(In March, 1906, Governor General Wood ordered the assault on Bud Dajo, a summit of an extinct volcano near Jolo, where about six hundred moro men, women and children built an impregnable "cotta" and stood defiantly, refusing to pay taxes or recognize the authority of the American colonial government. )
Here is an account taken from "Bullets and bolos", by John Roberts White, one of the American officers who led the attack.
The assault on Dajo was to be made by three columns, up the three practicable trails which climbed steeply to the crater. Off the beaten cut-out trail was an impenetrable tangle of bamboo and brush. I was assigned to the post of honor at the head of Major Omar Bundy's column, which, in addition to my handful of Constabulary, consisted of two companies of the Sixth United States Infantry, my old friends of four or five years before in Negros. We went into camp at the foot of the mountain, in the long grass and in full view of the rim of the crater summit where Moros and their banners were silhouetted against the sky. On Major Bundy's orders I sent Lieutenant Sowers with twenty men a few hundred yards ahead to where the mountain jungle ran into the long grass; and as the last of his blue-shirted, red-fezzed detachment disappeared in the timber, shots rang out. We had disturbed the nest of hornets.
There was a delay of several hours while other columns were taking position around the mountains. About noon orders came for me to reconnoiter up the mountain.
I moved out with the remainder of my detachment, picked up Sowers and his detachment, who had been sniping at an unseen enemy in the jungle, and started up the mountain. Steeply up, always up, we crept, seeing nothing at which to shoot, yet subject to an occasional harmless sniping from above. My orders were not to bring on a general engagement, but to locate the enemy trenches. That would be far from difficult; the mountain was only 2100 feet high, and we soon ascended 1500 feet without other result than to become sodden with perspiration and sore-muscled in the calves of our legs. The ascent was at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was like ascending the stairway of two or three Woolworth Buildings, piled on top of one another.
Toward sunset when we were two thirds of the way to the summit, Corporal Sayary, who was on the "point" with another soldier, slid quietly back and whispered that he heard talking ahead. I halted the column, enjoined strictest silence, and crept forward with Sayary to locate the first defensive work. On hands and knees, on bellies and often almost on our faces, we crept up inch by inch, taking advantage of every bit of cover, hugging the jungle or worming into it when the trail was exposed, scratched by thorns and bamboo, bitten by ants and assorted bugs, but always winning upward and nearer to the trench.
At last I could hear a faint murmur of voices that was less a conversation than an unaccustomed note in the chorus of the jungle birds and insects.
Corporal Sayary, himself a Sulu Moro and less than five feet of chunky brown manhood and nerve, motioned that he could creep still nearer and see what the trench was like; so I let him squirm forward and upward while I lay still under some trailing bamboo, scarcely daring to brush off the ants and gnats which showed by their actions that I had no right to lie prone in the jungle on a mountain in Sulu. Leaden minutes dragged into half an hour before Sayary slid back and whispered that the trench was a small one between two big trees on either side of the trail and that it was occupied by an outpost of four men. This information exactly tallied with spies' reports, so we retired a little way down the mountain and sent word to Major Bundy. Then, as it was now nightfall, we prepared to sleep alongside the trail, where it was difficult to find a spot level enough to lie down. However, I made myself fairly snug between the trunks of two fallen trees, with my soldiers close on either side and at my head and feet. But it was a poor night's rest, disturbed by occasional shots fired by nervous sentries, by the regular beat of brass gongs and chanted war songs in the enemy trenches not far above our roost, by the vicious attacks of warrior ants and other jungle pests, as well as by the brooding thought that the morrow would bring a bloody piece of work and a "five to one against" chance of living through it.
Soon after daybreak of March 6 we started up the mountain again. Captain Bayard Schindel of the Sixth Infantry, whose company was immediately behind my Constabulary, sent up four American sharpshooters under First Sergeant Knox. These men I kept close behind me. As we neared the first trench we caught our first glimpse of the enemy since entering the jungle. To the left, across a deep gully, through a break in the trees, was a house on the edge of the crater. On the fortifications around and below it were several figures which tumbled back as we opened fire. With the sound of our own rifles confidence and courage poured through our veins.
The first trench, to which Sayary had scouted the night before, we found vacant. But from it, up the ever-steepening trail, we could see fortifications from which came a sputtering of rifle fire soon answered by our sharpshooters who at a range of two or three hundred yards began picking the Moros off the entrenchments against the skyline-like shooting crows out of a tree. Vainly I tried to find flanking trails up the mountain as a frontal attack on the cottas above looked deadly. But we were on a hogback, and on either side, as at Mansalanao, yawned deep canions. There was no other choice than to attack up a slippery bare slope. Leaving the sharpshooters to keep down fire from above, I scouted forward with twelve constables-a mixed detachment of Moros and Filipinos. Soon we ran into an abatis of felled trees which completely blocked the trail. Sergeant Arasid with half the detachment attempted to climb over the abatis. With the remainder I crawled around one flank, and was greeted with such a fire from above and also from the opposite side of the canion that I withdrew my small detachment with the loss of one killed and one wounded. Private Diukson, mortally wounded, was hanging in the abatis exposed to fire from the fort. He was shot through the jugular vein. As I crawled up to haul him down his head fell over and great gouts of warm blood spouted over my face and chest, making me almost sick at the stomach.
I sent information down to Major Bundy and remained in a partially sheltered position under a ledge near the abatis until shrapnel fired by our own batteries at the foot of the mountain burst dangerously near. Then we retreated back to the first trench. Major Bundy and other officers climbed to the trench. It was decided to bring up a mountain gun to blast a way up the mountain. Just before dark, after great efforts, the gun was hauled up to the trench. That night Sowers and I slept beside the little cannon, expecting an attack. But beyond sniping and the occasional discharge of a lantaka (culverin cannon) which swept the jungle with a miscellaneous collection of slugs, stones, and old junk, the night passed in comparative quiet. I received word that the assault was to be made at daybreak, after five rounds had been fired by the mountain gun point-blank at the trenches above us.
Precisely at full daylight on March 7, stiff after a restless night within stone's throw of the enemy who had beaten gongs, fired muskets and cannon, and yelled defiance all through the hours of darkness, we left the partial shelter of the trench and jungle, soon reached the fortification and abatis which had halted us the day before, and turned the corner of the mass of fallen trees into a hell of fire. I forced my men through a gap in the bamboo chevaux-de-frise that protected one side of the abatis. It seemed that they were killed or wounded almost as fast as I could push them through. For, once around the corner, we came under the direct fire of the large fort which crowned the summit. Between us and the loopholes which spouted fire, there was nothing that would shelter a rabbit.
At a distance of fifty or a hundred feet even rusty old muskets can do terrible execution, while lantakas loaded with junk are more deadly than machine-guns. Man after man fell dead or rolled back, wounded, down the mountain. Those who were left, shepherded on by Lieutenant Sowers from behind, gallantly followed me as I pushed past the abatis and sprang madly up toward the fort where, paradoxically enough, safety lay. Once up against the walls, we were comparatively safe from the fire which came through loopholes formed by thrusting large bamboo tubes through the earthen walls.
When I prostrated myself, breathless, against the sheltering fort, Sergeant Knox and other American soldiers soon reached me, and we engaged the Moros on the other side in hand-to-hand combat. I attempted to look over the wall, which was but little higher than my head. A spear parted my hair, and the owner of the spear departed this life with a load of buckshot in his chest. Time after time the Moros reached over the wall to dislodge us with spear or kris, and we took toll of Malay lives a-plenty. When they became more careful Sergeant Knox would raise his hat on the muzzle of his rifle, while I stepped back a little so as to get the man who rose to the fly.
Sowers and the remainder of my Constabulary came up on the right, while the blue and khaki figures of American soldiers and Scouts were ascending in a thin, often interrupted but steady stream and massing against the cotta wall for the assault. Next to me a Moro constable, eager to see what damage he had done to those on the other side of the wall, looked through a bamboo tube into the fort, and rolled back with his eye blown out. The slope below us was carpeted with dead and dying Constabulary and Regulars. I rose to urge my men over the wall of the fort. As I clambered up, a gaudily dressed chief slashed at me with a big kris or kampilan. I dodged, lost my grip on the wall, and fell back right in front of one of the loopholes. Although I twisted myself out of the path of death as quickly as possible, I was not quick enough to avoid a bullet which passed through my left leg just above the knee. It was fired from a captured Krag rifle at a foot or two from my knee. The shock paralyzed me. Despite the heat of battle and a tropical sun, I became deadly cold and rolled helplessly away from the fort down the hill. My part in the Bud Dajo fight was ended.
Sergeant Alga and the faithful Fernandez gallantly came to my rescue. They helped me down the exposed area to the shelter of the trench near the abatis, there giving me first aid. The fight raged a few feet above my head, and wounded men poured back until the trench was full. Lieutenant Gordon Johnston of the Signal Corps came up from below, took my shot-gun and belt of ammunition, rushed up to the attack, started the final assault on the cotta, and was back in a few minutes with a load of slugs in upper arm and shoulder. At last there was an increase of fire, yells even more frenzied-then a slight lull as the fort was taken and the fight moved further away. Sergeant Knox staggered back with one hand hanging in shreds, blown to bits as he tried to climb over the wall. An American hospital corps man gave us more efficient first aid. He stopped the bleeding of my wound by a tourniquet. Some of my soldiers returned from the victory and carried me down the mountain-an hour or two of agony that seemed like a week until I reached the field hospital at the base, where a surgeon gave me a shot of morphine. The battering, incessant pain ceased.
The main defenses of Dajo were taken that morning, although twenty-four hours were required to complete the conquest of the mountain. We of the Constabulary were proud that we had reached the crater before the other columns. Over six hundred Moro men, women, and children were killed while resisting to the last. Humanly speaking, the incident was unavoidable. The proud fanaticism of the Moros had caused them to believe that they could resist the American Government. But, certainly, none of us believed that it would ever be necessary to repeat so severe a lesson. We thought that Bud Dajo would teach the Sulu Moros that the days of irresponsible government, of piracy, slavery, and cattle stealing, were ended. Yet six years later, in 1912, at Bagsak Mountain near Jo1o, General Pershing was obliged to repeat the lesson.
Here is an account taken from "Bullets and bolos", by John Roberts White, one of the American officers who led the attack.
The assault on Dajo was to be made by three columns, up the three practicable trails which climbed steeply to the crater. Off the beaten cut-out trail was an impenetrable tangle of bamboo and brush. I was assigned to the post of honor at the head of Major Omar Bundy's column, which, in addition to my handful of Constabulary, consisted of two companies of the Sixth United States Infantry, my old friends of four or five years before in Negros. We went into camp at the foot of the mountain, in the long grass and in full view of the rim of the crater summit where Moros and their banners were silhouetted against the sky. On Major Bundy's orders I sent Lieutenant Sowers with twenty men a few hundred yards ahead to where the mountain jungle ran into the long grass; and as the last of his blue-shirted, red-fezzed detachment disappeared in the timber, shots rang out. We had disturbed the nest of hornets. There was a delay of several hours while other columns were taking position around the mountains. About noon orders came for me to reconnoiter up the mountain.
I moved out with the remainder of my detachment, picked up Sowers and his detachment, who had been sniping at an unseen enemy in the jungle, and started up the mountain. Steeply up, always up, we crept, seeing nothing at which to shoot, yet subject to an occasional harmless sniping from above. My orders were not to bring on a general engagement, but to locate the enemy trenches. That would be far from difficult; the mountain was only 2100 feet high, and we soon ascended 1500 feet without other result than to become sodden with perspiration and sore-muscled in the calves of our legs. The ascent was at an angle of forty-five degrees. It was like ascending the stairway of two or three Woolworth Buildings, piled on top of one another. Toward sunset when we were two thirds of the way to the summit, Corporal Sayary, who was on the "point" with another soldier, slid quietly back and whispered that he heard talking ahead. I halted the column, enjoined strictest silence, and crept forward with Sayary to locate the first defensive work. On hands and knees, on bellies and often almost on our faces, we crept up inch by inch, taking advantage of every bit of cover, hugging the jungle or worming into it when the trail was exposed, scratched by thorns and bamboo, bitten by ants and assorted bugs, but always winning upward and nearer to the trench.
At last I could hear a faint murmur of voices that was less a conversation than an unaccustomed note in the chorus of the jungle birds and insects.
Corporal Sayary, himself a Sulu Moro and less than five feet of chunky brown manhood and nerve, motioned that he could creep still nearer and see what the trench was like; so I let him squirm forward and upward while I lay still under some trailing bamboo, scarcely daring to brush off the ants and gnats which showed by their actions that I had no right to lie prone in the jungle on a mountain in Sulu. Leaden minutes dragged into half an hour before Sayary slid back and whispered that the trench was a small one between two big trees on either side of the trail and that it was occupied by an outpost of four men. This information exactly tallied with spies' reports, so we retired a little way down the mountain and sent word to Major Bundy. Then, as it was now nightfall, we prepared to sleep alongside the trail, where it was difficult to find a spot level enough to lie down. However, I made myself fairly snug between the trunks of two fallen trees, with my soldiers close on either side and at my head and feet. But it was a poor night's rest, disturbed by occasional shots fired by nervous sentries, by the regular beat of brass gongs and chanted war songs in the enemy trenches not far above our roost, by the vicious attacks of warrior ants and other jungle pests, as well as by the brooding thought that the morrow would bring a bloody piece of work and a "five to one against" chance of living through it.
Soon after daybreak of March 6 we started up the mountain again. Captain Bayard Schindel of the Sixth Infantry, whose company was immediately behind my Constabulary, sent up four American sharpshooters under First Sergeant Knox. These men I kept close behind me. As we neared the first trench we caught our first glimpse of the enemy since entering the jungle. To the left, across a deep gully, through a break in the trees, was a house on the edge of the crater. On the fortifications around and below it were several figures which tumbled back as we opened fire. With the sound of our own rifles confidence and courage poured through our veins.
The first trench, to which Sayary had scouted the night before, we found vacant. But from it, up the ever-steepening trail, we could see fortifications from which came a sputtering of rifle fire soon answered by our sharpshooters who at a range of two or three hundred yards began picking the Moros off the entrenchments against the skyline-like shooting crows out of a tree. Vainly I tried to find flanking trails up the mountain as a frontal attack on the cottas above looked deadly. But we were on a hogback, and on either side, as at Mansalanao, yawned deep canions. There was no other choice than to attack up a slippery bare slope. Leaving the sharpshooters to keep down fire from above, I scouted forward with twelve constables-a mixed detachment of Moros and Filipinos. Soon we ran into an abatis of felled trees which completely blocked the trail. Sergeant Arasid with half the detachment attempted to climb over the abatis. With the remainder I crawled around one flank, and was greeted with such a fire from above and also from the opposite side of the canion that I withdrew my small detachment with the loss of one killed and one wounded. Private Diukson, mortally wounded, was hanging in the abatis exposed to fire from the fort. He was shot through the jugular vein. As I crawled up to haul him down his head fell over and great gouts of warm blood spouted over my face and chest, making me almost sick at the stomach.
I sent information down to Major Bundy and remained in a partially sheltered position under a ledge near the abatis until shrapnel fired by our own batteries at the foot of the mountain burst dangerously near. Then we retreated back to the first trench. Major Bundy and other officers climbed to the trench. It was decided to bring up a mountain gun to blast a way up the mountain. Just before dark, after great efforts, the gun was hauled up to the trench. That night Sowers and I slept beside the little cannon, expecting an attack. But beyond sniping and the occasional discharge of a lantaka (culverin cannon) which swept the jungle with a miscellaneous collection of slugs, stones, and old junk, the night passed in comparative quiet. I received word that the assault was to be made at daybreak, after five rounds had been fired by the mountain gun point-blank at the trenches above us.
Precisely at full daylight on March 7, stiff after a restless night within stone's throw of the enemy who had beaten gongs, fired muskets and cannon, and yelled defiance all through the hours of darkness, we left the partial shelter of the trench and jungle, soon reached the fortification and abatis which had halted us the day before, and turned the corner of the mass of fallen trees into a hell of fire. I forced my men through a gap in the bamboo chevaux-de-frise that protected one side of the abatis. It seemed that they were killed or wounded almost as fast as I could push them through. For, once around the corner, we came under the direct fire of the large fort which crowned the summit. Between us and the loopholes which spouted fire, there was nothing that would shelter a rabbit.
At a distance of fifty or a hundred feet even rusty old muskets can do terrible execution, while lantakas loaded with junk are more deadly than machine-guns. Man after man fell dead or rolled back, wounded, down the mountain. Those who were left, shepherded on by Lieutenant Sowers from behind, gallantly followed me as I pushed past the abatis and sprang madly up toward the fort where, paradoxically enough, safety lay. Once up against the walls, we were comparatively safe from the fire which came through loopholes formed by thrusting large bamboo tubes through the earthen walls.
When I prostrated myself, breathless, against the sheltering fort, Sergeant Knox and other American soldiers soon reached me, and we engaged the Moros on the other side in hand-to-hand combat. I attempted to look over the wall, which was but little higher than my head. A spear parted my hair, and the owner of the spear departed this life with a load of buckshot in his chest. Time after time the Moros reached over the wall to dislodge us with spear or kris, and we took toll of Malay lives a-plenty. When they became more careful Sergeant Knox would raise his hat on the muzzle of his rifle, while I stepped back a little so as to get the man who rose to the fly.
Sowers and the remainder of my Constabulary came up on the right, while the blue and khaki figures of American soldiers and Scouts were ascending in a thin, often interrupted but steady stream and massing against the cotta wall for the assault. Next to me a Moro constable, eager to see what damage he had done to those on the other side of the wall, looked through a bamboo tube into the fort, and rolled back with his eye blown out. The slope below us was carpeted with dead and dying Constabulary and Regulars. I rose to urge my men over the wall of the fort. As I clambered up, a gaudily dressed chief slashed at me with a big kris or kampilan. I dodged, lost my grip on the wall, and fell back right in front of one of the loopholes. Although I twisted myself out of the path of death as quickly as possible, I was not quick enough to avoid a bullet which passed through my left leg just above the knee. It was fired from a captured Krag rifle at a foot or two from my knee. The shock paralyzed me. Despite the heat of battle and a tropical sun, I became deadly cold and rolled helplessly away from the fort down the hill. My part in the Bud Dajo fight was ended.
Sergeant Alga and the faithful Fernandez gallantly came to my rescue. They helped me down the exposed area to the shelter of the trench near the abatis, there giving me first aid. The fight raged a few feet above my head, and wounded men poured back until the trench was full. Lieutenant Gordon Johnston of the Signal Corps came up from below, took my shot-gun and belt of ammunition, rushed up to the attack, started the final assault on the cotta, and was back in a few minutes with a load of slugs in upper arm and shoulder. At last there was an increase of fire, yells even more frenzied-then a slight lull as the fort was taken and the fight moved further away. Sergeant Knox staggered back with one hand hanging in shreds, blown to bits as he tried to climb over the wall. An American hospital corps man gave us more efficient first aid. He stopped the bleeding of my wound by a tourniquet. Some of my soldiers returned from the victory and carried me down the mountain-an hour or two of agony that seemed like a week until I reached the field hospital at the base, where a surgeon gave me a shot of morphine. The battering, incessant pain ceased.
The main defenses of Dajo were taken that morning, although twenty-four hours were required to complete the conquest of the mountain. We of the Constabulary were proud that we had reached the crater before the other columns. Over six hundred Moro men, women, and children were killed while resisting to the last. Humanly speaking, the incident was unavoidable. The proud fanaticism of the Moros had caused them to believe that they could resist the American Government. But, certainly, none of us believed that it would ever be necessary to repeat so severe a lesson. We thought that Bud Dajo would teach the Sulu Moros that the days of irresponsible government, of piracy, slavery, and cattle stealing, were ended. Yet six years later, in 1912, at Bagsak Mountain near Jo1o, General Pershing was obliged to repeat the lesson.
War .? Why ?
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