[August 6th
marks the 75th anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that fraught moment and four
other histories of U.S. military massacres.]
On why it
matters how we refer to a 1901 event, and to get beyond that question in any
case.
As part of my
February 2019 weeklong series on the Philippine American War, I wrote about
the
seemingly semantic question of whether we call that conflict a war or an
insurrection, and why such debates over terminology and classification are in
fact quite significant when it comes to how we remember, narrate, and
understand contested histories. It stands to reason that such debates over the struggle
as a whole would likewise trickle down to our collective memories of particular
contested events, and among the most contested from the Philippine American War
are the September-October, 1901 conflicts between American soldiers and
Filipino villagers near the town of Balangiga, on Samar Island; this fraught,
multi-layered series of events has been known not only as the Balangiga
Massacre, but also as the Balangiga Encounter (Filipinos in the region commemorate
Balangiga Encounter Day to this day), the Balangiga
Incident, and the Balangiga
Conflict.
Even if we agree
to call it the Balangiga Massacre, that phrase nonetheless contains two
entirely distinct and opposed historical analyses of these contested 1901
events. From the perspective of the American military, the phrase refers to the
September 28th
early morning attack on unsuspecting US soldiers (most of whom were eating
breakfast in the mess hall at the time) by Filipino villagers, an attack which
resulted in the deaths of 48 US servicemen (leading to its frequent description
as the most
destructive defeat of US military members since the Battle of Little
Bighorn in 1876). From the perspective of Filipino communities, on the other
hand, the massacre refers to the subsequent US military retaliation, an 11-day campaign
of violence against local villages which was led by two particularly brutal
officers (General Jacob
Smith and Major Littleton Waller, both later
court-martialed for their actions) and which resulted in at least thousands
(and by some
historical accounts tens of thousands) of Filipino deaths (most of them
civilians).
All of those
historical events took place, and all are of course interconnected, so one way
to escape this duality would be to think about all of them as part of the
massacre (or, perhaps, to use a word like “conflict” instead, since “massacre”
is so loaded that it might be impossible not to take sides through the use of
it). But at the same, I’d say that the question with which I started this post
is deeply relevant to this particular issue—if we define the overarching
conflict as a war (which I argued in that prior post we should), then the attack
on US forces was justified, while the subsequent attacks on civilian
populations would have to be classified as a war crime. And indeed, General
Smith’s infamous instructions
to Major Waller left no doubt that it was precisely such a crime he sought:
“I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn,
the better it will please me... The interior of Samar must be made a howling
wilderness.” Coincidentally, I’m drafting this post on Memorial Day, so I
certainly think we should remember the US soldiers killed at Balangiga—but a
more comprehensive and accurate account of the Filipino American War demands
that we also and especially remember the horrors that followed.
Next massacre
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories you’d highlight?
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