America's Insurgent Legacy

It wasn't just 1776 and all that. Drawing on an old TIME Magazine article, David Axe offers a nice history lesson on Danger Room about American insurgents in the Second World War...

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.

(Abu Muqawama finds the way TIME casually used the word "Japs" to describe the Japanese in 1945 to be highly amusing. It wasn't that long ago, folks! Once, when he was very small, Abu Muqawama asked his grandfather if they called 'em "Japs" when he was fighting in the Pacific. His grandfather said, no, they preferred "Nips" instead, which funny because it at once betrays a certain degree of cultural/historical familiarity yet is just as politically incorrect. Kinda like "Hajji," really.)