History of the Philippines by Luis H. Francia

Author:Luis H. Francia [FRANCIA, LUIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS048000
ISBN: 9781468315455
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE WAR

THE BLOODY CAMPAIGN TO WREST THE PHILIPPINES AWAY FROM the Japanese left the country in ruins, with the archipelago facing the seemingly insurmountable task of rebuilding. Manila was a shell of its pre-war grandeur, its heart, Intramuros, gutted. In an initial estimate of the damages caused by war, the Philippine Bureau of Census and Statistics put these at close to $3 billion. Later the Philippines would file claims on the Japanese government for $4 billion.

Claims from all the countries damaged by the Pacific War totaled $54 billion, an enormous amount that Japan would find all but impossible to pay. The Allied reparations committee, however, could not agree on the amount Japan could pay. In the interim, the U.S. government authorized MacArthur, virtual emperor of Japan during the U.S. occupation, to compel the Japanese to make payments. Most of these interim payments were in the form of industrial equipment. Additionally, Japanese assets in the different countries could be seized by their respective governments.

However, in 1949, the U.S. unilaterally dropped its demands for payments, but the Philippines and other war-damaged countries objected. In light of ideological battle lines being drawn between the Soviet Union and the U.S., Japan was now seen as a vital cornerstone in Asia against the Soviet Union. Its economic recovery, unhampered by reparations, was crucial. In 1952, Japan signed a peace treaty with forty-nine nations, including the United States. The treaty provided that Japan would negotiate separately with not just the Philippines but other war-damaged countries such as Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand. Four years later, Japan and the Philippines agreed to a reparations program wherein Japan would provide $500 million in free goods over a ten-year period; $30 million in technical services; $20 million in payments to war widows and orphans; and $250 million in long-term loans over a period of twenty years, to end in 1977. From the Japanese perspective, the reparations process would help reopen markets heretofore closed to them, and thus gain access to much-needed raw materials.

While Osmeña was nominally the president of the commonwealth, Douglas MacArthur, as commander of the U.S. forces, called the shots. He had at his disposal men, money, and materials, and he used them strategically to once again insure firm U.S. control before Philippine independence would be declared on July 4, 1946. To do that, and to get a government up and running as soon as possible, he and his staff overlooked potential charges of collaboration against those of the political elite who had worked with the Japanese. MacArthur was especially keen on Manuel Roxas, his aide before the war and whom he much preferred to the fastidious and more independent-minded Osmeña, who had succeeded Quezon as president of the commonwealth when the latter died of chronic tuberculosis at Lake Saranac, New York, in August of 1944.

Roxas’s star had risen fast in the pre-war political firmament: a politician from Capiz Province in the Visayas, he occupied the speakership of the Philippine Assembly in 1922 at the age of thirty.

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