First Battle of Bud Dajo

First Battle of Bud Dajo
Part of the Moro Rebellion

U.S. soldiers pose with Moro dead after the battle
DateMarch 5–8, 1906
Location
Bud Dajo, Jolo Island, Philippines
Result American victory
Belligerents
 United States Moros
Commanders and leaders
General Leonard Wood
Col. Joseph W. Duncan		 Unknown
Strength
750[1] 1,000+ Moro people
Casualties and losses
15–21 killed,
70 wounded[2][1]		 800–900 (including women and children)[3]

The First Battle of Bud Dajo, also known as the Moro Crater Massacre, was a counterinsurgency action conducted by the United States Army and Marine Corps[4] against the Moro people in March 1906, during the Moro Rebellion in the southwestern Philippines.[5][6][7]

During the engagement, 750 men and officers, under the command of Colonel Joseph Wilson Duncan, assaulted the volcanic crater of Bud Dajo (Tausūg: Būd Dahu), which was populated by 800 to 1,000 Tausug villagers. According to Hermann Hagedorn (who was writing prior to World War II), the position held by the Moros was "the strongest which hostiles in the Philippines have ever defended against American assault."[8] Although the engagement was a victory for the American forces, it was also an unmitigated public-relations disaster. Whether a battle or massacre, it was certainly the bloodiest of any engagement of the Moro Rebellion, with only six of the hundreds of Moro surviving the bloodshed.[9][unreliable source?] Estimates of American casualties range from fifteen[2] to twenty-one killed and seventy wounded.[1]

Whether the occupants of Bud Dajo were hostile to U.S. forces is disputed, as inhabitants of Jolo Island had previously used the crater, which they considered sacred, as a place of refuge during Spanish assaults.[10] Major Hugh Scott, the district governor of Sulu Province, where the incident occurred, recounted that those who fled to the crater "declared they had no intention of fighting, - ran up there only in fright, [and] had some crops planted and desired to cultivate them."[11] The description of the engagement as a "battle" is disputed because of both the overwhelming firepower of the attackers and the lopsided casualties. Author Vic Hurley wrote, "By no stretch of the imagination could Bud Dajo be termed a 'battle'".[12] Mark Twain commented, "In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle ... We cleaned up our four days' work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people."[13] A higher percentage of Moros were killed (99 percent) than in other incidents now considered massacres, such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Some of those killed were women and children. Moro men in the crater who had arms possessed melee weapons. While fighting was limited to ground action on Jolo, the use of naval gunfire contributed significantly to the overwhelming firepower brought to bear against the Moros.

  1. ^ a b c Arnold, J.R. (2011). The Moro War. New York: Bloomsbury Press. pp. 151, 170. ISBN 9781608190249.
  2. ^ a b Pacifying the Moros: American Military Government in the Southern Philippines, 1899–1913 Archived 2019-04-12 at the Wayback Machine, Charles Byler, Ph.D
  3. ^ Ceniza Choy, Catherine; Tzu-Chun Wu, Judy (March 13, 2017). Gendering the Trans-Pacific World. Brill. p. 184. ISBN 978-90-04-33610-0. During the battle, almost everyone in the village, including women and children, were killed, an estimated 800-900 Moros.
  4. ^ Llanes, Ferdinand C. (2016-09-18). "Remembering Bud Dajo and Bud Bagsak". INQUIRER.net. Retrieved 2024-06-19.
  5. ^ Benjamin R. Beede (August 21, 2013). The War of 1898 and U.S. Interventions, 1898T1934: An Encyclopedia. Routledge. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-136-74691-8. By the end of the operation, the estimated 600 Muslims in Bud Daju were wiped out.
  6. ^ Pershing, John J. (June 25, 2013). My Life before the World War, 1860-1917: A Memoir. University Press of Kentucky. p. 386. ISBN 978-0-8131-4198-5. These are merely estimates, because no firm number of Moro dead was ever established.
  7. ^ Dphrepaulezz, Omar H. (May 6, 2013). "The Right Sort of White Men": General Leonard Wood and the U.S. Army in the Southern Philippines, 1898-1906 (doctoral dissertation). p. 8. Retrieved August 11, 2015.
  8. ^ Hagedorn 1931, p. 64
  9. ^ The Battle of Bud Dajo (archived from the original Archived May 9, 2008, at the Wayback Machine on 2008-05-09), chapter 19 of Swish of the Kris (archived from the original Archived February 2, 2008, at the Wayback Machine on 2008-02-02), by Vic Hurley.
  10. ^ Smythe, Donald (August 1962). "Pershing and the Disarmament of the Moros". Pacific Historical Review. 31 (3): 241–256. doi:10.2307/3637168. JSTOR 3637168.
  11. ^ The statement from Scott comes from: Gedacht, Joshua. "Mohammedan Religion Made It Necessary to Fire:" Massacres on the American Imperial Frontier from South Dakota to the Southern Philippines". In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, pp. 397-409. Information on the use of craters as sites of refuge during Spanish attacks can be found in: Warren, James Francis. The Sulu Zone, 1768-1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, 2nd ed. Singapore: NUS Press, 2007.
  12. ^ Hurley, Vic; Harris, Christopher L. (2010). Swish of the Kris, the Story of the Moros. Cerberus Books. p. 186. ISBN 9780615382425.
  13. ^ Twain, Mark (2017). Comments on the Moro Massacre. E-artnow. ISBN 9788026878148.