Balangiga and Cebu’s war against the Americans
PAREDES
The Filipino nation was jubilant over the recent return of the historic bells to the church of Balangiga in Eastern Samar, after American soldiers took them away 117 years ago as war booty after they razed the town and killed thousands of civilians in 1901, when the Philippine-American War was supposed to be ending.
The American campaign to turn Samar into a “howling wilderness” where soldiers were ordered to “kill and burn”, sparing no Filipino male above 10 years of age, was in response to the surprise attack on their troops by insurgents and some Balangiga residents while the members of the US 9th Infantry stationed there were having breakfast at their mess tent.
The carefully planned attack of the natives killed 48 and wounded 22 of the 78 members of the American unit. On the Filipino side, about 20 to 25 were killed and around the same number were wounded.
The Americans were stunned and deeply embarrassed by this incident, which they considered at that time to be their worst defeat since the Little Bighorn in 1876 when American Indians stormed the 7th US Cavalry led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and killed 268 of the soldiers.
They could not take it that the Filipinos, whom the Americans considered just as inferior as the American Indians, could carry out such clever guerrilla tactics on their much-better armed and well-trained troops.
But for Filipinos, the massacre of the American troops was nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of civilians and insurgents that the Americans had previously killed as part of their campaign to forcibly control the towns and “pacify” the native population.
In their desperation, the Americans had resorted to brutal tactics such as burning of entire towns where residents were uncooperative and summary executions of innocent civilians.
For example, it was normal among the American soldiers to shoot anyone caught carrying a bolo, a common farm implement in the rural areas.
In Cebu, the same atrocities were experienced during the entire period of the Philippine-American War.
The Cebuano revolutionaries also employed similar tactics against the Americans, such as the use of conch shells and church bells for signaling.
Resil Mojares’s book The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu 1899-1906 gives a detailed account of the war and analysis of the factors that contributed to the defeat of the Cebuanos who fought under the flag of the Philippine Republic and the persistence of resistance even after the surrender of the revolutionary leaders in 1901.
Using information coming mainly from US Army and Navy archives as well as local sources, Mojares reconstructed the narrative of the Cebuano struggle against the American invaders who first came to Cebu by gunboat in February 21, 1899.
Indeed, it was a tragic story of brave resistance and collaboration, a war fought externally against the new colonizers but also internally against traitors of the revolution that earlier briefly liberated Cebu from Spanish rule.
Up to now, the US never officially acknowledged the Filipino resistance as a legitimate war to preserve their own independence as a new nation.
In American history books, the Philippine-American War is downgraded into a mere period of “Philippine Insurrection.”
The US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim said that the return of the Balangiga bells signaled the “closing of a painful chapter in our history”.
As most Filipinos today have only heard of the Balangiga story for the first time, it is thus more important not to close a chapter but to reopen the whole book on the history of our war against the Americans.
It is only after learning fully the lessons of that nearly forgotten past can we move on and look forward to the future.
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