Half Devil and Half Child: America’s War with Terror in the Philippines, 1899–1902

Abstract

After waging war for almost three years against an elusive enemy, many American commanders in the Philippine islands were frustrated. The United States had entered the archipelago after its brief, triumphant war against Spain in 1898. However, in addition to gaining a colony, the United States also inherited Spain’s war against a Filipino army determined to win independence. Unwilling to surrender its prize, the United States won a brief conventional war against its outmatched opponent and declared victory, only to find that the war had entered a nonconventional phase in which Filipino nationalists established a shadow government and fought a tenacious guerrilla campaign against the U.S. Army. To break the resistance, the Americans employed a strategy that combined military pressure with benevolent policies. By 1901, the resistance had been confined to a pair of provinces, but in those provinces the war took an ugly turn. Filipino insurgents increasingly employed terrorist tactics to force cooperation from a war-weary populace and to combat the occupying forces. Impatient American officers, chafing under limiting rules of engagement, chose to use terror to eliminate stubborn pockets of resistance. In both cases, isolated atrocities and uses of terror in the early months of the war would be used to justify more systematic terrorist activities in the final weeks of the conflict.