Devil's Causeway: The True Story of America's First Prisoners of War in the Philippines, and the Heroic Expedition Sen

by Matthew Westfall

As the United States prosecuted a bloody campaign to pacify its newly won Philippines territory at the turn of the nineteenth century, a secret mission of mercy went terribly wrong. The result was a prisoner-of-war crisis, the likes of which our nation had never encountered before. The epic struggle for survival that followed was not only a test of the human will to live, but a crucible for heroes. And yet, what was touted as a heroic rescue operation extended a war by almost two years and cost the lives of thousands.

In April 1899, Admiral George Dewey dispatched the USS Yorktown to liberate a detachment of Spanish soldiers under siege by Filipino rebels. To reconnoiter enemy defenses, one of the Yorktown’s armed cutters—manned by a crew of fifteen sailors—was sent toward shore. And then it happened. Defying orders, Lieutenant James C. Gillmore Jr. recklessly pushed upriver into heavy jungle—and headlong into an ambush that would kill four of his men. The survivors were dragged across mountains and through dense jungle from one pestilent prison to the next along what Gillmore called “a veritable Devil’s Causeway.” 

Their captivity and the torturous expedition sent to recover them, recalled today as one of the greatest marches in US Army history, features a tightly hewn cast of characters—including a frail yet determined teenaged sailor and his hardened seafaring mates; battle-tested veterans of the Civil War and the Indian Wars; and a fiery revolutionary commander who gave orders to bury wounded Americans alive. A sweeping military epic drawing on international primary sources, The Devil’s Causeway tells their extraordinary story in its entirety for the first time.

610 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 6, 2012

About the author

Matthew Westfall has devoted much of his professional career to tackling poverty in the developing world. As a regional director at a multilateral development bank, Matthew oversees a portfolio of urban infrastructure investments in water supply, sanitation and urban transport in the Central and West Asia region.

Matthew is also an award-winning writer, producer and director of film and video productions that address some of the most intractable issues in our increasingly urban world: megacities, slums and managing the urban environment. His films, garnering an array of festival awards and featuring celebrity narrators such as Malcolm McDowell, Willem Dafoe and F. Murray Abraham, have been broadcast worldwide. He has produced public service announcements, featuring the music of Enya, which aired globally on CNN and Bloomberg. A keen advocate of change, Matthew has written and produced several flagship publications on the urban sector, including the popular Garbage Book and Urban Indicators for Managing Cities: The Cities Data Book.

Matthew's independent documentaries have been showcased at the Hawaii International Film Festival, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and at scores of festivals across the US, Europe and Asia. For his documentary On Borrowed Land, executive produced by Oliver Stone and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Matthew received the prestigious Paul Davidoff National Award for Advocacy Planning from the American Planning Association in 1991. Starting out in architecture, he also won the architectural design competition for the Massachusetts Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1988. A graduate of the University of Colorado-Boulder (Environmental Design) and the University of Southern California (Urban and Regional Planning), Matthew began his career in international development with the Peace Corps.

Born in New York City and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, Matthew currently resides in the Philippines with his wife Laurie, three daughters and their ever-loyal French bulldog, Magnum. Matthew spends his free time reading, writing and collecting as a means to explore the fascinating history of his adopted country.

The Devil's Causeway is his first work of narrative nonfiction.