BANGKOK — The American soldiers were eating breakfast in Balangiga’s town square when Filipino villagers, including men disguised in dresses, attacked them with bolo knives. Forty-eight Americans died.
The year was 1901 and for the United States Army, the massacre in the central Philippines was the worst since Custer and his troops were slaughtered at the Battle of Little Bighorn, 25 years earlier.
In retaliation, the United States commander ordered his forces to kill every male older than 10 and turn the central Philippines island of Samar into a “howling wilderness.” American troops killed civilians, burned houses and destroyed food supplies.
They also carted off three church bells as war trophies.
Now, 117 years later, the bells are on the verge of returning home.
Despite objections from some American veterans, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis is expected to sign an order authorizing the bells’ return, according to the United States embassy in Manila.
Mr. Mattis has notified Congress that the Defense Department intends to return the bells, said Trude Raizen, an embassy spokeswoman. No date has been set for their return.
“We’ve received assurances that the Bells will be returned to the Catholic Church and treated with the respect and honor they deserve,” Ms. Raizen said by email. “We are aware that the Bells of Balangiga have deep significance for a number of people, both in the United States and in the Philippines.”
Two bells are on display at the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. The third, which has twice crossed the Pacific, is kept at Camp Red Cloud, a United States Army facility in South Korea.
For more than two decades, the Philippine government and the townspeople of Balangiga on Samar have tried to win the bells’ return.
“The Americans should give them back to the Philippines because they belong to us,” said the town’s mayor, Randy Graza. “It is part of our history.”
The United States ruled the islands from 1898 until 1946, when the Philippines gained independence. Since then, the two countries have been close allies.
But with the election of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines two years ago, the bells have taken on new significance.
Mr. Duterte, who has called for a “separation” from the United States, has cited the American retaliation on Samar island in 1901 to counter criticism of his government’s human rights violations in the killing of thousands of people who the police say used drugs.
“Those bells are reminders of the gallantry and heroism of our forbearers who resisted the American colonizers and sacrificed their lives in the process,” Mr. Duterte said in his State of the Nation address last year. “That is why I say today, give us back those Balangiga bells. They are ours. They belong to the Philippines. They are part of our national heritage.”
He noted that 28 Filipinos died fighting the American invaders that day.
Rolando Borrinaga, a professor at the University of the Philippines who has studied the massacre and subsequent retaliation, said the bells are the last contentious issue dating from the Philippine-American War, which ended in 1902.
“The return of the bells could help dissipate much of the animosity and rough language that have characterized the current state of relations between the two countries over the past two years,” he said.
When the United States occupied the Philippines in 1898, after acquiring it, Puerto Rico and Guam from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War, it met with resistance in many parts of the country.
Balangiga, a small coastal town about 600 miles southeast of Manila, was important for its trade in abaca, a kind of hemp used in making rope and ship’s rigging. The United States stationed troops there.
Many townspeople quietly seethed from mistreatment by the foreign soldiers, including forced labor and detention without justification. The Americans seemed oblivious to the unrest.
On the day before the attack, the women and children quietly left Balangiga. Some men donned dresses to keep up the appearance of normalcy.
The next morning, as the men served the American soldiers breakfast in the town square, they attacked them with traditional bolo knives.
The ringing of one of the bells in St. Lawrence the Martyr Parish Church near the town square is said to have been the signal for the attack.
Of the 72 Americans in the garrison, 48 were killed. Only four escaped unharmed.
“It was the worst single defeat in the Philippine-American war,” Mr. Borrinaga said
Gen. Jacob Smith, the American commander, responded by ordering his men to kill anyone who could represent a threat.
“I want no prisoners,” he said. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.
The general, a veteran of the notorious Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, added, “The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness,” earning him the nickname “Howling Jake.”
Some historians have put the number of dead at 50,000. Mr. Borrinaga said documents show that 39 people were killed outright. And after studying census data before and after the events, he estimated that Balangiga’s population shrank by about 15,000 during the massacre retaliation, whether from killing, starvation or people leaving Samar for other reasons.
“It was not a huge massacre,” he said. “But if you burn the houses, destroy the rice, burn the boats and destroy the caribou, they are as good as dead.”
One reason the bells were confiscated, he said, was to insure they would not be melted down and turned into weapons, he said.
General Smith was court-martialed in 1902 and found guilty of conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. He was sentenced to admonishment by his superiors.
The court was lenient because the general was known for making wild statements and his men ignored many of his most outrageous commands. But President Theodore Roosevelt reprimanded the general and ordered him to retire, The New York Times reported.
Balangiga, today a town of about 14,000, has never gotten over the loss of the bells. Its modern identity revolves around the massacre and the reprisals that followed.
The town plaza, where the killing occurred, is dominated by a large monument depicting the breakfast scene and the villagers approaching the soldiers with their bolos.
September 28, the anniversary of the massacre, is celebrated as a holiday, now politely known as Balangiga Encounter Day.
It is the occasion for a detailed re-enactment of the killing and the theft of the bells.
Since the mid-1990s, Philippine presidents have appealed to American presidents to give back the bells. Some advocates for their return have likened them to the Liberty Bell.
But some United States veterans groups have long opposed such action, arguing that the bells are part of their heritage too and reflect the sacrifice of American soldiers who died at Balangiga.
The bells’ return, though, is supported by some descendants of the Americans who survived the massacre and by some United States veterans who served in the Philippines.
Dennis L. Wright, a retired Navy captain who lives in the Philippines and campaigned for their return said he was pleased by the defense secretary’s decision.
“Church bells belong in churches calling the faithful to worship, not as trophies of war,” he said.
Source : Nytimes
