Military Myths and Legends: Pershing and His Pig's Blood Bullets

It might be difficult today to imagine the United States as a true colonial power, but in the years following the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. became a major global power. The idea of American Imperialism crept into the public consciousness for the first time. During the war, the United States captured several key Spanish possessions, including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. 

At first, it looked as if the U.S. was fighting to grant the Philippines its independence, but when the Americans annexed the islands instead, the resistance fighters that fought the Spanish started fighting the Americans. Combat in the Philippines meant bloody ambushes, lightning-fast raids, and fierce hand-to-hand combat at times. American forces suffered more troops killed in action in the first four months of fighting in the Philippines than they suffered in the entire Spanish-American War. 

No rebel group fought more fiercely than the Muslim Moros of the southern provinces, which had resisted outside control for 400 years. Military legend has it that then-Brig. Gen.John J. Pershing, Governor of the Moro Province, ordered the execution of 50 Moro soldiers with bullets dipped in pig's blood. 

The story goes that he knew the Islamic Moros believed anyone who touched a pig was unclean and could not enter heaven. After the execution, it's said, he buried the men with pigs and spared one insurgent to tell his friends and peers what would happen if they continued fighting American forces. The legend says it stopped the Moro attacks. 

But did any of that happen? 

To wrest control of the islands from the Spanish, American forces had transported the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo and enlisted the help of the Philippine rebel forces. The United States captured Manila and other major cities; Aguinaldo and the rebels took control of the countryside, declaring independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. 

However, neither Spain nor the U.S. recognized Aguinaldo's declaration. That same year, Spain ceded the islands to the Americans in the Treaty of Paris, and the United States formally annexed them. The people of the Philippines, especially those who fought with the Americans, saw this as a betrayal: the Americans were taking the place of the Spanish as their colonial masters. 

Philippine nationalists formed a republican government under the leadership of Aguinaldo in January 1899, but the U.S. refused to recognize it. It was a matter of days before fighting broke out between American and Filipino troops. On February 4, 1899, 19,000 American soldiers and 15,000 of Aguinaldo's Philippine troops clashed in the capital, fighting a conventional war that Aguinaldo could not sustain. 

Filipino independence fighters tried for months to wage a conventional war against the better-armed and better-equipped soldiers but found it unsustainable. In November 1899, they faded away, switching to the guerrilla tactics that had bedeviled the Spanish. General Arthur MacArthur, the soon-to-be Military Governor of the Philippines, declared the "insurrection" to be squashed, but he soon learned the Filipinos were far from finished. 

The Philippine-American War would rage across the islands for more than three years. Even when President Theodore Roosevelt announced an official end to the war, resistance among some rebel groups would continue until 1913. The U.S. had granted autonomy to the Moros if they stayed out of the Philippine War, but as soon as the war ended, the Americans invaded the Moros' land. 

Pershing was brought in as the third and final American governor of the Moros in 1909. At the time, one of the biggest problems was the juramentados, suicide jihadists who would strike occupying soldiers, policemen, and officials with swords and fight until they were killed in combat. To stop the religiously zealous juramentados, American forces in the Moro Province took extreme measures, one that echoed through the coming decades during the Global War on Terror. 

"... inaugurated a system of burying all dead juramentados in a common grave with the carcasses of slaughtered pigs. The Mohammedan religion forbids contact with pork, and this relatively simple device resulted in the withdrawal of juramentados… Other officers took up the principle, adding new refinements to make it unattractive to the Moros. In some sections, the Moro juramentado was beheaded after death, and the head sewn inside the carcass of a pig. And so the rite of running juramentado, at least semi-religious in character, ceased to be in Sulu."

The officer who first ordered the desecration of the Muslim remains was actually Col. Alexander Rodgers of the U.S. 6th Cavalry Regiment, with others to follow. There's no evidence that Pershing was ever involved in the idea of using pigs to subdue the Moros, but Pershing did mention the practice in his own memoirs:

"These juramentado attacks were materially reduced in number by a practice the army had already adopted, one that Muhammadans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig. It was not pleasant to have to take such measures, but the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven sometimes deterred the would-be assassins."

Pershing did succeed in quelling the Moros' attacks by the time he left the governor's office in 1913, but it wasn't by burying rebels with pigs. He expanded the area's economy, opened banks, built roads, and forcibly disarmed the rebels. When they fought against disarmament, he met them on the battlefield at Bud Dajo and Bud Bagsak, which led to the end of the Moro Rebellion.