American Insurgents

Facing growing insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Africa, it's easy to think we're in some new era. But a hundred years ago U.S. troops brutally put down insurgents in the Philippines in a 15-year struggle. And half a century later in 1942, as Japanese troops conquered the islands, several U.S. Army officers retreated into the mountains with bands of loyal Filipinos to launch their own insurgent campaigns. Time profiled one American insurgent leader in July 1945, following the successful liberation of the Philippines:

By the time the U.S. forces came back, [Colonel Russell] Volckmann and his band had already cleared the Japs [sic] from a large portion of northwestern Luzon's mountains. Throughout the Luzon [liberation] campaign Volckmann and his Ilocanos — short, dark-skinned, sensitive northern Filipinos — worked on their own within the planning orbit of Lieut. General Walter Krueger's Sixth Army. With air support they swept around the western and northern coasts of Luzon, ranged down the west bank of the Cagayan River and kept the Japanese nervously watching on every side.

"The more idealistically inclined guerrillas inflicted four hundred casualties on Japanese occupation forces in 1944," historian Max Hastings recounts in his excellent new book Retribution.

After the war Volckmann helped found the U.S. Army Special Forces.