The Bells of Balangiga | WyoHistory.org

On September 28, 1901, guerrillas assaulted unarmed American soldiers in Balangiga Phil. 48 were killed including all of the officers. An excerpt from the article:

"On Sept. 28, 1901, Filipino insurgents, armed only with machete-like bolo knives, attacked the soldiers of Company C, U.S. 9th Infantry, in the town of Balangiga on the island of Samar. The troops, nearly all of them unarmed, were eating Sunday breakfast. Of 74 men in the company, 48 were killed, including all the officers. The rest—all but four of them wounded—managed to escape up the coast in overloaded dugout canoes.

In response, in the most vicious and controversial operation of the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in those years, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps crushed the insurgency in a devastating campaign by the summer of 1902. At the end of the campaign, soldiers of the 11th Infantry brought two church bells from Balangiga back to the base where they were stationed at the time—Fort D.A. Russell outside Cheyenne, now F.E. Warren Air Force Base. A third bell from the Balangiga church, owned by the 9th Infantry, remains at the U.S. Army’s Camp Red Cloud, Uijeongbu, South Korea.

Begiining in the 1990s, Various Filipino groups mounted efforts for the return of all or some of the bells to the Philippines. The return was finallly accomplished in December 2018."