LUKBAN
Introduction
The concept and practice of people ’ s war is generally attributed to China ’ s Mao Zedong and Vietnam ’ s General Vo Nguyen Giap . Both relied on a people ’ s army that drew its sustenance from the masses in their respective struggle for independence . Mao wrote his four volumes and Giap his Big Victory , Great Task ; People ’ s Army , People ’ s War ; Ðien Biên Phu and We Will Win based on their own experiences . Such revolutionary works would become the reference manuals in the waging of revolutions in Latin America , the Philippines and other parts of Asia in the late ‘ 60s and early ‘ 70s .
Little is known of the fact that 40 years earlier , such a concept of people ’ s war was already being tried in the Philippines after the emerging neo-colonial power , the United States of America , seized the Philippines by brute armed force , using the Treaty of Paris to establish the legitimacy of its claim , disregarding the fact that Filipinos were already exercising their sovereign rights after they had decisively defeated colonial Spain , and that legitimate and functional government units were in operation throughout most of Philippine territory . Filipino General Emilio Aguinaldo and his field generals started to wage guerrilla warfare on November 12 , 1899 after he was surrounded by three American generals in his Pangasinan holdout . So at a meeting of his council of war in the town of Bayambang , the army was dissolved . “ It was formed into guerrilla units that would carry on the war unconventionally , relying on ambush , concealment , and the avoidance of set-piece battles .” 1
This book is about one of Aguinaldo ’ s intrepid generals , Vicente Rilles Lukban , and how he waged guerrilla war in the island of Samar , the country ’ s third largest island . Neither Aguinaldo nor any of his generals had any theoretical knowledge about waging that kind of war . Their experience in the anti-colonial struggle against Spain was largely the conventional sort of warfare where troops positioned themselves at designated sites and fired at each other until one or the other surrendered or retreated , although in the early days of the revolution the Katipunan forces used long bladed weapons to seize rifles in pitch battles that 9