Battle of Tirad Pass, 1899: Gregorio del Pilar's last stand

On a mountain trail in northern Luzon, a few dozen Filipino soldiers behind a wall of piled stones held up an American battalion for hours. Almost all of them died there, their young general among them. What they bought with their lives was time: the president of the Philippine Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, got away into the mountains and stayed free for more than a year.²

Who won the Battle of Tirad Pass and why?

The Americans won the fight: Major Peyton C. March's battalion of the 33rd Volunteer Infantry took the pass and killed General del Pilar and most of his sixty men. They won because a company climbed the cliff above the barricade and fired down on it. The Filipinos still achieved their aim, since Aguinaldo escaped.³

Background: the end of the regular war

The war grew out of the Spanish-American War of 1898. After the Treaty of Paris, which handed the Philippines from Spain to the United States, fighting broke out between the Philippine Republic and the American army around Manila on 4 and 5 February 1899. On 31 March the Americans took the Filipino capital, Malolos.⁴

In the autumn of 1899 the American commander, General Elwell Otis, planned to finish the Filipino army in one stroke. One column under General Henry Lawton was to sweep north through the province of Nueva Ecija and close the passes into the mountains, a second under General Lloyd Wheaton was to land by sea at San Fabian on the Lingayen Gulf and block the west coast, and a third under General Arthur MacArthur was to push up the railroad and drive Aguinaldo into the arms of the other two. Sexton, writing for the Army in 1939, points out that the plan never said where the two encircling columns were to meet.⁵

The trap did not close. Wheaton's troops, the 33rd Infantry among them, came ashore at San Fabian on 7 November, and a few days later the regiment scattered a Filipino force under General Manuel Tinio at San Jacinto, but the Americans did not push on far enough to bar the roads north. Around 12 November, at a council of war at Bayambang, Aguinaldo and his generals decided that their army could no longer fight in the field. A decree signed by Aguinaldo that day ordered the troops of central Luzon to fight on in flying columns and guerrilla bands.⁶

By the time MacArthur's troops reached Bayambang, the government had scattered. On 23 November MacArthur reported that the "so-called Filipino Republic" was destroyed: its congress dissolved, its president a fugitive, its army gone as an organization. Aguinaldo himself slipped away to the northwest with a small party and his bodyguard, heading up the Ilocos coast toward the mountains of Lepanto, with General Samuel B. M. Young's cavalry and scouts behind him.⁷

Armies and commanders

His rearguard was led by Gregorio del Pilar, one of the best-known officers of the revolution. Born in Bulacan on 14 November 1875 and educated at the Ateneo in Manila, he joined the revolt against Spain in 1896, signed the truce of Biak-na-Bato in 1897 and went into exile in Hong Kong with Aguinaldo. Back in 1898, he besieged the Spanish garrison of Bulacan until it surrendered, and was made a general, the youngest in the Philippine army.⁸

In 1899 he fought the Americans around Manila and in Bulacan. He commanded the Filipinos at Quingua, where the American Colonel John M. Stotsenburg was killed, and he went as Aguinaldo's envoy on the peace missions that followed the fall of Malolos. In the retreat north Aguinaldo gave him the hardest task of all: to hold the mountain pass behind the president and cover his escape.⁹

The pursuers were men of the 33rd Infantry, United States Volunteers, a regiment raised in 1899 for service in the Philippines and known as the Texas Regiment. It reached the islands in the autumn of 1899 and went ashore with Wheaton at San Fabian.¹⁰

Its 2nd Battalion was commanded by Major Peyton C. March, a regular officer who in 1918 would become Chief of Staff of the US Army. In late November his battalion was sent up the Ilocos coast to join Young's column.¹¹

The two sides were very unequal. Del Pilar had about sixty picked men. For the Americans the sources differ: the 1952 marker of the National Historical Commission at the pass says over 300, while the Philippine Folklife Museum gives 500. March himself learned later that the men at the pass were a picked force from Aguinaldo's own bodyguard.¹²

The pursuit to the pass

Young's men had been chasing Aguinaldo for weeks. On 22 November Young reported that Aguinaldo was "playing hide and seek", one day in the mountains and the next on the coast road, and that his own cavalry was worn out and short of horseshoes. He asked for fresh troops, and March's battalion was sent up the coast to join him on 26 November.¹³

At Candon Aguinaldo and Tinio separated. A captured letter showed Young that Aguinaldo was at Angaki on 28 November and meant to go on to Cervantes, beyond the mountains, the next day, leaving del Pilar to fortify and hold the pass behind him; Tinio went north to hold another pass with a larger force. On 30 November Young sent March into the mountains on Aguinaldo's trail, promising to cover his rear against Tinio.¹⁴

The battle in phases

The barricade. Most of what is known about the fight comes from March's own report. He described the place in detail. The pass rose to 4,440 feet, and the trail climbed the mountain in a sharp zigzag so narrow that his men had to go up in single file. Across it the Filipinos had built a loopholed stone barricade at a point that commanded the turns of the zigzag for a long way, and behind it, around a sharp bend, two more trenches. The 1952 marker at the pass also speaks of a rocky barricade thrown across the trail.¹⁵

The first volleys. On the morning of 2 December 1899 the head of the column, beyond the village of Lingey, ran into heavy fire from the barricade that killed and wounded several men before anyone could see where it came from. March brought up the rest of his command at the double and found the position with his field glasses, guided, he wrote, by a Filipino officer who showed himself freely and directed the fire. The defenders' fire came entirely from Mauser rifles firing smokeless powder.¹⁶

A front attack fails. As March pushed forward, his losses grew so fast that he saw the barricade could not be taken from the front on a trail that let men pass only one at a time. To the left of the wall was a gorge several hundred feet deep; to the right a cliff rose 1,500 feet above the trail. March put ten sharpshooters under Sergeant Major McDougall on a hill across the gorge, from which they could fire on the trail behind the barricade.¹⁷

The climb. Then March sent Lieutenant Frank Tompkins with H Company back down the trail and up the face of the mountain, along a slight ridge that ended about 150 feet below the summit. From there the men pulled themselves up by twigs and by hand. The climb took two hours, and all the while the defenders kept up an accurate fire and rolled stones down on them. The Philippine Military Academy's biography of del Pilar adds that a local man, Jose Galut, showed the Americans a hidden approach.¹⁸

Turning point

When Tompkins's men appeared on the crest, they could fire straight down into the trenches behind the barricade. At the same moment March charged the wall itself and drove the defenders over the hill. His men found eight dead on the trail, and the bushes at the edge of the gorge were broken and stained with blood where dead or wounded men had fallen through. Among the dead was del Pilar. March reached the summit at 4:30 that afternoon and camped there.¹⁹

John T. McCutcheon of the Chicago Record, who marched with the Americans and had met del Pilar in Manila, wrote that the general was the last man to fall. Already wounded in the shoulder, he was about to mount his horse when a bullet struck him in the neck. The Folklife Museum speaks of a sniper's bullet. Soldiers stripped the body of everything of value, and the papers in his pockets, muster rolls, letters from Aguinaldo and a diary, were handed to March.²⁰

Losses

March's loss was 2 killed and 9 wounded. The figure of 52 Filipino dead was given to him at Cervantes by the Filipinos themselves, and the Folklife Museum, Sexton and Andersen repeat it; the 1952 marker says more than fifty.²¹

The sources do not agree on what del Pilar wrote in his diary before he died. McCutcheon, who saw it, gave the last words as "I am holding a difficult position against desperate odds, but I will gladly die for my beloved country." The Folklife Museum quotes a longer entry, dated the night before the battle, in which he calls the defense of the pass "the most glorious moment of my life".²²

Aftermath

The defense did what it was meant to do. Aguinaldo had been resting at Cervantes, beyond the pass. Runners brought him the news of del Pilar's death at 5 p.m. that day, and that same night he left the town and fled east into the high mountains.²³

March followed. He reached Cervantes on 3 December, rested his men a day, and on 5 December set out with a hundred of his fittest men up a trail that climbed to 9,000 feet. At Cayan Aguinaldo's chief of staff, General Venancio Concepcion, came in and surrendered. March pushed on with 86 men to near Bontoc, where he learned that Aguinaldo had passed through three days before on fresh ponies. He gave up the chase, gathered the Spanish prisoners the Filipinos had left behind, and turned back.²⁴

Aguinaldo stayed free in northern Luzon for more than a year. He was captured only on 23 March 1901, by American troops led by General Frederick Funston. The guerrilla war he had ordered went on after his capture; the Library of Congress dates the end of the war to July 1902.²⁵

Legacy and memory

The battle became a legend almost at once. Andersen notes that American war correspondents wrote it up in embellished and partly false versions that ran in newspapers across the United States, and March himself called the pass "the insurgents' Thermopylae". In the Philippines del Pilar became the "boy general" of the revolution, and the Philippine Military Academy's home at Baguio is named Fort del Pilar in his honor.²⁶

The sources differ on his age. The 1952 marker and Sexton call him 22 and McCutcheon 23, while the birth date of 14 November 1875 given by the Folklife Museum and the Philippine Military Academy makes him 24. The pass itself lies today in the municipality of Gregorio del Pilar, Ilocos Sur, which bears his name.²⁷ › Battle of San Juan Hill, 1898