When was the Battle of Tirad Pass?

On 2 December 1899, in the mountains of Ilocos Sur in northern Luzon, during the Philippine-American War.

Who won the Battle of Tirad Pass?

The Americans took the pass and destroyed the Filipino rearguard, but the stand allowed President Emilio Aguinaldo to escape.

How many Filipinos fought at Tirad Pass?

About sixty men under General Gregorio del Pilar. Fifty-two of them were killed, including del Pilar.

How old was Gregorio del Pilar at Tirad Pass?

Born on 14 November 1875, he had just turned 24, although the 1952 historical marker at the pass gives his age as 22.

Why is Tirad Pass called the Philippine Thermopylae?

Because, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, a small force held a narrow mountain pass against a far larger enemy and died covering a retreat.

Battle of Tirad Pass, 1899: Gregorio del Pilar's last stand

General Gregorio del Pilar and his troops in Pampanga, about 1898, unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Quick answer

What happened at the Battle of Tirad Pass?

On 2 December 1899, during the Philippine-American War, about 60 Filipino soldiers under Brigadier General Gregorio del Pilar held a stone barricade across Tirad Pass, a narrow mountain trail in northern Luzon, against a battalion of the US 33rd Volunteer Infantry. They stopped the Americans for hours until a flanking move broke the position. Del Pilar and most of his men were killed, but their stand covered the escape of President Emilio Aguinaldo into the mountains.¹

By November 1899 the Philippine Republic's attempt to fight the United States with a regular army had failed. American columns had beaten Emilio Aguinaldo's forces again and again in northern Luzon, and by 12 November he ordered his commanders to give up conventional warfare and fight on as guerrillas. He himself fled with a small party into the mountains of the north. The Americans set out to catch him, and his escape route ran through the Cordillera toward the wild country of Lepanto.²

His rearguard was led by one of the best-known officers of the revolution. Gregorio del Pilar, born in Bulacan in November 1875, had joined the revolt against Spain in 1896 and been made a general at about 22, the youngest in the Philippine army. The Philippine Folklife Museum notes that he had already led the attack on the 4th US Cavalry at Quingua early in the war, and that he was chosen to guard the president for his record in combat.³

The Texas Regiment

The pursuers were men of the 33rd Infantry, United States Volunteers, a regiment raised in 1899 for service in the Philippines and known as the Texas Regiment because many believed it was made up of former cowboys. Brian Linn, writing in the Handbook of Texas, notes that a third of its officers came from Texas and that it was trained hard in marksmanship and forced marching. Jack Andersen's study of the regiment adds that it drew men from Texas, the South and the Midwest.⁴

Major Peyton C. March's battalion of the regiment had come up the coast road of Ilocos. On 29 November at Candon, Andersen writes from March's reports, it received orders to push into the mountains and block Aguinaldo's retreat. The march depended on speed, and every man who could not make it was left behind.⁵

The barricade

Tirad Pass was a natural bottleneck east of Candon, a trail so steep and narrow that the Americans had to climb it in single file. There, on 2 December, they met the rearguard: about sixty picked men under del Pilar behind a wall of stones thrown across the path. From above, the Filipinos raked the climbing column with Mauser rifle fire, and Andersen describes the leading American company pinned down on the rocky trail for nearly two hours, with del Pilar directing the fire in person.⁶

March saw that the barricade could not be taken from the front. He sent a sergeant major with ten sharpshooters onto a hill across the gorge to fire down on the wall, and ordered another company, under Lieutenant Frank Tompkins, to climb a ridge toward the summit and come in on the defenders' flank. When that company opened fire from above, March led the final rush on the barricade.⁷

The rearguard was destroyed. Andersen counts fifty-two Filipino dead and only eight survivors who escaped into the mountains; the Philippine Folklife Museum also gives 52 dead and describes a fight of some five hours. Del Pilar was among the dead, shot through the neck. According to March's reports, as Andersen gives them, the American battalion lost two killed and nine wounded.⁸

A stand that bought time

The defense did what it was meant to do. Aguinaldo's party had passed through the next villages on the same day, and March's exhausted men could follow no further without rest. The National Historical Commission's marker at the pass records that del Pilar and his men stood fast to cover the president's retreat. Aguinaldo stayed free in the mountains of northern Luzon for more than a year after the battle, until his capture in March 1901.⁹

The battle became a legend almost at once. American war correspondents wrote it up in embellished and partly false versions that ran in newspapers across the United States, and it came to be called the Philippine Thermopylae. The marker records the words on his grave at the pass, which call him an officer and a gentleman, and the Philippine Military Academy's home at Baguio is named Fort del Pilar.¹⁰ › Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC

The sources differ on his age. The 1952 marker calls him 22, while the museum's birth date of 14 November 1875 and Andersen's study make him 24.¹¹