The Philippine-American War: The War They Never Taught You
Most Filipinos and Filipino Americans grow up learning about Spain and about World War II. The war in between — the one fought against the United States — barely gets a paragraph. That gap is not an accident.
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In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, Spain handed the Philippines to the United States under the Treaty of Paris in exchange for $20 million. No Filipino was at the table. Filipinos had already declared independence on June 12, 1898, and were fighting to keep it.
When fighting broke out in February 1899, the U.S. called Filipino resistance an "insurrection." When American troops burned villages and killed civilians, it was called "pacification." A country that had fought its own war for independence was now colonizing a people fighting for theirs.
Balangiga, 1901
On Samar island, Filipinos in the town of Balangiga had been forced to clear brush for the American garrison while their food stores were seized. On September 28, 1901, townspeople led by local leaders attacked the U.S. Army company stationed there, killing dozens of American soldiers. It became one of the worst single defeats for the U.S. Army in the war.
"Kill everyone over ten"
The retaliation was brutal. Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered his troops to turn Samar into a "howling wilderness." According to testimony at his court-martial, he told Major Littleton Waller he wanted no prisoners and that anyone capable of bearing arms — anyone over ten years old — should be killed.
The order was so shocking that the New York Journal ran a cartoon showing American soldiers aiming at blindfolded Filipino children, captioned "Kill Every One Over Ten." Smith was court-martialed in 1902 and forced into retirement. No one served time for what happened on Samar.
The cost
Historians estimate that around 20,000 Filipino fighters died in the war, and that hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians died from violence, famine and disease — estimates commonly range from 200,000 to well over half a million. The war was officially declared over in 1902, but resistance continued in parts of the country for years after.
The bells came home
After Balangiga, American soldiers took the church bells of the town as war trophies. Two ended up at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and one with the U.S. Army in South Korea. Filipinos, the Catholic Church and Balangiga residents asked for them back for decades. In December 2018, all three Balangiga Bells were finally returned to the Philippines — 117 years later.
Why it was buried
A war of conquest doesn't fit the story of America as liberator, so it was renamed, downplayed and left out of classrooms on both sides of the Pacific. Knowing it changes how we understand everything that came after: the schools, the language, the bases and the "special relationship."
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