SHOCK AND AWE IN MANILA
Remembering ‘Occupation Day’, August 13, 1898
By Carmen Guerrero Nakpil
Special to the BusinessMirror
The handful of surviving Filipinos, who, like me, spent their early years as subjects of the only American colony, remember with mixed feelings and queasy confusion the 13th of August, which was celebrated every year with great pomp and ceremony as “Occupation Day.” It was a school holiday and a national fiesta with triumphalist speeches on the Luneta. We were taught that it was the day the Americans took possession of Manila in 1898, obviously a cause for rejoicing, since it meant the end of the nefarious centuries we had spent in Spanish convents and the beginning of our dalliance with English and Hollywood .
Nobody was ever told the exact circumstances of that event, for American policy was (and still is) steadfast denial of historical truths. But I had a dissident grandfather who spent the day in a cold fury, bursting out every so often with denunciations, rendered with clenched teeth and blazing eyes, about how Filipinos, that fateful August, had already surrounded Intramuros and reduced the Spaniards to starvation and despair but were prevented from taking over the city by the Americans, who had pretended they were allies only until they were able to land enough troops to take Manila themselves.
This is the documented account of the American Occupation of Manila, on August 13, 1898. That day, three combatants were locked in an epic confrontation. The Filipinos, about 80,000 troops of the Revolutionary Army, commanded by Gens. Emilio Aguinaldo, Antonio Luna, Mariano Noriel and other officers, had laid siege to Spanish Manila since mid-June and now held the walled city with a stranglehold of concrete blockhouses and trenches from Caloocan to Pasay . Behind them was the whole of liberated Luzon . But they lacked weapons and ammunition and knew they were exposed to the guns of the American warships anchored in Manila Bay . Read more