A largely overlooked conflict in American history, the Philippine-American War anticipated such wars as the Vietnam conflict, with U.S. troops ill prepared to deal with an enemy using unconventional guerilla tactics. The Philippine-American War began in early 1899, shortly after the defeat of Spain by the United States in the Spanish American War, which resulted in the liberation of the Spanish colony Cuba but the takeover of other colonies by the United States, including Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine islands. The Filipinos, who had taken up arms against their Spanish colonizers in 1896, assumed they would receive liberation once American soldiers arrived in the Philippines and became comrades-in-arms against a common enemy. But Filipino independence was not to be; the islands offered too many incentives for the Americans to abandon and watch another Western power or Japan undertake their annexation.