Expeditionary· Philippine-American War
Basey, Samar
The arrival of the Marines on Samar for the campaign that would become the most notorious of the war.
On 24 October 1901 Major Littleton Waller's battalion of some three hundred Marines landed at Basey, on the southern coast of Samar, sent at the army's request to help subdue the island. The deployment followed the Balangiga massacre of the month before, in which Filipino fighters had killed nearly fifty American soldiers of the 9th Infantry, the same regiment alongside which Waller's Marines had served in the China relief expedition the year before, so that the Marines came to Samar with a personal stake in the fighting. No combat attended the landing itself; it was the staging point for the sustained and brutal counter-guerrilla campaign that followed through the rest of 1901 and into 1902, the operations against Lukban's forces that would include the Sohoton assaults and the calamitous march across the island.
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Record no. 488