Gen. Springs as he's interesting example of a World War One vintage U.S. senior officer whose military career was cut short by his premature death at age 53.

He entered the Army upon his graduation from West Point in 1891 and was commissioned as a 2nd Lt. in the cavalry, and assiged to the 7th Cavalry.  He was a scout, early on.

In 1898 he made the unusual choice to switch branches, something rarely done in the U.S. Army at the time, and went to Coastal Artillery School.  After graduating from the school, he was assigned as an aid to Gen. Royal T. Frank, and continued on in that role during the Spanish American War.  Following the war, he was transferred to the 2nd Artillery Regiment, in effect yet another branch switch from Coastal Artillery to Field Artillery, and commanded it in the field in Cuba from 1899 to 1900.  He later served in the Philippine Insurrection and in the Canal Zone before retunring ot the U.S in 1915, where he commanded Camp Bowie.  During the Great War he was in command of the 31st Division at first and then the 90th Division.

Like most brevetted generals, following the war the Major General returned to his permanent rank of Colonel and was assigned to command the Field Artillery Basic School which was located, at that time, in Camp Taylor, Kentucky.

His wife Harriet, whom he married in 1903, was ten years his junior and outlived him by forty-one years.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Bells of Balangiga to depart

Gen. Jacob Smith inspects the ruins of Balangiga a few weeks after the battle there.

The Bells of Balangiga, war trophies from the Spanish American War, are going back to the Philippines, according to a government press release.

The bells have long been a matter of contention between the United States and the Philippines.  The 9th Infantry, which took the bells, maintained that it was ambushed in the locality, where it was garrisoned, and the bells symbolized its defense of itself from a surprise treacherous attack.  The Philippines have asserted the battle represented an uprising of the indigenous population against occupation and that the conclusion of the battle featured the killing of villagers without justification.  Both versions of the event may be correct in that it was a surprise attack on a unit stationed in the town and, by that point in the war, 1901, it had begun to take on a gruesome character at times.

Whatever the case may be, the bells, from three Catholic Churches, have long been sought to be returned.  Two of the bells are at F. E. Warren Air Force Base, which which the 9th Infantry had later been stationed at when it was Ft. D. A. Russell, and a third has been kept in Alaska.  It would appear that they're now going to go back to the churches from which they came in the Philippines, almost certainly accompanied by at least some vocal protestations from Wyoming's representation in Congress, I suspect.  As the current Wyoming connection with the 9th Infantry, let alone the Philippine Insurrection, is pretty think, it's unlikely that the average Wyomingite, however, will care much.  Indeed, while it caused its own controversy, a former head of a veteran's position in the state came out for returning the bells the last time this controversy rolled around a few years ago.

Monday, October 2, 2017

Is it murder?

The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.

In the podcast, the shooting is repeatedly referred to as a "murder".

Was it.

First some background.

As noted Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was the head of the South Vietnamese National Police.  He was not, as the speakers in the podcast incorrectly stated (and I can't recall what the documentary stated) an army officer.  He had been, but at the time of the shooting he was the head of the police.

Nguyễn Văn Lém was what we'd normally refer to now, and was occasionally referred to then, a terrorist.  He was in handcuffs and under arrest as he'd been detained after his actions in the offensive.  Head of a small unit, Lém had eariler captured ARVN Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan and his family and attempted to force the Colonel to show them how to drive tanks.   Lieutenant Colonel Tuan refused.  Lém killed then killed Col. Tuan, his wife, six children and his eighty year-old mother by cutting their throats.  There was one survivor, a seriously injured ten year old boy.

So, quite frankly, Lém was a real bastard.  A bastard, we'd note, of the Communist true believer type from all over the globe for whom such actions were not uncommon.  And things like this were not uncommon during Tet.

So, getting back to Loan, was his shooting of Lém a murder, or something else?

That may be trickier to determine that a person might suppose.

Let's start with this.  What's murder?

Every human community on earth recognizes that there's such a thing as murder and that its one of the most horrible of crimes.  But nearly every human community also recognizes that not every instance of one human killing another is murder.  Rather, generally, most societies of all types hold that killing another human being without an extreme justification is murder.  Killings in self defense are not murder.  Killing in defense of others, which extends out, commonly, to how we view actions by the police and the ultimately the military, are not murder.  Most people agree on that much.

Beyond that, there's other instances of humans killing other humans that are not generally regarded as murder, but they get trickier.

Actually, it's not even beyond that. We mentioned policemen and soldiers, but let's break that down.

That policemen are authorized to use deadly force in their work is not doubted by anyone, but where that line is drawn is not agreed upon and never has been.  In some societies (and this is something directly relevant to what we are discussing here) police use of deadly force has been regarded as very wide indeed, although not usually to the level of summary execution. . . always.

Under the Common Law, at one time, the police in Common Law jurisdictions were regarded as authorized to use deadly force to apprehend a suspected felon up until he was apprehended.  That's where the old line that we used to shout when we played police as kids, "Stop in the name of the law" came from.  If you didn't stop, back in the day, a policeman could shoot you.  There were no investigations or anything much that happened.  That's the way it was. Fleeing from the law is still regarded as evidence of guilt (a questionable proposition).  Not all that long ago that presumption went pretty far in what it authorized.

Indeed in some regions of our own country the use of deadly force against suspected criminals was regarded as so proper that there was a common assumption that the police need not really bring a suspect in alive. In the American West it was truly the case that sheriffs and marshals shooting suspects in the sticks was pretty accepted.  This generally applied to average citizens as well who were generally regarded as authorized to act on what everyone knew to be against the law.  Indeed, a sheriff in North Dakota openly questioned Theodore Roosevelt as to why he simply had not shot some suspects he chased down over a long distance who had stolen a boat.  It seemed odd to the sheriff, and it would have seemed odd to most residents of the west at the time.  Hanging thieves and murderers, even by civilians, was seen as perfectly legitimate and an extension of the proper enforcement of the law.  The scene from Lonesome Dove in which cowhands hang murderers is pretty much spot on.  People didn't worry that much about taking people to the law and they felt authorized to simply "carry it out".  A much different concept of the law, to be sure.

Carrying on, even now in some regions of the world the police can go very far in using deadly force and not be regarded as acting outside of the law.  A friend of mine who was in the Navy in the 1970s recounted being on leave in a Caribbean nation when a fellow sailor had his wallet lifted.  They ran to a nearby traffic policeman and pointed otu a fleeing man they knew to have taken it.  The officer unholstered his pistol, shot the fleeing man, and gave them the wallet back.

We'd regard this as a shocking violation of the law and murder.  There, he was simply acting as a policeman.  The old Common Law in full force.

Indeed, beyond the Common Law, there's the "old law" we've spoken of before.  Restraint on the use of deadly force in revenge or self protection or out of a sense of justice is a societal restraint.  While all people everywhere recognize murder, most cultures at one time sanctioned a lot of violence and most people still sympathize with a type of it that's well beyond what the law allows.  There are a lot of movies on this topic in the Western World where restraints on official killings are the highest.  In spite of that, the man or woman acting in revenge who takes life outside of the confines of the law remain popular.

More on all of this in a moment.  Let's talk about soldiers in war first.

There's sort of a general concept out there that any killing in war is legitimate, but it isn't.  Indeed, since World War Two it is in fact the case that people all over the world have tolerated less and less deadly violence in war.  Wartime never authorized wholesale slaughter, although there's been plenty of it.  As early as the aftermath of World War One there were war crime trials and during the war itself the the Germans were rightly condemned for their murderous actions against Belgian and French civilians.  Some have noted how this played into Allied propaganda, but the fact of the matter is that the Germans during the Great War already foreshadowed what they'd do in the Second World War and were condemned for it.  Soldiers are not to kill civilians. Nor are they to kill Prisoners of War.

Not that don't both happen and the latter, in fact, has often been tolerated.  Indeed in various ages it was highly tolerated.  An order to give "no quarter", i.e., don't bother with taking prisoners, was at one time regarded as a legitimate order for various reasons, often because the battle had become too much of a mess to sort out friend from foe quickly.  At least since some point in the 19th Century, however, such orders have not been regarded as legitimate, and indeed have been regarded as illegal.  That doesn't mean that they haven't been given or suggested.

For Americans, a lot of struggle over such suggestions came about during the later stages of the Indians Wars, by which time most Americans did not regard them as legitimate.  By that point they'd frankly stopped, although tragically the battle that such things are most associated with, mistakenly, occurred in that period, Wounded Knee.  Wounded Knee was more of a general mess than people suppose and less of a real massacre.  Real massacres did occur however, particularly prior to the 1870s and often not by Federal troops but mustered militia. Bear River in Idaho and Sand Creek in Colorado are good example of real unformed massacres by men marching under the Stars and Stripes.  The latter is a particularly heinous example.

By the Philippine Insurrection Americans were no longer willing to tolerate it and the one example some agitated people mention today, inaccurately attributing it to Pershing who had nothing to do with it, is an example of one commander authorizing very broad deadly force. That resulted in an investigation which was aimed towards a prosecution but that did not occur as the sufficient evidence could not be gathered. That did stop such actions in the prosecution of that war, however.

The shooting of prisoners again arose, although not in the public eye, as a feature of World War Two even with the American military. It's still a topic that isn't addressed much, but generally what occurred is that there were instances in which certain units simply stopped taking prisoners or mostly stopped.  In Europe this tended to to occur, on a very limited basis, where those units had suffered from the same conduct by the Germans. As a reprisal, they stopped.  In the Pacific, however, it was very widespread.  Taking Japanese prisoners was dangerous anyhow and the war in the Pacific degenerated to some extent to one with heavy racist overtones.  Not many Japanese soldiers attempted to surrender but a lot of Americans weren't very interested in taking Japanese prisoners anyhow.

In Vietnam something like that occurred, but on a much more limited scale.  As this became known it became widely circulated in the American press and after the My Lai massacre it became very widely know.  "Search and Destroy" missions and the like tainted the American military for years in the minds of the American public even though most US troops never served in units that either conducted them or committed any atrocities.  None the less, some atrocities did occur.

Which gets back to what is considered legitimate in war. Atrocities never are, but conduct towards prisoners and even combatants has varied widely. At one time, an order of "no quarter" was regarded as legitimate.  It certainly isn't now.  The French were regarded as barbarous at Amiens for raiding the English rear and killing the boys in the train, a truly hideous act.  The Welsh in the same battle killed a lot of French downed chivalry, which was regarded as bad monetary practice.  Standards haven't been always exactly the same.

So what does that all have to do with Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and Nguyễn Văn Lém?

Well, maybe more than we think.

Both Vietnamese sides took prisoners during the Vietnam War but the north uniformly treated them horribly.  NVA treatment of prisoners was based on the Communist concept that anyone fighting a Communist nation is guilty of a crime. The Soviets treated German prisoners of war the same way during World War Two (the Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners was more purely genocidal).  The NVA treatment of prisoners was itself criminal. And when their fortunes appeared good they were not above mass execution of civilians.  The ARVN may not have been sweethearts towards prisoners they took, but htey were much better and there was always an official policy of trying to convert prisoners to the Southern cause.

Of course, not all prisoners were uniformed by any means, which creates the classic franc tireur problem.  For years it was regarded as perfectly legitimate to execute, on the spot, men bearing arms but not wearing uniforms.  Nations complained about it, but it was regarded as legitimate.  And execution of men captured wearing your uniforms against you also routinely resorted in execution. The United States in fact did this during World War Two when it captured Germans wearing American uniforms.  Military Police shot them.  No trial, just execution.  Nobody has ever suggested at any time that the US was acting improperly in doing that.

So, where does that leave us.

Well, I don't know .

I have to presume that the Republic of Vietnam had some sort of judicial code that prevented the execution of suspects.

I know that the Republic of Vietnam, with American assistance, was carrying out a program of assassination of suspected Communist agents in the countryside, which seems to be much the same thing.

What the actual standard in the country was is hard to know, particularly given the level of corruption that was common in South Vietnam.

So, was the killing of Nguyễn Văn Lém an extra judicial police murder or simply a rare filmed example of common South Vietnamese justice in action?  Or was it a battlefield execution of a franc tireur, if that practice was still regarded as legitimate by the Republic of Vietnam.

Did South Vietnam have an official death penalty for murder?  Most nations have had one at some time. Indeed most nations have had one that applied more broadly than murder, to be sure.  That has generally not been regarded as illegitimate for true crimes.  But it's also generally been regarded as requiring a real fair trial as well.

No trial here.

So was this, then murder?

That's hard to know.  It was probably technically at least a crime and that crime was murder (although the author of the Wikipedia article on Loan argues that it was not technically illegal).  And it was horrible.  But Lem had done something horrible. But that doesn't sanction a horrible extra judicial murder.  But maybe that was official justice in South Vietnam.

Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?
He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:
The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.
No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.

None of which even begin to approach the question of whether such actions are moral.  I would say clearly not, but my view may be in the minority on a lot of the questions I've raised.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Movies In History: 1898, Our Last Men in the Philippines

This is a Spanish film dealing with the apparently true story of a Spanish outpost in the Philippines that held out well after the Spanish surrender to the United States in the Spanish American War.  It's the second Spanish film on this topic, with this one being made in 2016 and the earlier one being filmed, I think, in the 1940s (which somewhat makes sense, given the politics in Spain at the time).

 Spanish soldiers of this period in their summer uniforms, which were blue and white.

I don't know what the earlier film is like, but this one is only so-so.  It was worth watching, but not exactly great.  The film deals with the protracted struggle of a Spanish outpost that takes refuge in a village church against Philippine forces which were fighting Span in the 1890s and were quickly, after that, fighting the United States.  The story is a sad one, which it wold almost have to be, given the nature of the actual events.

In terms of portrayal, there seem to be weaknesses in various character portrayals from my prospective, but then I know nothing about the actual events.  The Philippine forces seem too well equipped, and even uniformed compared to what was likely the case, and some of the lurid portrays of the village are highly unlikely to have reflected reality given the Catholic Philippine nature of the region being portrayed.  The Spanish equipment and uniforms, however, appear to be quite accurate.

This film is available on Netflix, which is really the only reason I happened to catch it.  Very few films deal with the topic of the Spanish in the Philippines in this late period, and so it was perhaps worth watching on that account.


Wednesday, May 10, 2017

John J. Pershing informed he is to lead American troops in France.

I've backed off nearly daily entries from 1917 here, now that we no longer have the Punitive Expedition to follow, and returned more of the traditional pace and focus of the blog, but there are exceptions and today is one.


On this day, in 1917, John J. Pershing, recently promoted to Major General, was informed by Secretary of War Newton Baker that he was to lead the American expeditionary force in France.

This now seems all rather anticlimactic, as if the appointment of Pershing was inevitable, and perhaps it was, but he was not the only possible choice and his selection involved some drama, to some extent.  Pershing was then 56 years old, an age that would have put him in the upper age bracket for a senior office during World War Two, but not at this time in the context of World War One.  Indeed, his rise to Major General had been somewhat unusual in its history and course, as he had earlier been advanced over more senior officers in an era when that was rare, and it is often noted that his marriage to Helen Warren, the daughter of powerful Wyoming Senator Francis E. Warren, certainly did not hurt his career.  Often regarded as having reached the pinnacle of his Army career due to "leading" the Army during the Punitive Expedition, he was in fact technically second in command during that event as the commander of the department he was in was Frederick Funston.

Funston is already familiar to readers here as we covered his death back in  February.  Not really in the best of health in his later years, but still a good five years younger than Pershing, Funston died suddenly only shortly after the Punitive Expedition concluded leaving Pershing his logical successor and the only Army officer then in the public eye to that extent.  Indeed, as the United States was progressing towards entering the war it was Funston, a hero of the Spanish American War, who was being considered by the Wilson Administration as the likely leader of a US contingent to Europe.  His sudden death meant that his junior, Pershing, took pride of place.

But not without some rivals.  Principal among them was Gen. Leonard Wood, a hero of the later stages of the Indian Wars and the Spanish American War who was a protégée of Theodore Roosevelt.  Almost the exact same age as Pershing, Wood was backed by Republicans in Congress for the position of commander of the AEF.  Not too surprisingly, however, given his close association with Roosevelt, he was not offered the command.  Indeed, it was this same week when it became plain that Roosevelt was also not to receive a combat command in the Army, or any role in the Army, for the Great War, to his immense disappointment.

Pershing went on, of course, to command the AEF and to even rise in rank to the second highest, behind only George Washington, rank in the U.S. Army.  That alone shows that he was an enormous hero in his era. He lived through World War Two and in fact was frequently visited by generals of that war, many of them having a close military association with him from World War One.  His personality dramatically impacted the Army during the Great War, so much so that it was sometimes commented upon to the effect that American troops were all carbon copies of Pershing.  Still highly regarded by most (although some have questioned in recent years his view of his black troops) he is far from the household name he once was for the simple reason that World War Two has overshadowed everything associated with World War One.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

General Frederick Funston dies.

On this date in 1917 a shock happened to the nation.  The general who Woodrow Wilson already had in mind for an American expeditionary force in Europe, should the US enter the Great War, which was becoming increasingly likely, died.


And with his death, it truly seemed that an era had really passed.

 Gen. Frederick Funston, next to driver, in 1906.

Funston was a hero and a legend.  He'd risen to high command on the strength of his military achievements without being a West Point graduate.  He was truly an exception to the rules.

Funston was born in Ohio in 1865 and in some ways did not show early promise in life.  He was a very small and slight (at first) man, standing only 5'5" and weighing only 120 lbs upon reaching adulthood.  He aspired as a youth to the military, after growing up in Kansas, but he was rejected by West Point due to his small size.  He thereafter attended the University of Kansas for three years but did not graduate.  Following that he worked for awhile for the Santa Fe Railroad before becoming a reporter in Kansas City in 1890.

Only after a year he left reporting and went to work for the Department of Agriculture as a researcher in an era when that was an adventuresome occupation.  In 1896, however, Funston left that to join the Cuban insurrection against Spain in Cuba.

  Funston as a Cuban guerilla.

As most Americans spending any time in Cuba at the time experienced, he came down with malaria while serving the Cuban revolution.  Returning to United States weighing only 95 lbs he found himself back in the United States just in time to secure a commission with the 20th Kansas Infantry as it was raised to fight in the Spanish American War.  

"Funston's Fighting Kansans" in the Philippines.

The 20th Kansas didn't fight in Cuba, it fought in the Philippines.  Funston served there heroically and received the Medal of Honor, and found himself promoted to the rank of Brigadier General in the Regular Army at age 35, a remarkable rise contrary to the usual story of military advancement and more reminiscent of the Civil War than anything thereafter.  Following his service in the Philippines, however, he fell into a period of controversy due to aggressively pro military action comments he made in the United States.

He was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco upon his return to the United States and was there at the time of the 1906 earthquake.  He controversially declared martial law to attempt to combat the fire and looters and in fact authorized the shooting of looters.  Following that he was stationed again in the Philippines and Hawaii.  In 1914 he was placed in command of the Southern Department of the Army and was in command of the US forces in Vera Cruz and thereafter in Mexico under Pershing.


Funston and his family at the Presidio.

On this date in 1917 he was relaxing at the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio Texas when he suffered a massive stroke and died.  He was only 51 years of age but he had put on a tremendous amount of weight in recent years. Indeed, his weight had prevented him from active field service by the time of the Punitive Expedition, but the fact of his death in this fashion would suggest an undiagnosed high blood pressure condition, something that was commonly fatal in that era.