The Balangiga, Samar, Massacre
(Excerpted from the chapter, The Philippine-American War (1899-1902),
in The Filipino Americans (1763-Present): Their History, Culture, and Traditions
by Veltisezar Bautista, 2nd. Edition. Copyright 2002)

The so-called Balangiga Massacre happened in 1901, a few weeks after a company of American soldiers arrived in Balangiga, Samar. How the massacre took place is described in Joseph L. Schott’s book, The Ordeal of Samar (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc./Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., Publishers, Indianapolis, Indiana, Copyright 1964). Here’s an excerpt from the book:

On the night of September 27, the sentries on the guard posts about the plaza were surprised by the unusual number of women hurrying to church. They were all heavily clothed, which was unusual, and many carried small coffins. Sergeant Scharer, sergeant of the guard vaguely suspicious, stopped one woman and pried open her coffin with his bayonet. Inside he found the body of a dead child.

“El calenturon! El colera!” the woman said.

The sergeant, slightly abashed by the sight of the dead child, nailed down the coffin lid again with the butt of his revolver and let the woman pass on. He concluded that cholera and fever were in epidemic stage and carrying off children in great numbers. But it was strange that no news of any such epidemic had reached the garrison.

If the guard sergeant had been less abashed and had searched beneath the child’s body, he would have found the keen blades of cane-cutting knives. All the coffins were loaded with them.

The night passed and morning came. At about 6:20 a.m., a sergeant was in the door of his squad hut. At that time, the unarmed Americans were going to breakfast. Some of them, of course, had finished their breakfast.

The sergeant saw Pedro Sanchez, chief of police of the town, line up prisoners for work. Then Sanchez sent all the workers to work in the plaza and in the streets. After that, Sanchez went to a hut and even talked with a corporal who knew pidgin Spanish and Visayan.

After speaking with the corporal, Sanchez walked behind Private Adolph Gamlin, the sentry on the area. All of a sudden, Sanchez grabbed the Gamlin’s rifle, and he smashed the rifle’s butt on the American soldier’s head. The Filipino fired a shot and shouted a signal. Then pandemonium broke loose.

Schott describes what happened next:

The church bell ding-donged crazily and conch shell whistles blew shrilly from the edge of the jungle. The doors of the church burst open and out streamed the mob of bolomen who had been waiting inside. The native laborers working about the plaza suddenly turned on the soldiers and began chopping at them with bolos, picks and shovels.

As the church bells were being rung, Sanchez fired upon the Americans at the breakfast table. He then led the Filipinos in attacking the American soldiers.

Schott continues:

The mess tents, filled with unarmed soldiers peacefully at breakfast, had been one of the first prime targets for the attackers. They burst in screaming and slashing....

Then, as the soldiers rose up and began fighting with chairs and kitchen ropes, causing the tents 5to collapse on the struggling men. The natives ran in from all directions to slash with bolos and axes at the forms struggling under the canvas.

Inaccuracies. The Balangiga Study Group has cited inaccuracies in Schott’s book, The Ordeal of Samar, which has become the “bible” of the Balangiga Massacre. For instance, they said the police chief was not named Pedro Sanchez, but Valeriano Abanador.

(Note: The Balangiga Study Group is composed of Jean Wall-Fe, American, who has investigated the Balangiga since the 1950s and whose father, Adolph Gamlin, was the only surviving member of the guard on duty on the morning of September 28, 1901; Professor Rolando Borrinaga, Filipino, of the School of Health Sciences, University of the Philippines at Palo, Leyte, Philippines, and who is recognized as an authority and frequent writer on the history of the area for a decade; and Bob Couttie, writer/director, media consuiltant to the Subic Bay Chamber of Commerce, who has collected and collated American and Filipino source materials for the past seven years.)

Here are excerpts from Bob Couttie’s version of The Balangiga Attack. (Reprinted with permission from Couttie and the Balangiga Study Group at http://balangiga.bobcouttie.com.)

The Balangiga Attack

At around 6.45 in the morning, Abanador waited for Gamlin to pass by in the plaza. He then grabbed Gamlin’s rifle and struck him down then turned the rifle on the men in the sergeant’s mess tent, wounding one.

As Abanador grabbed Gamlin’s rifle, the two men assigned to neutralis(z)e the stationery guards outside the convent and municipal hall carried out their task and killed their targets.

Immediately, the Filipinos apparently sealed in the Sibley tents at the front of the municipal hall, having had weapons smuggled to them in water carriers, broke free and entered the municipal hall and made their way to the second floor.

Simultaneously, the attackers in the church broke through into the convent through a connecting corridor and attacked and killed the officers. An unarmed Co. C. soldier was ignored and passed by, as was a Filipino houseboy working for (Captain) Connel.

At the same time, the attack on the mess tent and the two barracks got underway.

The convent was successfully occupied and so, initially, was the municipal hall, but the mess tent and barracks attack suffered a fatal flaw - about one hundred men were split into three groups, one of each target but too few attackers had been assigned to ensure success.

So it was that a number of Co. C. personnel escaped from the mess tent and the barracks, were able to retake the municipal hall, arm themselves and fight back.

Additionally, Adolph Gamlin recovered consciousness, found a rifle and caused considerable casualties among the Filipinos.

Faced with immensely superior firepower and a rapidly degrading attack, Abanador ordered a retreat.

The Co. C. survivors escaped by sea, being in insufficient numbers to hold the town. The townspeople returned to bury their dead, then abandoned the town.

Conclusions. While the Balangiga attack can be considered a Filipino success in that Co. C. was forced to abandon the garrison, it was a qualified success. The splitting of forces at the mess tent and the barracks with insufficient manpower was a weakness. Abanador’s failure to kill Gamlin caused significant Filipino losses and later enabled Gamlin to secure a field of fire across the plaza which, together with those in the municipal hall, made continuation of the attack insupportable.

As for the bell, it was not under control or direction of anyone in a command position and therefore could not have given the signal to initiate the attack. One does not ask a boy bell ringer to tell you when to go to war.

In another article, entitled “Balangiga and Bad Historians” (also on the Balangiga Study Group site at http://balangiga.bobcouttie.com) Couttie points out these “inaccuracies” in Schott’s book:

Schott gives a vivid account of Captain Bookmiller’s arrival in Balangiga the day after the attack. Jeering, drunken natives defiantly waved bolos at the USS Pittsburgh. Bookmiller opened fire on them and bodies fell left and right.

Only they didn’t. This is another scene not found in Schott’s cited sources. Bookmillers original report, plus Filipino records, make it clear that the town had been evacuated by the time he arrived and he only fired a single shot as the last of stragglers left.

Schott gives suitably gothic accounts of the Filipino bodies being piled high and set afire as their womenfolk pleaded them to stop in tears, of 20 Filipinos being handed over the survivors of Company C and shot. The only source for this is an account by Arnold Irish, a survivor with a history of mental illness given more than three decades after the attack. They are unsupported by Bookmiller’s report, the accounts of other survivors, or the Filipino survivor accounts that would have been available to Schott at the time.

Body Count. How many Filipinos were killed at Balangiga? According to Schott, 250, and their bodies were burned by Bookmiller.

When Bookmiller entered the empty town, he found that the Filipinos had already buried their dead. From the size of the trench, he estimated about 50 dead. Filipino sources like Eugenio Daza who gave his account of the incident, gave a total, with names, of less than 30, a figure that is close to those given in a diary kept by a Pedro Duran, who kept a diatry of the attack. In the trench they stayed, as Bookmiller did not exhume them or burn the bodies.

Another Version of Attack. Professor Rolando Borrinaga, in his article Ialso found on the Balangiga Study Group site at (http://balangiga.bobcouttie.com, provides his own version of the attack. This article was originally published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer issue of September 28, 2001. Excerpts from the article follows:

The attacking force, commanded by Valeriano Abanador, the local chief of police, was composed of around 500 men in seven different units. They represented virtually all families of Balangiga, whose outlying villages then included the present towns of Lawaan and Giporlos, and of Quinapundan, a town served by the priest in Balangiga.

Only two of the eight main plotters were identified as revolutionary officers under the command of Brig. Gen. Vicente Lukban, the politico-military governor of Samar appointed by President Aguinaldo. They were Capt. Eugenio Daza, a former teacher who became Lukban's area officer for tax collection and food security in southeastern Samar, and Pedro Duran, Sr., a Balangigan sergeant under Daza.

Abanador’s deft move to neutralize the moving armed guard, Pvt. Adolph Gamlin, by grabbing his gun from behind and hitting him unconscious with its butt on the head, served as the cue for the communal laborers positioned in and around the town plaza to make the rush at the two other stationary armed guards and the unarmed men of Company C.

Abanador then picked up his rattan cane, waved it above his head, and yelled: “Atake, mga Balangigan-on! (Attack, men of Balangiga!)”.

A church bell was rung seconds later, to announce that the attack had begun. (This was probably the smallest of the three bells, the ringing of which is allowed for secular or civic uses.)

Fierce fighting ensued, resulting in one of the biggest numbers of American casualties in a single encounter.

Of the 74 men of Company C, 36 were killed during the attack (including all commissioned officers), 8 of the wounded died later during the escape by bancas to Basey town, and four were missing and presumed dead.

Of the 26 survivors, only 4 were not wounded.

The natives suffered 28 deaths and 22 wounded.

In a nutshell, the Balangiga Study Group cited the following findings as a result of its investigation. (The summary report is on the Balangiga Study Group site at http://balangiga.bobcouttie.com.)

It is claimed by some writers (Schott, Imperial) that Co. C., 9th US Infantry was dispatched to Balangiga in response to a request by its then-Mayor Pedro Abayan. The group’s investigation to date shows that this claim is based solely on R.O. Taylor’s “Massacre at Balangiga” by George Meyer, a Co. C survivor, in support of efforts to secure the Congreational Medal of Honor.

No such letter has been found in U.S. or Philippine archives and is not referred to by any military authority on either side, despite its potent value for anti-Filipino propaganda.

Valeriano Abanador, the police chief, initiated the attack by assaulting Private Adolph Gamlin, who was on guard, shouting and waving a baton. Sometime undertermined time after this, a bell in the church tower was rung.

The attack was carried out without the support of General Vicente Lukban either in men or material and it is the present opinion of the BRG that his direct guerilla forces played little role in the attack.

The following day, the 29th, after American survivors had reached Basey and Tanauan, Captain Bookmiller went to Balangiga, burried the dead and burned the town. Contrary to highly colorful versions of this visit, no Filipino bodies were burned, and no Filipinos were executed.

On or about Octobder 25th, the 11th Infantry took two of the town’s bells and returned with them to the United States in 1904 to then-Fort Russell (now AFB Warren) and finally abandoned them there about 1913.

A third, smaller bell, according to Jim Beane, a U.S. former 9th Infantry sergeant, was later crated up and sent to Madison Barracks in New York. It is now with the 9th Infantry in Korea.

About nine months after the attack, townspeople returned to Balangiga. Abanador remained the police chief and Pedro Abayan the mayor, without American military supervision.

It is the opinion of the BRG that the attack was carried out in its entirety by the people of Balangiga and surrounding areas, that it was carried out for purposes of self-defense and survival in the face of the orders of Captain Connell and fear generated by the activities of Captain Glenn elsewhere on the island, rather than as a challenge to American sovereignty over the islands. (End of excerpts from the Summarty Report.)

The Pacification of Samar. Due to the public demand in the U.S. for retaliation, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the pacification of Samar. And in six months, General “Jake” Smith transformed Balangiga into a “howling wilderness.” He ordered his men to kill anybody capable of carrying arms, including ten-year-old boys.

Smith particularly ordered Major Littleton Waller to punish the people of Samar for the deaths of the American troops. His exact orders were: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better you will please me.”

(End of Excerpt.)

For more info about Filipino Americans, see The Filipino Americans (1763-Present): Their History, Culture, and Traditions.