Matthew Westfall - Devils Causeway: The True Story of Americas First Prisoners of War in the Philippines, and the Heroic Expedition Sen

THE USS YORKTOWN

THE LANDING PARTY

THE 2ND CUTTER

THE SPANISH GARRISON

THE SPANISH FRANCISCAN PRIESTS

THE FILIPINO ARMY OF LIBERATION

THE US ARMY

This moment was one to be captured for posterity.

Twenty-three gaunt, starving men approached a gray boulder that punctuated the rock-strewn bank of the river. Wracked by disease and riddled with sores, the haggard souls mustered their last reserves of energy to hoist each other up and jostle into position. A small American flag was handed to the dazed senior naval officer of the party, Lieutenant James C. Gillmore Jr., who weakly held it aloft.

That a camera was present there and then, in the war-ravaged Philippines, two weeks shy of the close of the nineteenth century, defied all odds. Brought along by a forward-thinking army lieutenant, the Kodak folding pocket camera had been introduced in the United States just eight months earlier, in April 1899. The hand-sized marvel of photographic innovation had survived a transpacific ocean journey to the Philippines, a grueling months-long march into northern Luzon, pitched battles against insurgents, and a daring mission into the uncharted hinterlands of the Cordilleras to rescue the men now assembled.

But the journey to this site would prove to be just half the miracle: After the single photograph was snapped, consuming the final frame of the last cartridge of film, the Kodak joined the Gillmore party prisoners and 168-soldier rescue column on a harrowing ninety-mile mountain descent along a winding, turbulent river, suffering extremes of mountain frost and stifling tropical heat, and at least two dunkings in the bone-chilling current. Nonetheless, the camera and the cartridge arrived safely in Manila, as did, for the most part, the broken men.

Months later, the improbable portrait of the liberated Gillmore party ran in newspapers across the United States, accompanying a startling tale of siege, survival, and salvation. The account made colorful headlines, albeit briefly: A US Navy mission, sent to rescue a besieged Spanish garrison, had gone horribly awry. A ferocious rebel assault on a hapless cutter crew had left a number of sailors either dead or in captivity. And after more than eight harrowing months as prisoners of war, the survivors had been dramatically freed from insurgent hands by two battalions of US Army volunteer infantry. By many accounts, Lieutenant Gillmore was a hero. His survival and rescue were nothing less than triumphs of civility over savagery, underpinned by Americas daunting military might. How could anyone know that these events were just fragments of a larger story, one that had yet to be told?

And then, like all fresh news that quickly grows stale, the account of the US Navys stunning debacle at Baler, the captivity of the first American prisoners of war in a foreign land, and the US Army units sent to their rescue was lost to time. The photograph of the Gillmore party prisoners on the very morning of their liberation was filed away and forgotten. No further thought was given to the event, nor the great consequences suffered by the men involved and the country in which it occurred.