The Walls of Jolo by Alan Caillou

The Walls of Jolo Reviews

• 
  Robert Jackson

  The following words (my words) are from a proud American supporter of our armed forces. The acquisition of the Philippines just was not our (America’s) or our armed forces finest hour. This book, which I read years ago, is not about the Philippine American War but a later war against the Philippines’ Muslim minority, which engaged in piracy, kidnapping, and human trafficking in those days. Those Muslim “Moros” were a great danger to Christian Filipinos and their new American rulers alike.
  
  I found the book to be excellent, a romantic adventure with depth. There are unmentioned themes in the work, which is the way it is supposed to be in good literature. The characterization is good. You care about these people. The cultural mores of people different from those of the protagonists and the reader are well portrayed and you feel the power of culture that can smother the outsider. I write realistic romantic adventures, some set in the Philippines during those times portrayed in the THE WALLS OF JOLO, and I can identify with this story and the author, though I know little about him.
  
  For the basic background to the story, I’ve provided some here. After almost 400 years of Spanish colonial rule, which the people overthrew, the United States conquered them under the claim that their land was spoils of war. I suppose it technically was, but in every other way of looking at it, one can find nothing ethical about the scenario. Finally after independence in 1946, Filipinos joked that, because the incongruous cultures of their two ruling colonial powers, they had spent 400 years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood.
  
  The conquest of the uncooperative Filipino people was not so funny an is a generally dark stain on our history, when we took the Western Indian Wars off continent and took land . . in fact a whole country away from civilized Christians and their less developed peoples of their same Malayan race.
  
  When U.S. forces came to the Philippines, the Christian Filipinos forces (not the Muslim Moros) had just pushed the main Spanish leadership into Intramuros, the walled inner part of Manila. The U.S. Navy destroyed the Spanish squadron in Manila Bay. The outmatched Spanish were allowed to surrender to the Americans not the Filipinos who had essentially defeated and surrounded them. Spain turned over the islands to America in treaty negotiations at the end of the Spanish American War that also required some payment by America. The Christian Filipinos felt they had won independence from almost 400 years of Spanish rule, and fighting broke out between them and the U.S. with no one certain who fired first. The primary war was between the U.S. forces and an officially established Philippine Republic government of Catholic Filipinos fought from 1899 to 1902. Moros we’re not involved and had long before been pushed out of the islands except for, Jolo, Mindanao, and perhaps Palawan, all in the South. This was our nation’s worst hour, with American farm boys who had no indoor plumbing or electricity killing Christian darker people who lived in Manila, an electrified city like New York and other big cities in America. When American modern weapons and training won the conventional war, a guerrilla war began. To control collaboration between rural populations and the Filipino Guerrillas, U.S. commanders resorted to concentration camps to control the population’s behavior. One U.S. general stated that the death and sickness in the camps were teaching the Filipinos a lesson. More or less the entire population of one province, Batangas, was locked in camps. Of course women, children, and the elderly suffered most. Rounding off numbers, this war against Christian Filipinos saw 4,000 U.S. combat dead, 15,000 Filipino combat dead, and between 150,000 and 300,000 Filipino citizens killed. The U.S. officially accepts the 150,000 number. At least 250,000 is probably the actual number. Some Filipino historians have made fantastically higher unbelievable claims.
  
  After this “pacification” of the Philippines, piracy activity by the Moros, which including capture and trafficking of women and children, led to the Moro War between 1906 and 1910. Again, our nation’s forces, faced with a tough enemy and the Americans’ own moral duty, over stepped acceptable bounds and slaughtered men women and children with machine guns at the First Battle of Bud Dajo.
  
  When Spain had earlier left the archipelago, the Philippines had won and deserved independence, but the Filipinos were at risk of almost immediate forced colonization again, this time by Japan of Germany, both rising powers. America should have offered a protectorate status in exchange for favored nation trading agreements and population travel between the two countries. As a colonial power, America was less abusive than Japan or Germany would have been, and Filipinos, as American subjects, could travel to the States.
• 
  Cameron Lawrence

  I'd recommend it. I love that the author was part of the British Army and later the Intelligence Corps. Having been captured himself and escaped, you have to wonder how much of this story is "change the names and call it fiction" but it's clear that Caillou himself has faced many of the obstacles that lie within this tale. On face value alone (as a work of fiction) it may have a handful of storytelling flaws, but knowing the genuine place this author wrote from, I was really into the book and found myself rooting for Sullivan, the main character of our story. Honestly, it would probably make for a great movie. There really wasn't as much talk of war tactics and strategy as another reviewer mentioned. At worst, it slows down the pace of the real story here and there and isn't what this book is about anyway. Still very much worth a read.
• 
  Walter

  The Walls of Jolo is the story of American soldiers in a different kind of war, a war where the enemy is hidden and attacks in secret, Muslim insurgents in a foreign land in a very limited war. Does it sound like the American experience in Iraq or Afghanistan? That's how it sounded to me as I read the "Walls of Jolo", but this story was actually written in 1908 and is about the US Army's involvement among the "Moros" of the Phillipines in the Phillipine Insurrection.
  
  In the years immediately following the Spanish-American War, the US Army occupation forces in the newly acquired Spanish territory of the Phillipines were faced with rebellion by Muslim populations in several of the Phillipine islands. American soldiers were sent to outposts among the Moros where they were expected to easily overwhelm these "savages" with advanced soldiering. But the US soldiers were hunted like animals in strange terrain among a foreign people. The "Walls of Jolo" describes the terror and confusion felt among US soldiers during the Phillipine Insurrection. This was a little known war, but in the light of the US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, this little known war should be better known among military planners and tacticians. I am actually surprised that Caillou's novel has not been reprinted for just the purpose since 9/11.
  
  Although I have only rated this novel with 3 stars, it is a valuable work for students of wars of insurgency. The problem with this novel is that it is not a well crafted novel. The storyline is muddy and the characters are not well developed. I am not familiar with the background of Alan Caillou but I assume that he was either a military man or a war correspondent because of his great knowledge of the warfare and tactics of the time. For those who are looking for a good description of insurgencies at the turn of the century, this novel is must reading.
  
  There is a place in this novel where the author opines that the age of great armies clashing in large battles, such as were seen in the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War, were a thing of the past. The author wrote this about 10 years before World War I and several years before WWII and Korea, so his prediction that all future wars would be insurgencies was far from true. But Caillou wrote this novel in the immediate wake of the Boer War and the Phillipine Insurrection, at a time when small wars against irregular forces looked like they were becoming the norm. It is interesting that the same claims are being made by military theorists today in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps they should read "Walls of Jolo" and experience the deja vu.
• 
  Rishindra Chinta

  This novel started out well, but my interest started diminishing after the first half. I was kind of hoping for a better plot. But I liked the author's prose style and how he wrote action.