Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History

by Kim A. Wagner

PublicAffairs 2024

Kim Wagner, professor of global and imperial history at Queen Mary University of London, builds his searing new book Massacre in the Clouds around a photograph. This photograph, of armed American soldiers standing around the edges of a shallow pit filled with dead bodies, was taken in March 1906 at the summit of Bud Dajo, an extinct volcano on a small island in the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, which were then under US occupation. US forces under the command of Major General Leonard Wood conducted a three-pronged attack against the one thousand Moro men, women, and children at the top of Bud Dajo, killing almost all of them in action that was occasionally extremely heated. 

In the immediate aftermath of the clash, this stunning photograph was taken. Wagner even does some sleuthing to determine the true identity of the photographer, a man named Aeronaut Gibbs. And Wagner charts the ripples of outrage that spread through the States when Harper’s Weekly started publishing accounts and photos of Bud Dajo. W.E.B. Dubois and especially Mark Twain fulminated against what they clearly saw as a one-sided massacre. 

The furor reached the administration of US President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who’d been civilian governor of the Philippines only a few years before. He was well aware of the public relations powder keg the area could be; he asked Wood for particulars: 

It is charged there was wanton slaughter of Moros, men, women, and children, in the fight at Mount Dajo. Wish you would send me at once all the particulars with respect to this matter, stating exact facts. 

Dozens of first-hand testimonies from US combatants began to filter out into the world, all bespeaking the bloodbath Bud Dajo had been. One private wrote: 

The intense heat, with the sight and scent of so much blood, crazed me and I lost all respect for human life and fought like a demon everything in reach of me, regardless of age or sex … My clothes were wet with blood, I was bareheaded and there was blood in my hair.

From the central appalling photo, Wagner’s narrative works its way forward and back, sketching in the history of the Moros and the forces that drove those men, women, and children up to the top of Bud Dajo, detailing the fallout from what happened there, and, given our current political moment, repeatedly excoriating not just General Wood and his men but also the entirety of the US presence in the Philippines. “One of the defining features of the imperial projects during the turn of the century,” he writes, “was the inability of colonizers themselves to recognize their primary role in creating the conditions of mass violence in the first instance.” In refusing to submit to that project, Wagner writes, the Moros on Bud Dajo weren’t simply “defending their honor” but also “that of the entire Muslim community in Sulu — the umma.” 

Wagner stops short of claiming that the desperate people on Bud Dajo were actually defending the dignity of all sentient life forms on Earth, but the rhetorical two-step here is familiar: every aspect of every “imperial project” is irredeemably evil, every action taken by any of the imperial victims is pre-emptively justified. If Wood’s men attested that the Moros on Bud Dajo were scornful of all negotiation and rushed into battle carrying their little infants, they’re lying; if evidence indicates they did rush into battle carrying their little infants, they were morally right to do so. Wagner’s narrative is thus charged and angry reading from start to finish, and his verdict is damning:

Ultimately, the order to “destroy” the Moros on Bud Dajo, and to treat them as legitimate targets, did not arise out of the frustration of fighting an elusive enemy in an inhospitable environment, nor was it the product of a process of gradual brutalization during a drawn-out campaign. Rather, it was the explicitly strategy right from the outset and the inevitable outcome of Wood’s original plan to teach the Moros “one clean-cut lesson.” 

These might be more declaration than deduction (the massacre on Bud Dajo could indeed be seen as both the outcome of fighting an elusive enemy in an inhospitable environment and the product of gradual brutalization during a drawn-out campaign, although it could of course be seen as other things too), but Wagner’s anger is pointed and pertinent: he seldom takes his eyes off the massacre itself.

Hence the centrality of that photo by Aeronaut Gibbs, which is presented in a two-page spread to make all its details clearer. Wagner says the soldiers “seem perfectly at ease in front of the camera.” They don’t. No one in photo looks at ease. Wagner also writes that the soldiers are “photographed as they posed with the bodies like hunters with their prey.” They’re not. They look grim and tired, not proud and triumphant. Wagner’s deeply necessary book tells a stark, angry story. His key photo very likely tells a worse one. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News