I did not really start out wanting to study Philippine military history. Once upon a time, when I was “young and full of hope” I thought I might like World War II history or medieval European history. I’m forced into this field out of practical considerations– I’m a Filipino and it was expedient. I knew the languages– I added Spanish after a lot of difficulty– I have a familiarity with the culture and, well, you know, modern academe’s lingering orientalist, colonial-era intellectual structure. By that I mean, there’s an almost tacit expectation that a minority will study his or her cultural or ethnic field. Have you ever heard of a Filipino or a Nigerian being accepted to study, say, US Civil War history or medieval European history? Let’s just say when I sent out exploratory emails to professors in America more than one was puzzled as to why I would want to study medieval Europe, I was Filipino. And I thought them academics were lefty granola types?
One thing I do know– Filipino military history is an incredibly under-studied field. Oddly, more foreigners have written about it than Filipinos. I’m lucky that people like Cesar Pobre, Noelle Rodriguez and Rico Jose have done so, but they’re the exception. There are not so much gaps as gaping black holes in Philippine military historical knowledge. For instance, how many Filipinos are aware of Bancusay Bay? Or of Malong? It seems like the entirety of Philippine military history is Mactan, maybe Tirad Pass and then World War II.
33% of Philippine military history.
Honestly, I can’t say I’m too pleased with the field myself. Part of the reason why I’ve long soured on being a research historian is that, dear god, I don’t want to keep researching Philippine military history. There’s various reasons– it’s tedious work nobody cares about (nobody really cares about Philippine history in general) and it’s difficult to secure funding or publication for it, are two practical ones. But one big reason I’ll admit it is that it’s depressing as fuck.
Why? Let’s just say that the Filipino people have not been… burdened with dealing with the aftermath of victory.
Here’s an only slightly exaggerated little historical generalization for you. Since the 16th century,the Philippine archipelago has practically never been successfully defended. By anyone. It seems like there’s a curse laid on it.
Sure, some Visayans in Mactan fought off the Spanish in 1521, but by the end of the century, the Spanish had established a permanent presence in the islands despite resistance from the native Filipinos. In 1762, the Spanish– with Filipino help– failed to defend the city of Manila from the British. In 1896, the Spanish failed to defend Cavite from the Philippine Rebels, who in turn failed to defend it when the Spanish shipped in reinforcements from Spain. The Spanish again failed to defend the Philippine Islands in 1898, when the Filipinos and Americans attacked the colony. The Filipinos consequently failed to defend the Philippines in 1899 when the Americans decided to take pity on us poor half devil, half children. The Americans and Filipinos failed to defend the Philippines in 1941 when the Japanese invaded and in 1944, the Japanese in turn failed to defend the Philippines when the Americans returned.
Just about the only time the Philippines saw off an invasion was when the Spanish-Filipino forces repelled Limahong’s attempted to capture Manila in the 1570s. Other than that, defending the Philippines seems to be as futile as trying to get Lindsay Lohan off drugs.
Studying Philippine military history.
Filipinos– or people who were ancestors of today’s Filipinos– don’t have a very good military record either. We lost to the Spanish in the 16th century. Our uprisings all failed in the 300 years of Spanish rule. Our Revolutionaries all failed in the 1890s. When we sided with the Yanks, we lost in the early ’40s. Our “fighter ace” Juan Villamor has “two probables.” Our most “renowned” general of the Philippine-American War (or at least one constantly lauded, just read the hagiographic wiki page on him) Antonio Luna lost every single battle he fought. Our current armed forces is constantly baffled and ambushed by various rebel groups. Seems like all it’s good for is scaring us every so often with threats of coup d’etat.
In fact, here’s another depressing little guide for you– the Philippine navy names many of its ships after Philippine commanders from the Philippine Revolution of 1896 or the Philippine-American War of 1899. None of these ships have been named after a victorious general. Not a one.
The newest one is the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, a former Hamilton-class cutter. He’s named after a general who is most famous for losing the Battle of Tirad Pass. He’s an Atenean too, incidentally. There’s also the BRP Artemio Ricarte. There’s a guy with a depressing record. In the Philippine Revolution, he sided with the Bonifacio party, and was spectacularly unsuccessful, unlike the rival Aguinaldo party that supplanted his faction. In the Fil-Am War, Ricarte had switched allegiances and was now an Aguinaldo general– and was also spectacularly unsuccessful. He left for exile in Japan, and returned in World War II on the Japanese side– just in time to share in their defeat. There’s others– the BRP Mariano Alvarez, the BRP Miguel Malvar, the BRP Antonio Luna, the BRP Emilio Aguinaldo, the BRP. Emilio Aguinaldo, Mariano Alvarez and Miguel Malvar were at least military leaders during the 1898 defeat of Spain, but they too would go down in defeat just a year later. Just for kicks, the Philippine Navy also named ships after two datu from the 16th century– Magat Salamat and Humabon. Both were also defeated.
So let that sink in– the Philippine Navy named its ships after a string of incredibly unsuccessful commanders.It’d be like the US Navy naming its ship the USS Loyd Fredendall or the USS John P. Lucas or the USS Horatio Gates (look them up in wikipedia). Not very confidence-building, if you ask me but um, what choice did the Philippines have– there were no other military commanders to name the ships after. At this point, we’d be better off naming a ship the BRP Manny Pacquiao. At least he’s a victorious fighter.
If we do name a ship the Manny Pacquiao, I vote it be something like a Pegasus-class. Small but tough and punching above its weight class.
So yeah… one reason why the Philippines so loves the Battle of Mactan is because it was probably our only notable victory. Ever. And at least it was a reasonably decisive one. Magellan was overstepping his orders, which were to make contact with local rulers for trading purposes, but not to secure their submission or attempt a conquest. He did so anyway, and if he had lived it might be possible that the Spanish would have established a permanent presence in the Philippines sooner. But he died in 1521, defeated by the chieftain Si Lapu Lapu in 1521, in the Battle of Mactan. The Spanish efforts in the Philippines were set back 40 years.
There were a few other fairly successful Filipino commanders. The rebels of the Dagohoy Revolt managed to hold out for 80 years. This, however, is an incredibly understudied revolt. The wikipedia article makes it seem as if the Dagohoy rebels held out because of their fortifications, which would be a false analysis since other Filipino rebels also built good or elaborate defenses and then failed to hold them. Truth is, we don’t really know why they were so successful.
Emilio Aguinaldo, the first president of the Philippine, also had a few victories early in his career in 1896. He did manage to secure Cavite for the Philippine Revolution. Again, these are incredibly under-studied engagements. I’ve read up on them and my assessment is that they barely count as battles. There were very few forces involved– the Spanish were caught by surprise and had no forces on hand other than second rate garrison troops or constabulary forces. Interestingly, the Spanish had more Filipino soldiers than Spanish, so a lot of Aguinaldo’s victories were against other Filipinos.
Finally, I suppose there’s the Balangiga Massacre during the Philippine-American War, when insurgents in Leyte managed to nearly wipe out a small garrison of Americans. This was a victory of sorts, but was promptly followed by a massive defeat, when the Americans showed their benevolent assimilation by killing a lot of innocent Filipinos. That’s because we were uncivilized, and needed to be taught culture and civilization. It was for our own good, mind you.
They're civilizing the hell out of us!
Now there’s some caveats to all this, of course. As dear old Carl von Clausewitz said, war is politics– armed might is a tool of politics, and therefore serves a political purpose and politics never ends during war. So perhaps Philippine military behavior might be more intelligible if viewed from the perspective of politics. The prehispanic Filipinos who were “defeated” by Spain for instance– some things have to be said about them and I probably know more than anyone how these guys thought about war– I’ve been the only historian to do work on the period for the past 8 years.
Firstly, these guys weren’t “Filipinos.” If asked, they might not even call themselves “Visayan” or “Tagalog.” They would think of themselves as datu Si Humabon’s man, or datu Si Lapu Lapu’s woman. Politics was based on charismatic individuals and communities could be ephemeral. Politically and militarily, then, territorial annexation and defense or massive force destruction was not an objective in war. In other words, prehispanic Filipinos didn’t think in terms of “total war” and never got it in their heads to “defend” a Philippines that didn’t yet exist. When they fought the Spanish, the datu were fighting to preserve their authority. Again, herr Clausewitz can help us here since he did note with his obtuse dialectical method that one pole of warfare is “limited war” and not all war led to “true war” which was the complete disarmament of the enemy.
The Spanish were more than happy to keep these datu in power and they coopted them very quickly. Indeed, the datu probably benefited from Spanish overlordship, since the Spanish believed in hereditary power– something that the prehispanic Filipinos did not believe in.
There’s also the idea of “conquest.” Get it out of your heads that the Spanish completely blanketed the Philippines with troops and their writ of law extended to every single inch of Philippine terrain. In fact, the Spanish were confined to mainly a handful of towns and cities– probably 80% of them lived in Manila. During the Conquest in the 1560s and 1570s, the Spanish would demand tribute and then leave– not changing local laws, not changing the elites, not really doing anything other than taking money. This doesn’t amount to a very thorough conquest. After the Conquest, most Spanish in the Philippines were missionaries, and their idea of “conquest” was religious conversion. So those maps that show the Philippines as part of the Spanish empire… people really have to rethink what that means. Some Filipinos saw only one Spaniard for many decades after the Conquest.
Okay, fine, there is that.
The same kind of analysis can be applied to the rebellions during Spanish rule. None of these had more than limited goals in mind. Perhaps only the Malong Rebellion in the 1660s aimed at expelling the Spanish, and even that is debatable. Most had local grievances– anger at this Spanish official, anger at that Spanish law. The missionaries and secular Spanish in the Philippines were so few they tended to accede to Philippine demands. They didn’t have the strength to go out and crush rebels and, to be fair, the missionaries didn’t have the religious inclination to allow that either. Sure, the Spanish would use force to make the Filipinos stop, but the body counts during these expeditions could be quite low. For the most part, the Spanish were forced to execute only ringleaders, leaving the bulk of the rebels to reintegrate with the community. So, no rows of crosses along the side of the road where a Philippine Spartacus can be hung up as a symbol of what happens to those who defy the pax Hispanica.
The Spanish should have a new slogan-- "Hey, it could have been worse! You could have been colonized by the Dutch!"
The Filipinos of the Revolution and the Fil-Am War did aim for territorial hegemony and political self-rule. By their own definitions, they lost and lost badly. Reading up on the Revolution is a singularly demoralizing exercise since the Filipinos were incredibly amateurish and unprepared. My dissertation has uncovered some previously unused documentation that will show just how amateurish the Filipinos were when it came to ideas of tactics and war.
But even for them, I guess it’s not so bad. Sure, Aguinaldo and Malvar lost their wars and failed to become leaders of an independent Philippines, but they maintained their elite status and their local authority. The Americans, like the Spanish, chose to deal with the local elites since this was the easiest way to both stop the insurgency and rule the colony. So get it out of your heads that the Americans magically planted participative democracy in the Philippines– all they did was to reinforce the elite structure with new laws. Emilio Aguinaldo may have failed to become president of the Philippines, but his family has been in power in Cavite for the past 100 or so years.
So okay, there’s highfalutin explanations for Philippine military defeat. Sure, we lost all the time, but a canny historian can write it up in such a way as to make it interesting for revisionist academics who like explanations that use social structures, anthropology, longue duree, agency, and other nice, academic terms. I bow down to the temple of Focault, Benedict Anderson and the “war and society” guys. May their approval rain down upon me in the form of grants and tenure!
But there are times when I do still find this field rather depressing. I understand the culture behind Philippine military behavior, I know the political circumstances, blah blah blah. But like Ellen Degeneres said of Peter O’Toole at the Oscars, sometimes, “you just want to win.”
I find this to be particularly true for the conflicts that the Philippines is in today. I’m not the biggest fan of insurgent groups like the NPA, Abu Sayyaf, MILF and MNLF. Yes, there is a Muslim separatist group in the Philippines called the MILF. If you’re done snickering at the name of a group that has killed probably thousands of Filipinos, we can move on.
Anyway, maybe these guys have legitimate grievances– the national government has certainly not had a good track record with Muslims. But at this point, these groups do more harm to the sectors in society they supposedly help. The Abu Sayyaf in particular is really nothing more than a latter-day remontado group leading ngayaw raids for their own wealth and benefit. It would be nice if our army could just kick the shit out of them and get it over with.
Finally, it’s particularly depressing to me because– if you have paid close attention– the people who suffer the most from these multiple defeats are ordinary Filipinos. The elites, as usual, do just fine. They keep their power, the enemy even often helps them. But the ones who died the most during the Revolution or the Fil-Am War or World War II, or who keep dying and suffering in today’s anti-insurgency efforts? The poor blokes who are either caught in between– farmers, workers, families– people who are forced to fight for elites or get killed in between armies. Sometimes it just seems to me like the armed might of the Philippines has been unable to fight for its own people. It demands sacrifices of them, but gives them little benefits in return. Indeed, people like Aguinaldo are turned into heroes, when these same guys fought labor movements and protests during the Fil-Am War. In Milagros Guerrero’s unpublished dissertation, she shows how the Revolutionary Government in 1898 and 1899 suppressed peasant movements and labor movements– ordinary Filipino people who had taken the rhetoric of revolution (espoused by elites) at face value and were trying to win themselves some social justice were violently repressed by the Philippine army. Ironically, it seems as if the Philippine armed forces– be they insurgent groups or armies– are historically better at crapping on its people than they are at defending them.
Crikey. Why am I in this line of work again?
Posted by callitaweasel 
