Remember them, too

We enjoyed Ruth-Ellen Cohen’s article in the weekend BDN on the upcoming centenary of the sinking of USS Maine. Toward the end of the piece, Cohen makes mention of the 320,000 American participants in the Spanish-American War and how that conflict resulted in Spain relinquishing control of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam. She neglects to mention that the United States also used the commencement of hostilities with Spain as rationale for attacking Spanish forces, and later quashing a nascent independence movement, in the Philippine Islands.

The U.S. war of conquest in the Philippines, which lasted from 1898 until 1902, is lost history to most Americans today. Adm. George Dewey, the Norman Schwarzkopf of his day, destroyed a derelict Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in five glorious hours one morning in May 1898.

Over the course of the next four bloody years, U.S. forces counted 4,234 battle deaths, 2,818 wounded and thousands who later succumbed to diseases contracted while in the tropics. Filipino casualties were, not surprisingly, much higher. By its own count the U.S. Army reckoned 20,000 native soldiers killed. As many as 200,000 civilians may have died from causes including famine and what would now be considered war crimes and atrocities.

The U.S. war in the Philippines was as controversial and divisive in its own time as the war in Vietnam was in ours. Reports of the slaughter of noncombatant men, women and children, foreshadowing tragedies like My Lai, caused debate and dissent stateside. Many Americans felt that the much-touted bastion of democracy had no business conquering and colonizing other peoples.

When we commemorate, as we should, the deaths of those who perished aboard USS Maine, let us not forget those uncounted and virtually unremembered who died in conflicts which are no longer convenient to celebrate. Merlita de Guzman Zelz Peter E. Zelz Holden