The Philippine War, 1899-1902 - Hardcover

Linn, Brian McAllister

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0700609903 ISBN 13: 9780700609901

Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas, 2000

Synopsis

Focusing purely on the military aspects of the war, Linn (history, Texas A&M U.) argues that previous studies of the war have mischaracterized it as having qualities which can only be ascribed to the final few campaigns (i.e. concentration camps, American brutality and torture, and one officer's threat to turn the Philippines into a "howling wilderness"). Reviewing the fighting in every Filipino province, he finds that the American victory was due more to rebel mistakes and American "social reform" than to overwhelming American military force. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

Brian Mc Allister Linn is professor of history at Texas A&M University and the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902 and Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902-1940, winner of the 1997 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award.

From the Back Cover

"Brian Linn, who has the rare ability to craft a readable text without abandoning the scholar's penchant for accuracy, has written another fine book. Meticulously researched and impressively documented, his study draws upon the literature from all sides of a number of controversies. The result is a book of unusual balance, making Linn's accomplishment without equal among the many works on the war."--John M. Gates, author of Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902

"An impressively researched and well written narrative history that brings reasoned analysis to topics previously fraught with partisanship and polemics."--Timothy K. Nenninger, author of The Leavenworth Schools and the Old Army, 1881-1918

Reviews

Linn, a professor of military history at the U.S. Army War College, enhances his position as the leading authority on America's military presence in the Pacific before Pearl Harbor in this well-written, comprehensively researched monograph. Without justifying the annexation itself, Linn demonstrates that the Filipino nationalists enjoyed at best limited popular support and did as much as the U.S. commanders in the islands to provoke a shooting war as an alternative to negotiation. Operationally, U.S. forces were well led, fought hard, and took advantage of repeated Filipino mistakes in both conventional and unconventional warfare. None of insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo's lieutenants were able to combine regular and partisan warfare effectively or to build on local successes. Linn's demonstration of the fighting power of regular troops and the short-service national volunteers who succeeded them does much to correct the bias in favor of the regulars that dominates the literature. As Linn shows, however, military success was only half of the war. Civic action was the other element of victory. The Americans built hospitals, opened schools and restored order. When necessary, they sustained that order with punitive measures, including torture. Without whitewashing individual incidents, Linn shows that both the general customs of warfare and U.S. civil and military law allowed for exponentially higher levels of physical coercion than their present-day counterparts. If the U.S. annexation of the Philippines was an exercise in imperialism, Linn makes a convincing case that by 1902 the U.S. government of the island was nevertheless legitimate both de jure and de facto. For an increasing majority of Filipinos, the Americans had become preferable to the insurgents. Illus. not seen by PW. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0700609903
• ISBN 13: 9780700609901
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 427