Today in Manhunting History -- February 19, 1917: The Death of Frederick Funston

As pressure increased for America to enter World War I, Major General Frederick Funston -- hero of the hunt for Philippine insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901 -- emerged as the leading candidate to command the American Expeditionary Force.

On February 19, 1917, Secretary of War Baker threw a dinner party at his home with President Wilson as guest of honor. Major Douglas MacArthur, the son of Funston’s former commander in the Philippines, was on night watch duty for the General Staff. Peyton March, now a lieutenant colonel, was also on staff duty that night. At about 10PM, March brought MacArthur a telegram that both officers agreed was important enough to be delivered to Baker at once. MacArthur writes:

When I reached the Secretary’s home, the butler refused to let me enter, saying that he had orders to admit no one. The dining room looked out on the entrance hall and I could see it plainly. It was a gay party, with lights and laughter, the tinkle of glasses, the soft music from an alcove, the merry quips and jokes of a cosmopolitan group. I finally pushed by the butler and tried to attract the attention of the Secretary so I could report to him privately what had occurred. But the President saw me and sang out in the most jovial manner, “Come in, Major, and tell all of us the news. There are no secrets here.” There was a general clapping of hands at this, and I knew I was in for it. So clicked my heels together, saluted him, and barked in a drill-sergeant tone, “Sir, I regret to report that General Funston has just died.” Had the voice of doom spoken, the result could not have been different. The silence seemed like that of death itself. You could hear your own breathing. Then, I never saw such a scattering of guests in my life. It was a stampede.

Frederick S. Funston had survived the extremities of deserts, tundra, and jungles, multiple tropical diseases, and five wounds from enemy fire. While sitting in the lobby of the Saint Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, he heard an orchestra playing, and commented “How beautiful it all is,” when his own heart finally failed him at the age of 51. His body was the first to ever lay in state at the Alamo, before eventually being buried at the Presidio.

With Funston’s passing, “Black Jack” Pershing became the logical choice to command the American Expeditionary Force in France. He successfully led U.S. forces to victory in World War I, and was rewarded in 1919 with promotion to the artificial rank of six-star “General of the Armies,” a grade occupied only by himself and the posthumously promoted George Washington.

Major General Frederick Funston, 1865-1917

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Today in Manhunting History: February 5 -- The Offensive Against Aguinaldo

Although the firefight of 4 February was a random occurrence, General Otis had spent the previous three months carefully developing a battle plan with his division commanders and Admiral Dewey. On the morning of 5 February he put this contingency plan into effect and ordered immediate offensive operations. The subsequent battle would be the biggest of the war, fought along a 16-mile front and involving all or part of 13 regiments and thousands of Filipinos. By the afternoon the Americans had overwhelmed the Filipino nationalist forces, taking all the disputed territory between the armies while suffering 238 casualties – of whom 44 were killed in action or died of their wounds – against an estimated 4,000 Filipino casualties.

The intensity of the American assault stunned Aguinaldo and his generals. Filipino morale had been soaring after the string of victories over demoralized Spanish forces – as well as the failure of U.S. forces to respond to numerous provocations. Five-hundred pound shells from Dewey’s guns crashed into the Filipino trenches. Unlike the Spaniards, the Americans were excellent shots, were aggressive, and moved fast. Aguinaldo sent envoys to Otis offering a truce and the creation of a neutral buffer between the two armies, to be followed by peace talks, but Otis simply replied: “The fighting, having once begun, must go on to the grim end.” 

Aguinaldo was quickly demonized by Americans. Secretary of War Elihu Root called him “an assassin” and “a Chinese half-breed.” Frank Millet wrote in Harper’s Weekly that “he has the keen cunning of the Chinaman, and the personal vanity and light mental caliber of the Filipino.” The New York Times declared that Aguinaldo was nothing but “a vain popinjay, wicked liar, and a perfectly incapable leader” whose men were “dupes, a foolish incredulous mob,” and that the “mischievous influence of this tricky little man must be broken.” Even Admiral Dewey, who had previously spoken fondly of the young Filipino, told anyone who would listen that Aguinaldo was only interested in “revenge, plunder, and pillage.”

Otis, whom one historian has aptly described as “the Philippine war’s answer to George McClellan, without the latter’s good looks,” was slow to pursue the battered Filipino forces, and allowed a month to pass before resuming the offensive. It wouldn't be until late March that he ordered Major General Arthur MacArthur’s division to attack along the railway line stretching north out of the capital to capture Malolos, 20 miles up the line. Otis believed that the north held the enemy’s center of gravity -- its army, its capital, and its commander-in-chief, Aguinaldo -- and was sure that the capture of this trinity would break the opposition.

MG Otis and staff at Malcanan Palace, Manilla

Today in Manhunting History -- February 4, 1899: The Start of the Phillippine War

 
President William McKinley’s January 1899 proclamation to the Filipinos that America’s mission in the Philippines was “one of benevolent assimilation” was met with derision and ridicule. Within 24 hours every placard in Manila bearing McKinley’s message was torn down. Self-declared president of the Philippine Republic Emilio Aguinaldo responded by issuing a manifesto tantamount to a declaration of war. Aguinaldo directed his provincial commanders to stockpile rice and other supplies in preparation for war, encouraged local commanders to forcefully resist American demands, and instructed a fifth column of native commandos inside Manila to plan attacks against the Americans inside the capital. On 20 January the Philippine Congress voted Aguinaldo authority to declare war at any moment he saw fit. Shooting incidents occurred nightly, and on 3 February General Elwell S. Otis wrote to Admiral George Dewey: “There has been a great deal of friction along the lines the past two days, and we will be unable to tamely submit to the insulting conduct and threatening demonstrations of these insurgents much longer.

On Saturday night, 4 February, 1899 a silver moon hung brightly over Malolos, the temporary seat of the revolutionary government where much of the Philippine senior civilian and military leadership had gathered for a ball. Outside Manila, Private William Grayson of the 1st Nebraska Volunteers and a buddy manned an outpost overlooking the no-man’s-land near the confluence of the Pasig and San Juan Rivers. Around 8:30PM Grayson heard movement along the tiny dirt road in front of the advanced Nebraskan picket line. Twenty-three years old, thousands of miles away from his home in Beatrice, Nebraska, Grayson shouted, “Halt! Who comes there!”

A voice in the dark mockingly called back “Alto!” and four armed Filipinos appeared out of the shadows five yards away, advancing towards the Nebraskan line.

“Halt!” Grayson shouted again, and again he was ignored by the Filipinos. Under orders to assume any advancing Filipinos were hostile, Grayson and his companion raised their rifles and opened fire, their initial volley killing two men.

The other Filipinos ran back to their fortifications, yelling obscenities as they fled. Within minutes the entire Nebraskan line was ablaze as both sides reacted to the incident, firing blindly into the night. By midnight the fire had abated, with little damage suffered by either side.

The Philippine War had begun, and soon with it, the hunt for Emilio Aguinaldo.

Private William Grayson, 1st Nebraska Volunteers, standing on the spot where his shots initiated the Philippine War on February 4, 1899.

Today in Manhunting History -- November 19, 1865: Frederick Funston's Birthday

Of all the fascinating military figures I encountered while researching Wanted Dead or Alive, my personal favorite was Frederick Funston, the 5'4" 120-pound general who in 1901 lead a daring mission 100 miles behind enemy lines to capture Filipino insurgent leader General Emilio Aguinaldo.

On this day in 1865 in New Carlisle, Ohio, Funston was born to an artilleryman in the Union Army who after the war moved the family to Kansas and eventually was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. When Funston graduated from high school he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps by entering the military, but was denied an appointment to West Point because of poor grades, a weak competitive exam score, and his height. He subsequently enrolled at Kansas State University, but after two desultory years dropped out and took jobs as a court reporter for a West Arkansas newspaper and a ticket collector on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway. In 1890 he passed a civil service examination and became a botanist serving on expeditions to such forbidding locations as the just-pacified Bad Lands, the hellish Death Valley, and the frigid Yukon territory, where he completed a 1,400 mile solo trip down the Yukon River.

Funston was in New York City trying to sell rights to a memoir of his adventures, when out of curiosity on a spring evening in 1896 he followed a crowd into Madison Square Garden. There, he found a political rally in progress promoting the cause of the Cuban Revolution against Spain, with the former Union General Daniel E. Sickles the featured speaker. The event implanted martial images in Funston’s mind that kept him awake with excitement, and before dawn arrived the next morning he had decided to volunteer for his first war. During a visit to the Cuban junta, the Cubans said they particularly needed artillery officers. Although Funston’s experience with artillery was limited to once “having seen a salute fired to President Hayes at a county fair in Kansas,” he signed on with that designation and proceeded to teach himself the art of gunnery with a Hotchkiss twelve-pounder he found at an arms dealer. Thus, knowing no conversational Spanish and lacking any formal military training, Funston became an artillery officer in the Cuban insurrecto army.

Over the course of a year’s fighting in 1897, he was shot or hit by shrapnel three times – including a Mauser bullet that passed through both lungs in June – and had his horse shot out from underneath him on another occasion that crushed his legs and impaled his thigh upon a dry stick. In addition to the persistent hunger he shared with his revolutionary comrades, Funston contracted malaria and was subject to periodic fevers and chills, and contracted typhoid fever during one of his many hospital confinements. On 12 December 1897, while about to go on leave, Funston was captured by a Spanish patrol. Looking directly into the barrel of Spanish rifles, knowing he could be shot at any moment, Funston quickly invented a story about how he was actually deserting from the insurrecto army and had been looking for Spaniards to whom he could surrender. As he spun his tale, he subtly slid his hand in to his pocket, placed the incriminating leave papers in his handkerchief, pulled the handkerchief out to swab the perspiration on his face, and managed to slip the papers into his mouth and swallow them without being noticed. The Spaniards subsequently conveyed Funston to Havana, where he was soon placed upon the first available ship for New York.

To the average man, the series of wounds and diseases Funston suffered in Cuba would be enough to dissuade them from ever again volunteering for war in a tropical climate. But such was Funston’s passion for adventure – and perhaps his sense of invulnerability – that when the Spanish-American War erupted the following spring he leaped at the opportunity to serve as the colonel of the 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry, one of three regiments the Jayhawk State was raising in response to President McKinley’s call for 125,000 volunteers to augment the meager regular army. While training his regiment and awaiting deployment in San Francisco, Funston undertook what may have been his most daring venture yet – in two weeks he met, wooed, and proposed to Ms. Eda Blankart. They were married on October 25, 1898. Two days later, Colonel Funston left his bride and sailed with the second and third battalions of the 20th Kansas on the transport Indiana, bound for Manila.

Frederick Funston, 5'4", 120 pounds, in the uniform of the 20th Kansas

The bantam colonel quickly made a name for himself for his personal courage and aggressive tactics. Funston’s Kansans were always in the lead of the American offensives. During the fighting of 5 February 1899, Funston led his regiment up the coast so swiftly that he came under fire from the U.S.S. Charleston and had to stop. “There goes Kansas,” exclaimed General Arthur MacArthur as the regiment swarmed, yelling and shooting, toward Caloocan during 1899’s spring campaign, “and all Hell can’t stop here.” MacArthur wired back to headquarters: “CALOOCAN TAKEN. KANSAS A MILE IN ADVANCE OF THE LINE. WILL STOP THEM IF I CAN.”



On 27 April, 1899, MacArthur and General Lloyd Wheaton’s combined brigades found themselves halted at the banks of the Rio Grande de la Pampanga by a formidable entrenchment of 4,000 Filipinos backed by artillery and a Maxim machine gun. The only way of establishing a beachhead on the enemy bank seemed to be by a combined artillery assault to cover the activities of a small unit in the river. After two Kansas privates swam across with a long coil of rope, Funston personally took seven men across on the a raft and, ordering the rest of his troops across in stages, he dashed with a half-dozen men into the trenches. “I realized perfectly well that according to the rules of the game a colonel should not leave the bulk of his regiment on one side of a stream and accompany a detachment smaller than a company in size,” Funston recalled, but he “knew mighty well that if I should send a small force across and sacrifice it I would be damned in my home State all the rest of my life, and held up to scorn by all the corner-grocery tacticians in the country.”

Although they only found dead and wounded Filipinos remaining in the trenches, they soon came under fire from the Filipino Maxim gun positioned across a stream 300 yards a way. An American soldier yelled out, “It’s the Maxim – we’re goners,” only to receive a kick from Funston, who told him to be quiet. Funston stood up, saw that the gun was beneath a railroad culvert, and ordered his prone men to rise. “Under that culvert, rapid fire,” he yelled, and the gun was silenced. Funston was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the crossing of the Rio Grande.

When the war devolved into a grinding counterinsurgency campaign, Funston was given command of the Fourth District of the army's Department of Northern Luzon, where because of his previous experience as an insurgent, he was one of the army's more effective counterinsurgency commanders.  He was still serving in this position on February 4, 1901, when news arrived that a courier bearing dispatches from Aguinaldo had been captured. But that is another story . . .

Today in Manhunting History -- May 24, 1898: Arming Aguinaldo

After Aguinaldo spent the night aboard Admiral Dewey's flagship [see May 19], the next morning he was provided with close to a hundred rifles, some cannons, and ammunition courtesy of Dewey, who encouraged him to “go ashore and start your army.”  Four days later, on 24 May, Dewey allowed a steamer from Hong Kong filled with thousands of rifles and ammunition to reach Aguinaldo at Cavite. 

Years later, when the young Filipino became the target of a massive U.S. strategic manhunt, Dewey explained that he requested Aguinaldo’s return to the Philippines “as it was possible that he might have valuable information to impart at a time when no source of information was to be neglected.”  Moreover, he told Congress, “we had a common enemy [in Spain], and of course I wanted his help.”   Consequently “my policy was to avoid any entangling alliance with the insurgents, while I appreciated that, pending the arrival of our troops, they might be of service.”

News of Aguinaldo’s return spread like wildfire through the Philippines.  Aguinaldo moved quickly to consolidate his political power, proclaiming himself dictator on 24 May to rule during the initial stages of the renewed insurgency. He reassembled the insurgent forces, and began operations around Manila at the end of May.  His troops proceeded to capture much of the Cavite region and lay siege to Manila, taking more than 2,000 Spanish prisoners.  By the end of June, central Luzon was in Filipino hands.  Aguinaldo’s army numbered about 30,000 men, exclusive of small hit-and-run groups that operated as far south as the Moro islands. 

Today in Manhunting History -- May 19, 1898: Aguinaldo's Homecoming

The morning sun still hung low over the horizon on 19 May, 1898, illuminating the rocky shores of Corregidor Island as the U.S.S McCulloch sailed into Manila Bay.  Over the next few hours the revenue cutter passed the spongy littoral marshes south of Cavite, the small peninsula jutting into the bay ten miles south of Manila.  As the ship passed the peninsula, passengers on the landward side could make out the twisted rigging and battered funnels of battleships protruding above the water line – the wreckage of the Spanish fleet destroyed by Admiral George Dewey’s squadron in a stunning naval victory less than three weeks earlier.

           

The “remnants and ruins” of the Spanish fleet were an especially powerful image for one of the McCullough’s passengers, Emilio Aguinaldo.  Barely 28 years old, Aguinaldo was not physically imposing, only five-foot-four and slight of build.  His face was handsome despite scars from a childhood bout of smallpox.  His wide, high brow suggested intelligence, and sat over clear, serene, and slightly Asiatic eyes.  Although the three day trip across the South China Sea from Hong Kong had been outwardly uneventful, the young man’s mind was in perpetual turmoil. 

Emilio Aguinaldo

Despite his youth, Aguinaldo was returning from exile in Hong Kong as the leader of the Philippine revolution against Spanish colonial rule in the archipelago.  As the McCullough traversed the waves, his waking hours had been spent in deep reflection: Would he find his people as ready to support his cause as before?  Had his acceptance of exile tainted his ability to lead?  And what about his family, and the families of his comrades in arms that had been left behind?  Had the Spanish honored their promises to guarantee their safety?  Or in the panic of war with the Americans would they take them as hostages, or worse, torture and perhaps kill them?

           

As these thoughts turned over and over in his mind, the red-tile roofs of the old city of Manila appeared over the horizon.  Just after noon, the McCulloch dropped anchor in Manila’s inner harbor.  Almost immediately, Admiral Dewey’s launch pulled up alongside to convey Aguinaldo to the Admiral aboard his flagship.  Accompanied by his aides Colonel Gregorio del Pilar and Lieutenant J. Leyba, he boarded the launch, and quickly found himself being piped over the Olympia, the cruiser which served as the Dewey’s flagship.  Upon boarding, he was enthusiastically greeted by a tall, slim man with wavy grey hair and a thick, white mustache.  Admiral Dewey was a 60 year old naval veteran of the Civil War who wore an immaculate, tailored dress-white uniform and polished high-instep boots.  Dewey immediately ushered Aguinaldo and his aides to his private quarters for discussions of the course ahead.

Dewey aboard the U.S.S. Olympia

           

Over the next twenty-four hours, Aguinaldo’s mind would be put to rest on several issues, as he received the American commander’s blessing to restart his revolution.  Although he could not know it that afternoon in Manila Bay, within two months he would be at the height of his power, the President of the nascent Republic of the Philippines in command of 30,000 troops and in control of almost the entire archipelago. 

           

Perhaps still more inconceivable, within a year Emilio Aguinaldo would become the most wanted man in the Philippines, with as many as 70,000 American troops possessing orders to capture or kill him.