[Photo] US Army Troops on the Road to Lipa, Batangas

From the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Digital Library, we get this rare photograph of the United States Army on the move somewhere in the Province of Batangas¹. The photograph shows cavalry soldiers atop their horses moving along a street flanked by large houses.

Typically, little information accompanies the photograph, with just the brief caption “Troops Starting Out on the Road to Lipa from Batangas, Philippine Islands.” The creation of the photograph is attributed to the United States Army Signal Corps, a branch of the service charged which “creates and manages communications and information systems for the command and control of combined arms forces².”

Initially, but since removed, the date range of the creation of the photograph was placed by NARA at 1900 to 1903. The likelihood is that the photograph was taken early in 1900, after the United States Army had taken control of the province.

On the 17^th of January 1900, troops of the United States Army under the command of Brigadier General Theodores Schwann reached and captured what was then still the town of Batangas. It is highly possible that the picture above is related to this event.

A few days earlier, the United States Army’s 38^th and 39^th Infantry Regiments, under the commands of one Colonel Anderson and a Colonel Robert L. Bullard, head reached and captured the then-municipality of Lipa, at the time still held by Filipino revolutionary forces³.

After the Americans had captured and looted Lipa, they then proceeded on to Batangas Town, which they also subsequently captured without much difficulty.”

For related readings regarding these historical events, we recommend the following articles:

The photograph at the top of this page is in the public domain and its usage has been categorized by NARA as “unrestricted.” For quicker Internet download, the photograph has been optimized to a resolution of 700 by 367 pixels and converted to grayscale mode.

For those who needed a higher resolution version for printing and other purposes, you may click this link to a Google Drive file.