7 - World War II: Transient and Enduring Legacies for the Philippines

Summary

INTRODUCTION: TWO PASTS IN THE PRESENT

The question of wartime legacies is particularly relevant to the Philippines because a key protagonist of the war in the Pacific was the United States, and the Philippines was its sole colony. Because of this forty-year colonial relationship, coupled with the experience of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans against the Japanese enemy, it seems a foregone conclusion that the Filipinos would continue to be fixated with the United States ever since. In contrast to the subjects of Britain, France and Holland, who managed to shrug off any special relationship with the former mother country, the Philippines is seen to be very much tied, still, to Mother America. World War II, if anything, would have cemented this relationship.

This image is partly true. As America's colony, the Philippines was inevitably a focal point of World War II in the Asia-Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur had been Field Marshall of the Philippine armed forces at the outbreak of the war. With the surrender of the Filipino-American forces to the Japanese in the Bataan Peninsula, MacArthur left in humiliation, vowing to return. For him, to retake or “redeem” the islands was almost a messianic endeavour. Remembering this promise, a great number of Filipinos, unlike their neighbours in Southeast Asia, continued to thumb their noses at the Japanese administration. Of all the Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines consequently suffered the most in terms of the destruction of life and property and the dislocation of millions of its inhabitants.

A brief rundown is in order for those unfamiliar with what the Philippines experienced in World War II. Political events certainly moved swiftly through the war years: the Japanese takeover, the dogged “last stand” of the defenders at Bataan and Corregidor, the establishment of a new colonial order with its own language, Nihongo, and its own visions of Asian co-prosperity. Then in October 1943 came the granting of independence, three years in advance of the American timetable, a move designed to win the Filipinos over to Japan and jointly defend the country against the imminent return of the United States.