Jungle of Snakes by James R. Arnold

Brigadier
     General Jacob Smith.
    In Samar, insurgents operated from jungle sanctuaries in the roadless interior and confined the Americans to a handful of
     coastal enclaves. Their victory at Balangiga had increased their strength. Whomever Chaffee had assigned to Samar would have
     faced tremendous problems, including the need to keep the American troops firmly in hand because the lurid memories of the
     “treachery” at Balangiga were foremost in their minds and they wanted revenge. Unfortunately the sixty-one-year old Smith
     possessed few qualifications beyond a savage instinct—he would be best remembered for allegedly ordering a subordinate to
     reduce Samar’s interior to a “howling wilderness”—and his loose control led to some of the worst American atrocities of the
     war. 5
    Smith knew war. He carried a Confederate minié ball in his hip, a legacy of his valiant conduct at the Battle of Shiloh. His
     subsequent behavior during a three-year recuperation revealed a less attractive side to his personality. While serving as
     a recruiting agent, he invested ignorant recruits’ bounties for personal gain. Cashiered for insubordination during the 1880s
     and then reinstated, Smith again displayed valor at the Battle of El Caney in Cuba, where the Spanish defenders shot him in
     the chest. Transferred to the Philippines, Smith found himself in in dependent command at a level he had never before experienced.
     He enthusiastically complied with Chaffee’s demands to employ the harshest methods on Samar. He ordered his brigade to wage
     hard war, telling subordinates the more killing and burning the better, and reminded them that not even civilized war could
     be carried out “on a humanitarian basis.” 6 He then set to work by ordering the concentration of Samar’s inhabitants into protected zones on the coast. He treated the
     rest of the island as enemy territory. Smith sent his forces, including a battalion of U.S. Marines, inland, where they killed
     opponents, real and imagined, burned houses and crops, and slaughtered livestock. Many of his subordinates kidnapped civilians
     and routinely applied physical abuse to extract intelligence. Eventually, a comprehensive starvation policy forced the insurgents
     to spend most of their time searching for food. Meanwhile, uncounted numbers of civilians also perished. The capture of an
     emaciated and sick Vicente Lukban, Samar’s insurgent leader, on February 18, 1902, led to mass desertion among the remaining
     insurgents and marked the collapse of resis tance against American occupation on Samar.
    After the last guerrilla bands on Samar surrendered, a series of courts-martial ensued. Revelations of gross misconduct, including
     murder and torture, emerged. Allegedly when an officer asked Smith to define the age limit for killing, he replied, “Everything
     over 10.” 7 The judge advocate general of the army noted that only the good sense exhibited by the majority of Smith’s subordinates had
     prevented a complete reign of terror on Samar. The fact that Chaffee’s fearful overreaction to the Balangiga Massacre had
     created a climate where such conduct could occur escaped scrutiny. Smith had conducted a savage campaign well outside even
     the stern norm of American operations elsewhere in the islands. His legacy was to tarnish horribly the history of the American
     war in the Philippines.
    The Real Terror of the Philippines
    In contrast to Smith, Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell conducted his Batangas campaign within the boundaries of what the
     military considered acceptable. Indeed, he employed counterinsurgency methods that he and others had successfully demonstrated
     in previous campaigns. Nonetheless, for many Filipinos the consequences looked very much the same as those endured by the
     inhabitants of Samar.
    Bell was forty-five years old when he took over the Third Separate Brigade in Batangas. He was one of the army’s comers, a
     West Point