Gunboats, Spanish American War

                                     TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY

                                             25 SEPTEMBER 1899

                                     THE CAPTURE OF URDANETA

The autumn of 1898 saw the end of the Spanish-American war and the ceding of the Philippine Islands from Spain to the United States.  Militant Filipinos who had been struggling against Spanish colonial rule shifted their animosities toward their new stewards.  For the next four years the US countered this insurgent uprising–the Navy’s roles including patrolling inshore waters, providing gunfire support, and landing Marines at coastal and riverine jump-off’s.  It was during one such patrol that the 70-foot gunboat USS URDANETA ran aground in the Orani River on 17 September 1899.  Naval Cadet Welborn C. Wood and his eight-man crew worked for days at freeing their boat but had their efforts interrupted on the 25^th.  Insurgents discovered the stranded URDANETA and opened fire from the densely jungled riverbank.  Wood’s men sprang to action but found defense against an unseen enemy difficult.  Wood and half his crew were killed in the fire fight.  The survivors escaped overboard but were quickly captured.  URDANETA fell to the enemy, the only naval vessel to be captured during this “Philippine Insurrection,” as it was known in America.

Elsewhere, US Marines and Army soldiers found the land campaign an unwelcome departure from our past wartime experiences.  The outmatched enemy abandoned conventional tactics in favor of guerrilla warfare.  Enemy troops blended imperceptibly into the local populace.  Marine patrols might enter a rural village to the welcoming greetings of peasants working their rice paddies–only to be ambushed further down the road by these same peasant-insurgents.  Jungle patrols encountered booby traps with spring-loaded spears or poison-tipped arrows.  More than a few Marines fell victim to pungy pits lined with sharpened bamboo spears.  Random acts of terrorism became frequent.  On one Sunday morning, an American sentry playing solitaire was approached by an innocent looking street vendor selling eggs.  Before the sentry could look up however, he was decapitated by a machete the vendor had secreted under his produce.  Reports surfaced of American captives whose bodies were found hideously mutilated.  One corpse was discovered near an anthill, buried to the neck and covered in sugar.

Employing tactics we would face again in the 1960s Vietnam war–tactics that would later be formalized by Mao Tse Tung–Philippine nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo waged a campaign designed to dishearten the American public.  He hoped (in vain) for a Democratic victory in the 1900 American presidential election, judging candidate William Jennings Bryan to be more supportive of Philippine independence.  But unlike Vietnam, the Philippine Insurrection failed to outlast American public support.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  29 SEP 25

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 7 “T-V”.  GPO, Washington, DC, p. 421, 1981.

Karnow, Stanley.  In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines.  Ballantine Books, New York, NY, pp. 177-87, 1989.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History:  An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3^rd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, pp. 101-02.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  URDANETA had been captured from the Spanish Navy during our 1898 war.  She was named by the Spanish in honor of Andres de Urdaneta (1498-1568), a friar and explorer credited with the second circumnavigation of the globe (after Magellan).  “Urdaneta’s route” across the Pacific from Luzon to Central America was used by Spain’s Manila galleons.  Urdaneta City in the Pangasinan Province of Luzon, near the Lingayen Gulf, also remembers the friar.  URDANETA was recaptured in 1900 and served off and on in survey work, patrols, and as a yard tug until 1916.  Her ultimate fate after 1916 is unknown.

          Cadet Wood is remembered with the WWII veteran Clemson-class destroyer USS WELBORN C. WOOD (DD-195). WOOD was later transferred to the US Coast Guard and ultimately to Britian, with whom she served as HMS CHESTERFIELD.