Army in the 1950s contained fewer than three pages on the war. Thus the one volume military history published by the historical branch of the U. In most history texts, the war is given only a few brief paragraphs, commonly treated as an appendage of the Spanish-American War rather than an event with its own significance. The war was also an important milestone in American overseas expansion and an example of that expansion in one of its most militant phases.Īs important as the conflict was, however, it has long remained one of the least understood wars in American history. The Philippine-American War thus represents an important event in the confrontation between Western imperialism and Asian nationalism, a phenomenon that would become increasingly significant in the twentieth century. When the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, although the issues leading to war concerned Cuba, the United States soon found itself also embroiled in the quickly moving events of the Filipino revolution. Pitted against the Philippine revolution in the beginning was the waning power of imperial Spain, a nation that some 300 years earlier had been the strongest in Western Europe but by the end of the nineteenth century had been in a period of decline for over a century. On the Filipino side one sees a struggling anti-imperialist movement seeking Philippine independence, as well as peasants reacting to the stress of economic change. This war about which one hears so little was not a minor skirmish.Įven if the number of dead had been lower, however, the war would still rank as an important conflict for it provides an example of a significant phenomenon taking place at the dawn of the twentieth century. For the Filipinos, the loss of 34,000 lives was equivalent to the United States losing over a million people from a population of roughly 250 million, and if the cholera deaths are also attributed to the war, the equivalent death toll for the United States would be over 8,000,000. Army’s death rate in the Philippine-American War (32/1000) was the equivalent of the nation having lost over 86,000 (of roughly 2,700,000 engaged) during the Vietnam war instead of approximately 58,000 who were lost in that conflict. Of the non-Muslim Filipino population, which numbered approximately 6,700,000, at least 34,000 lost their lives as a direct result of the war, and as many as 200,000 may have died as a result of the cholera epidemic at the war’s end. Of some 125,000 Americans who fought in the Islands at one time or another, almost 4,000 died there. Army served in the Philippines during the conflict, as well as a number of state and federal volunteers. The war between the United States and the forces of the Philippine revolution began in 1899 and lasted over three years. Even with revision, however, my interpretation of the army’s work in the Philippines remains incompatible with the popular view of the campaign as one characterized by brutality. I revised the symposium paper, “The Pacification of the Philippines, 1898-1902,” in 1985 for presentation as one of five lectures given at Obirin College in Japan, and it has been revised further for inclusion here. The first formal opportunity to present an updated analysis came in 1980 when I was invited to participate in the United States Air Force Academy’s Ninth Military History Symposium. Since 1973 I have revised my views on the Philippine campaign to incorporate the work of other scholars and new research of my own. Army, even for work done more than a half century before, was bound to prove controversial, as it has. I have no idea why publication took so long, but I have always suspected that someone at the press did not want to bring out the book until American participation in the Vietnam War had ended. Although I sent the completed book manuscript to the publisher in 1970, publication was delayed until 1973. I finished my thesis in 1967, and over the next two years I revised the manuscript for publication in the Greenwood Press military history series. At the time the army’s successful campaign in the Philippines stood in marked contrast to its then stalemated efforts in Vietnam. I began research on the topic in 1964 when I embarked upon a Ph.D.
Army’s early encounters with irregulars, none is more relevant to contemporary concerns than the army’s campaign in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, and my study of the Philippine-American War provided the foundation for much of my thinking on irregular warfare.
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