The Philippines' Reluctant Reunion With the United States - The Atlantic
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Thirty-two years ago, the departure of American troops from the archipelago symbolized the end of colonialism. Today, their return seems like the least bad option.
By Timothy McLaughlinIllustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.June 16, 2023, 7 AM ETShareSaved StoriesSave
On September 16, 1991, Senator Wigberto Tanada gave a soaring speech on the floor of the Philippine senate. The country's president, Corazon Aquino, was proposing to sign a new military-base treaty with the United States. As the treaty came before the senate, lawmakers had "the awesome task of severing the last remaining shackles of colonialism in our motherland, the U.S. military bases," Tanada said. "The sight of the last American warplane flying out of our skies, the last American battleship disappearing from our horizon, and the last American soldier being airlifted from our soil should inspire us to greater heights of achievement."
Twelve senators voted against the treaty, dooming it by a single ballot. Socorro Diokno, an activist who led the Anti-Bases Coalition at the time, told me that she was astonished by the outcome. "This was a fight that was begun by my great-grandfather," she said, "and I was lucky enough to be part of it and in the thick of it when it finally ended, when we finally won."
The United States had maintained a military presence in the Philippines since 1898. But by the time of the senate vote, Manila and Washington were squabbling over payments for the bases, whose usefulness was in question as the Cold War waned and President George H. W. Bush sought to deepen relations with China. In the Philippines, a popular uprising had ousted the American-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos just five years earlier, and nationalist sentiment was still high.
"From the American end, it was a withdrawal," Walden Bellow, an academic and a former congressman in the Philippines, told me. "From the Philippines' end, it was that we kicked them out."
Thirty-two years later, there is no talk of reestablishing U.S. bases, but more American troops have returned to Philippine soil. On a scorching stretch of beach along the South China Sea in April, U.S. military reservists from Mississippi hunted target drones out of the air with Stinger missiles and heavy machine guns. Artillery fire pounded a warship floating offshore in a mock attack. Farther north, on a far-flung island just over 100 miles from Taiwan, hundreds of U.S. troops simulated securing control of what would be a key maritime transit point in the case of a conflict with Beijing.
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President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., the son of the ousted dictator, has reinvigorated his country's alliance with the United States as a buttress against actual and anticipated Chinese aggression. Ships from the Chinese coast guard and navy regularly harass Philippine forces and fishermen, and Beijing has asserted expansive claims in the South China Sea. Unfettered by an international tribunal's 2016 ruling in Manila's favor, China is placing military installations on several islands it built in the contested waters.
This year, the United States and the Philippines reached an agreement giving U.S. forces access to four bases in the Philippines in addition to the ones they can already use. The joint military exercises in April, an annual tradition, were the largest in history between the two countries. Two months earlier, Marcos had summoned China's ambassador to complain about maritime harassment by a Chinese naval vessel, then four days later delivered a warning that the Philippines was facing "heightened geopolitical tensions that do not conform to our ideals of peace" and that the Philippines "will not lose an inch of its territory."
For the moment, at least, the need for a counterweight against China seems to have overridden the vexed history between the Philippines and the United States—one in which the people of the Philippines have held Washington responsible for colonial oppression, aiding a dictator, and the excesses of its troops.
The United States took control of the Philippines in 1898, as a victor's bounty in the Spanish-American War, and established military bases there starting in the early 1900s. The colony gained independence after World War II but signed an agreement in 1947 that granted the United States a 99-year lease on a range of military and naval facilities. The countries later signed a mutual-defense treaty that cemented their alliance.
Ferdinand Marcos, a staunch anti-communist and skilled lawyer, was elected president in 1965. He entranced crowds with his rhetorical power and governed democratically at first. But within 10 years he had imposed martial law, and his rule descended into human-rights abuses and kleptocracy.
Still, during the Cold War, Washington viewed Marcos as a bulwark against the spread of communism, and the U.S. bases as essential to keeping the threat at bay.
"There was a belief deeply held in the Reagan administration that we had to stick with our friends, and Marcos was a friend," Stephen Bosworth, who was the American ambassador to Manila in the late 1980s, said in an oral-history project recounting his post in the Philippines.
Marcos's chief political rival, Benigno Simeon Aquino Jr., was brazenly assassinated in 1983, but even then, Ronald Reagan insisted that the U.S. should offer constructive criticism of the Philippines' rulers rather than, as one contemporaneous news story paraphrased the president, "throwing them to the wolves and then facing a communist power in the Pacific." The position became untenable, however, as the country's economy staggered and opposition coalesced in response to Aquino's killing. In February 1986, Aquino's wife, Corazon, won a presidential election, and mass protests that would come to be known as the People Power Revolution foiled Marcos in his desperate attempt to cling to power.
Bosworth had the task of telling Marcos that he had lost U.S. support. "With that," Bosworth said, "we had removed the sign of heaven from him, the mandate of heaven. He was done."
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The Marcos family and its large entourage of cronies, carrying bags laden with stolen wealth, diamonds tucked into their children's diapers, lifted off from the U.S.-controlled Clark Air Base on February 26, 1986. They went first to Guam and then to Hawaii, where the fiery orator who had ruled the Philippines for 20 years would die in ignominious exile within four years.
The movement to eject the U.S. military in 1991 linked the presence of American bases to Marcos's abusive rule. Diokno and her colleagues at the Anti-Bases Coalition held that without American support, Marcos would never have stayed in power as long as he did. Then the U.S. had allowed him safe passage and a haven abroad, rather than forcing him to face justice in the Philippines. This history had a personal dimension for Diokno. The Marcos administration had imprisoned her father, a former justice secretary and a senator, for nearly two years.
The American military presence was objectionable to many in the Philippines on its own terms as well. A sex trade catering to U.S. servicemen, euphemistically referred to as an '"entertainment industry," flourished around the bases. In Olongapo, the city near U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay, dozens of bars and thousands of women served young American men. The U.S. military helped create a debaucherous playground for sex tourists—"the bargain hunters, freaks, pedophiles, psychopaths, creeps, and crackpots" who were lured "by brochures that promise 'anything goes at Olongapo,'" a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune wrote in a 1989 dispatch from the town.
Tens of thousands of children fathered by U.S. servicemen were left behind when the men rotated out of the country. AIDS broke out among sex workers. Horrific incidents of underage prostitution regularly caught the attention of the media. Nearby cities were often violent and lawless. The shootings and frequent base break-ins were startling. "Holy shit," Lee Badman, who served at Clark Air Base in the late 1980s with the U.S. Air Force, told me he remembered thinking when he arrived. "This is a hostile place when it was supposed to be peacetime."
Still, Badman remembers his posting to the Philippines fondly. Monsoon rains and touts hawking souvenirs were wholly new to a young man from small-town America. He explored the airfield cut from the jade-colored jungle on his bicycle, awed by the scenery and sheer size of the facility. A huge, highly secretive listening station known as the Elephant Cage sat far out on the base, marking "the end of civilization," he said. Beyond it stretched even more dense forest and the foothills of the Zambales Mountains.
Mount Pinuatubo, a volcano only nine miles from Clark Air Base, exploded on June 15, 1991. The ash cloud rose 28 miles into the air. Pyroclastic flows, surging avalanches of hot volcanic gas and fire, barreled down its slopes. A powerful typhoon moved ashore at the same time. Heavy rain mixed with ash, creating a blanket of wet sediment that collapsed the roofs of homes and buildings. Clark Air Base was wrecked.
Frank Wisner arrived in Manila to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines shortly after the eruption. The anti-bases campaign was at its height, and Clark was in no condition for American forces to return. But the United States wasn't ready to relinquish its presence at Subic Bay, which remained important for the 7th Fleet roving the Pacific.
"We worked like hell. I campaigned for it," Wisner told me recently. "I went all over the country. I marched." The effort was unsuccessful.
Wisner flew to Washington after the senate vote, hoping to rally support for a last-minute fix, but found little interest in an expensive basing agreement thousands of miles from home as the threats from the Cold War faded. In a meeting at the White House, Wisner told me, President Bush "made it clear his heart wasn't in it either." In late November 1991, Wisner received the crisply folded American flag that had flown over Clark, once America's largest overseas military base. The last American warship sailed out of Subic a year later.
In the years that immediately followed, the Philippine navy had sporadic run-ins with Chinese poachers fishing illegally in Philippine waters. In the mid-1990s, the Chinese began building structures that appeared to be small huts on Mischief Reef, about 129 nautical miles from Palawan island and within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. The Philippine government protested, but Beijing brushed its objections aside. There was little understanding at the time of the breadth and speed with which China would build up its military forces and position itself to dominate the South China Sea.
"In hindsight," Rommel Jude Ong, a former vice commander of the Philippine navy, told me, "the vacuum created by the loss of Subic and Clark provided opportunities for China to take over."
The Philippines backtracked. It signed a Visiting Forces Agreement with the U.S. in 1998, allowing U.S. forces to come and go from temporary stints on Philippine bases, rather than operating from bases of their own, so as not to run counter to the 1991 vote. The groups that had opposed the U.S. bases had splintered by this time, and a challenge to the agreement in the country's Supreme Court failed.
"It was very disappointing," Diokno told me.
Maritime tensions with China were continuing to build. In 2012, Chinese ships moved into the waters around Scarborough Shoal, a rocky atoll that sits roughly 120 nautical miles west of the Philippine island of Luzon in the South China Sea. After a tense standoff with Philippine forces, Beijing effectively took control of the shoal and has held on to it ever since. Later that year, Xi Jinping became China's president and stepped up Beijing's militarization activities in the South China Sea, despite pledging during a White House visit not to do so.
The Philippines looked to the United States for support, and in 2014, the two countries signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a 10-year security pact allowing a larger U.S. military presence in the country. Within months, questions about the power imbalance between the U.S. and the Philippines again arose. A U.S. Marine taking part in joint exercises murdered Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipina. Authorities discovered her strangled, her head pushed into a toilet in an Olongapo motel.
Yet Manila largely tolerated and even welcomed the military relationship until President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. Duterte insisted that the Philippines was no match for its powerful neighbor, and that it was better to court investment than to antagonize China. He flattered Beijing and made a show of his independence from Washington, regularly lambasting the United States and then-President Barack Obama. He even threatened to scrap the Visiting Forces Agreement, but then abruptly did an about-face. The relationship between the U.S. and Philippine militaries was, Ong told me, "the only reason the alliance survived."
I visited the old Clark facility during the Duterte period, in 2019. The veterans' cemetery was immaculate, its brilliant-white headstones almost fluorescent in the afternoon sun. Other parts of the old air base had been swallowed by the jungle. Some of the bars were still open. They were relics of the heyday of the 1980s, the walls filled with military memorabilia of long-departed units and photos of young airmen sporting ringer tees and mustaches, their arms slung around Filipina women. The American patrons the bars now drew were a considerably older crowd, mostly retirees in blue-and-yellow veterans' hats sipping from bottles of San Miguel beer.
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Government officials at the time were abuzz over anticipated Chinese investment, which they said would help develop the area into a business hub and woo residents sick of the congestion and stifling crush of life in Manila. And Chinese investment did flow into the Philippines during Duterte's tenure—particularly into the pockets of those close to the president. But many of the large-scale, Chinese-backed projects his administration promised never materialized. The $2 billion industrial park that was to provide hundreds of jobs at Clark was one such phantasm.
As U.S. troops left the Philippines in 1991, the Marcos family returned from Hawaii and set about rehabilitating its dynasty through a sustained campaign of historical revisionism. The effort paid off handsomely last year, when Bongbong Marcos was elected president. Joe Biden was one of the first world leaders to call the new president after his victory.
Marcos came to office with scant public record of a foreign policy. But his priorities became clear in short order, as he abandoned what Victor Andres Manhit, the founder of Stratbase ADR Institute, a think tank in the Philippines, described to me as Duterte's "appeasement policy towards China" in favor of stronger ties with the United States and other maritime powers, such as Japan and Australia. Wendy Sherman, a high-ranking U.S. State Department official, jetted to Manila to meet Marcos even before he was sworn in. Marcos announced the expansion of the 2014 security agreement, granting U.S. forces access to four more bases in addition to the five it already uses. Two of the new ones are close to Taiwan.
The Balikatan Exercises have been held annually for years, but the scale and scope of the 2023 events were meant to send a warning to China. On the beach of San Antonio, in Zambales, hundreds of soldiers trudged through powdery sand, manning heavy weapons and logistical equipment. U.S. Marines sweltered in rows of tents lined up just off the beach. Military helicopters and V-22 Osprey, a hybrid aircraft, passed overhead. Counterparts from the Philippines and Australia worked alongside the American soldiers.
Toward the end of the week-long exercises, target drones meant to mimic competitors' hardware launched from the beach and buzzed just offshore. A burst from a .50-caliber machine gun sent one nose-diving into the South China Sea. Another was eviscerated by a Stinger missile. (A different Stinger plopped into the sea, an apparent dud. "Obviously not what we were looking for," an Army major quipped.) Later, at another site, a set of American Patriot missiles ripped through the air. Members of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, a newly formed group designed specifically for fighting in the Pacific island chains, performed sensing and intelligence operations for the exercises, its very existence a testament to the priority Washington now places on the region's security.
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The exercises concluded with a mock attack on a 1940s warship anchored eight nautical miles offshore in the direction of Scarborough Shoal. Having served in World War II before being transferred to the Philippine navy, the ship had been "built to take some punches," a Marine public-affairs officer told me. And it did.
Marcos looked on from an observation tower alongside the U.S. ambassador and military brass. A barrage of artillery hammered the ship, its repercussions setting off car alarms and sending billows of smoke rolling down the beach. Attack helicopters shot at the ship, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, like those supplied to Ukraine, fired on it. Marcos, the first Philippine president to watch the exercises in more than a decade, peered through a pair of binoculars at the display. Even as the exercises were happening, a Chinese coast guard ship offshore blocked a Philippine patrol vessel, nearly hitting it.
Marcos eventually descended from his perch and sped off in a convoy of black SUVs, kicking up a cloud of dust. Days later, he arrived in Washington, where Biden briefly reminisced about Marcos visiting the White House as a child with his father while Reagan was in office.
Such memories don't cast a particularly warm glow for many in the Philippines, despite worries about Chinese designs. Senator Risa Hontiveros, a Marcos critic who backed his progressive challenger in the last election, toldThe Philippine Star in November that she fears her country will soon find itself "choosing between our former colonial master and one that wants to be the new regional or global colonial master."
Diokno, the anti-bases advocate, expressed a similar frustration. The aspiration in 1991 was for the Philippines to stand on its own. But "we have done nothing to defend ourselves from foreign aggressors. Why do you think China can do this to us?" she said of Chinese ships' harassment of Filipino fishing and coast-guard vessels.
"Because we are nobody; we don't do anything. We have had since 1991 to do this and we have done nothing but rely on the U.S."
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This is why all of history needs to be adequately taught in US schools. We teach slavery and the westward expansion fairly well, but when it comes to World War II and it's aftermath, we barely go beyond Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust. How many Americans know how many places in the Pacific were under attack the same day (Dec 7, 1941) that Pearl Harbor was attacked? On that day the Japanese were continuing a war in China, attacking Malaysia, Hong Kong, and they had attacked & completely cut off the Philippines from the US. The American forces who were stationed on the Philippines would have to fight on their own for a very long time before the Japanese took control. The Japanese committed attrocities in the Philippines, such as "the rape of Manilla" in which 100,000 Filipino civilians were slaughtered and there were numerous attrocities committed against American POWs.
The article begins by calling out American colonialism. The Philippines were part of the spoils of war. In the 1940's a good deal of the Pacific region was under colonial rule. The Brits defended India, Burma and Malaysia. The Dutch defended the East Indies, which had the region's oil refinery at Palembang (a key Japanese target.) Without the so-called colonists and the raw materials they produced, the Japanese would have quickly overrun the entire region.
It would seem that the case the government of the Philippines now wants to make is that both they and the US has a mutual interest in restraining China. Does that mean the US should reinvest in the Philippines? Should we rebuild our great submarine base there? Should we station troops there again? Rebuild Clark Field? It would be in our interest too, but I think the moral answer is NO. The so-called colonized are on their own now. Let us not spend a dime on their defense.
So we just give it to China?
They did overrun the whole region including the British stronghold of Singapore. The Dutch East Indies fell in less than three months, Singapore in a few weeks with the loss of 138,000 troops of which 130,000 per taken as POWs, and Malaysia fell in two months. Burma fell in a few months as well.
We were colonizers of the Philippines and quite brutal at times. When the islands fell to the Japanese the Philippine people formed guerrilla groups to fight the Japanese and the US encouraged the Phillippine people to resist and promised them the following:
Yes, we should continue with the new agreements in supporting the Philippines as it is to advantageous to both the US and the Philippines.
We have just completed an agreement with the PNG to have troops and bases there and it is also a strategic location and is advantageous to both the US and PNG.
They didn't get India or Australia. China held on for dear life. Otherwise all that would have been left was a bunch of islands in the central/eastern Pacific. It was a defensive war until the US idustrial complex got rolling. With time the Japanese lost many of their experienced pilots The US Navy won crucial battles early on and eventually we prevailed.
We were colonizers of the Philippines and quite brutal at times. When the islands fell to the Japanese the Philippine people formed guerrilla groups to fight the Japanese and the US encouraged the Phillippine people to resist and promised them the following:
More than 200,000 Filipinos fought the Japanese alongside American soldiers during World War II. At the time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised Filipino troops they would be rewarded for their service and receive all the benefits afforded to an American veteran, including the right to naturalize on U.S. soil. In 1946 the US passed a bill canceling all of what we had promised the Philippine fighters. It was until 2009 that they finally got a bit of what they were promied.
That happened because FDR went along with the MacArthur plan of liberating the Philippines. Admiral Nimitz wanted to bypass it. That is a bit of the history. The important point is that a majority of the Filipinos wanted the US to pull out. Generously, the US went along with that. Now the Filipinos are frightened. They didn't like when the US was there? We need to educate them. The best medicine now is a good dose of the CCP.
Australia was isolated by the Japanese as was India for quite some time the oil/rubber was in Malaya, Burma, East Indies and the Japanese had them and the strategic area of Singapore.
Yes, Nimitz wanted to bypass it, and others to take Formosa to have a base close to Japan.
If you had a good knowledge of the Filipinos you would know that they are fighters and I doubt saying they are afraid is accurate. If would seem that we don't need to educate them and give them a good dose of CCP, I understand that to be let China take the Philippines. You need to be educated on that. Having the CCP controlling them and having bases there would endanger our bases in Guam and other US bases in the area.
As I mentioned in my first comment the US has just signed an agreement with PNG which allows us to station troops, and have bases and naval facilities. That combined with the Philippines not only strengthens the ring around China but puts us in a one up position on the CCP.
As you can see from the map the Philippines are a critical location. Additionally, the US is permanently basing B-52s at RAAF base Tindal south of Darwin.
During my time in the Philippines, I had the opportunity to have as patients many Filipinos that fought alongside the American troops as well as guerilla fighters. Man, did those guys have some stories. As a American, I was one the few younger ones that had a interest in their stories. On more than one occasion I was invited to their houses for dinner and sit around afterwards drinking San Miguel beer. These old gents just wanted their stories heard. Several were Bataan Death March survivors.
Listening and meeting history in the flesh is an honor for many of us and I'm sure that you felt that way. First hand information from those that were there, priceless.
The Japanese could have dominated Australia by air from Port Moresby. As early as May of 1942 the US Navy and the Japanese Navy fought their first carrier battle known as the battle of the Coral Sea. The significance of that battle, in which we sacrificed the Lexington , (at a time when we only had 4 carriers) was to cause the Japanese to turn their invasion force away from Port Moresby and give up on their plan to dominate Australia. I asked an Australian here if that was taught in their history books. He mentioned something about the loss of a Hospital ship.
My first point is confirmed: We need more history taught in our schools, beyond "slavery."
As to my second point: We gave the Filipinos what they asked for! You want to let them have their cake and eat it too. I, on the other hand, have little tolerance for people who are ungrateful. You say it puts the US at a strategic disadvantage. So does allowing the CCP to have a spy base in Cuba, police stations within the US and crawling to them asking for normal relations after all their aggression. So be it!
Here is another point that ties into this: We face this dire problem today as a result of WW II and decisions we made during the Korean War and when we recognized Communist China, normalized trade relations with them, even granting them most favored nation status and later allowing them into the WTO. American policies via both Republican and democrat administrations helped China become the economic and military world power that it is today. Being a benificent nation hasn't worked well out there in the real world.
In the battle for the PNG (Port Moresby), the Japanese had 100,000 troops stationed there and the ferocious fighting lasted from January 1942 until December 1944. The Japanese had over 1,000 air raids in northern Australia, mostly in Darwin and Townsville. German surface raiders and submarines were also in Australian waters until 1944 and sank a number of Australian vessels including the cruiser HMAS Sydney. A Japanese sub sank the hospital ship AHS Centura with almost 300 lives lost. They are taught in Australian history books.
Seems you have little tolerance or understanding of the strategic importance of operational bases in the Pacific or of a people that fought and died fighting alongside us and then our promise to them being broken.
The bases in the Philippines will be to our advantage as will the new bases in the PNG. You are aware that the Chinese are now in the Solomon Islands, aren't you? If so you should see why bases in the Philippines and PNG are extremely important to us and our allies, right?
Yes, hindsight is wonderful and the same could be said about Russia. If we hadn't supported them at the start of WWII they would not have become the power they were and the cold war would not have happened.
Um-hum. Do you have a point to adding insignificant facts to what I pointed to? The battle of the Coral Sea altered the threat to Australia. That's the battle every Australian school child should know about.
Seems you have little tolerance
I have very little tolerance for ingratitude. I was glad to hear from Ed-NavDoc. From him I learned that the majority of Filipinos don not resent the US. The American media was evidently too caught up with "colonialism" to inform the American public.
Yes, hindsight is wonderful and the same could be said about Russia. If we hadn't supported them at the start of WWII they would not have become the power they were and the cold war would not have happened.
That is an orange compared to an apple. With out the Soviet Union doing the heavy lifting the Wehrmacht would have most likely won the Second World War. The cold war with Russia was inevitable since a seriously ill FDR allowed Stalin to have a huge share of the spoils in eastern Europe and of course there was the little matter of the Soviets stealing the secret of the bomb from us.
Yes, the Battle of the Coral Sea did alter the threat to Australia but the defeat of the Japanese at Port Moresby by Australia certainly altered the threat to Australia certainly a lot more than insignificant information, actually critical to the battle and the war. In fact, it is quite famous with very famous paintings throughout Australia depicting it, and if you ever have the opportunity to visit Australia and see the war memorial in Canberra you would know this fact. The ''Australian Coast Watchers'' aided and supplied by the Philippine fighters were a major source of intelligence to us and Oz. Aussies are very cognizant of WWII and especially in Australasia.
It would seem that you have very little tolerance for the men and women of the Philippines that fought and died fighting the Japanese in WWII. That is sad. The media isn't too caught up with ''colonialism'' it is simply a fact that exists if you want to recognize it or not. Most everyone knows that the Philippine people have a warm relationship with the US which is not a surprise to most. I saw it personally over the years when I would travel there to review our operations and had regular contact with our employees, vendors and customers. Which was in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s.
That is simply an opinion about who would have won the war. Yes, they did steal the secrets from us. On the other hand, we aided the Chinese in WWII, and after supporting Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese civil war and after being warned not to move our troops to the Yalu River we did and the Chinese entered the Korean War against us. It's little wonder that China and the US are at odds now, history does paint a telling story.
One of the biggest detriments to the Imperial Japanese Army's plans to take Port Moresby was not a military one by the Allies. It was Mother Nature in the form of the Owen Stanley Mountains dividing the island. The Japanese were over confident and poorly supplied figuring they could live off the land as they had other campaigns. That was one of Imperial Japan's biggest tactical errors of the war. The terrain was so treacherous it was largely impossible to transport the heavy equipment across the range needed to attack and secure Port Moresby. Much of the units suffered from malnutrition and jungle diseases with their uniforms rotting off their bodies. Many whole units were just swallowed up by the jungle and disappeared. The few Japanese that actually made it across were in such pitiful shape that they were in no fit shape to fight and either made suicide Banzai charges to end their suffering honorably in their eyes or just simply surrendered. the Japanese wasted multiple entire divisions in the futile attempt to reach their objectives.
That is true, the Kokoda Tract and the indigenous tribes were able to walk the toughest trails carrying ammo and supplies and wounded Aussies. Many Japanese starved to death and died from disease.
No, Kavika that's a lie. I hate little tolerance for people who hate America. Shall I stop there?
On the other hand, we aided the Chinese in WWII,
It was then A FREE CHINA!!!!. Both Chiang Kai‐shek and Mao led armies during that war. Long after the war and after the Communists took control a Japanese leader visiting Japan apologized to then Chairman Mao for the Japanese war on China. Mao told him that no apology was necessary and that he could not haven taken control of China without that war.
Learn history.
No it isn't a lie and you should have stopped there, you have proved it isn't a lie but keep trying to bs your way through it. You've been told by three people on this thread all of who have spent considerable time in the Philippines that the Philippino people like Americans, so what are you babbling on about?
Actually saying China was free is stretching reality at one point Chaing was allied with Russia. China was in the middle of a civil war and it was stopped due to the second Sino Japanese war in 1937. It continued after WWII ended and ended in 1949 when Mao drove Kai-shek out of the country to what is now Taiwan. The US backed Chiang Kai-shek.
Follow your own advice.
Show me where I said that?
You've been called
Here is where you said it.
LOL, as usual, you duck everything else and try to BS your way out of what you said. Bull shit and bluster isn't a good look, you should have learned that by now.
You've been called
As usual you can't back it up.
That referred to people like you!
Nowhere did I speak against Filipino veterans.
So you lied
It was backed up with your words and now after complaining about Filipino people you are stating that he wasn't about them and you did not differentiate between Filipino but it was referring to people like me...LMAO you stumble over your own words.
Good to know that you think that I hate America, since you have no idea what it is to be an American you're left throwing insults.
No ticket, huh? At least you tried.
Have a good one.
I didn't try anything except that I showed that you have no idea what your taking about.
Interesting, if somewhat slanted article. From 1984 through 1987 I and my family were stationed at the US Naval Communications Station Philippines San Miguel. This was a small and somewhat isolated base that you could walk from one end to the other in about 20 minutes or so. We were about a hours drive North of the Subic Bay/Cubi Point Naval complex and were situated right on the beach. we were there when the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos Sr and the People Power Revolution took place. It was a very tense situation for the Active Duty personnel and frightening for the military dependents there as well. Things happened so fast we had no warning, and very guidance from higher authority other than to send the civilian Philippino National base workers home and lock the base down and bar the gates to any except those active duty personnel trying to return to the stations. There were protesters surrounding the base and several tried to breach the perimeter. Thankfully unsuccessfully thanks to the base Marine Barracks contingent. I would like to think I have unique viewpoint that many on NT may not have.
The reason I say the article is slanted is that the author several items that occurred after the Marcos's were deposed and fled. I will only mention three. As regards the base leases, much of the problem stemmed from the Philippine insisting on raising the lease amounts that had previously been agreed upon. Fact is that many members of the new Philippine Senate under Corazon Aquino. a major factor in that was led by Army General Fidel Ramos who had been a close associate the Marcos family, just plain got very greedy and upset when the US refused.
My second point is the potential use of the facilities at Subic Bay by the US Navy. This is still in discussion and I believe it has not been finalized. Problem with that is that China is pressuring the Philippines to allow their warships to dock there as well, as it is considered a "free port". I believe President Marcos turned the Chinese down which probably pissed them off highly, but I could be wrong. Communists generally do not like the word no.
Last point is that, from my contacts in the Philippines, the US is still viewed as very popular by the general population, especially among the younger generations.
In Olongapo, the city near U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay, dozens of bars and thousands of women served young American men.
Ah, yes...good memories.
Every time my ship, the Midway, pulled into Subic, we rented a country bar off Magsaysay and pretty much lived there for the 10 days we were there, with the exception of duty days.
We also had pulled in just after Marcos was deposed and could not leave the ship. That visit sucked.
After Pinatubo, I had just left Japan and I heard from some of my friends there that several Yokosuka ships had gone down and evacuated Americans, family and many Filipinos. Went back with the Independence to Manila Bay a few years later, took a Jeepney to Subic and saw continued mass destruction from the volcano, including only roofs of houses with everything else buried.
My wife and I just bought some property in Central Luzon, just south of Baguio and plan on building a house there in February.
I understand there are several small bases scattered throughout the country, some because of Dutuerte and some others due to the new President Marcos, son of the deposed Marcos in the 80s.
It would be nice to have some protection if we are there and the Chinese decide to invade that country.
I hear you. What I forgot to add above is that right after Mt Pinatubo blew up and everything was covered in ash, the Philippines government came back and said Oh, we will settle for the original agreement if you will stay." The runway at Clark AFB was trashed and Cubi Point was covered in ash. The US said sorry the cost is too much to fix everything. The rest is history.
Yes, you do.
a major factor in that was led by Army General Fidel Ramos who had been a close associate the Marcos family, just plain got very greedy and upset when the US refused.
So it wasn't just colonialism. Thank you for that.
My second point is the potential use of the facilities at Subic Bay by the US Navy. This is still in discussion and I believe it has not been finalized. Problem with that is that China is pressuring the Philippines to allow their warships to dock there as well, as it is considered a "free port". I believe President Marcos turned the Chinese down which probably pissed them off highly, but I could be wrong. Communists generally do not like the word no.
I believe it was very important for the submarines. In the 1940's most of them used it as a home base. We are a very generous nation, aren't we?
Last point is that, from my contacts in the Philippines, the US is still viewed as very popular by the general population, especially among the younger generations.
Why do you think the American media can't report that?
I appreciate the imput from somebody who was there for a key part of the history.
Personally, I think the MSM believes it is in their best interest to downplay and good feelings on the part of the Philippines to the US as it is not conducive to the current leftist liberal agenda.
Fidel Ramos was a quite wealthy person in his own right and later became president after Corazon Aquino. In his position as the Philippine Army Chief of Staff, he was also directly in charge of the Philippine Presidential Guard unit responsible for security and protection of Ferdinand Marcos Sr and his family. In that position, he was privy to many of the Marcos families' deepest and darkest secrets. One that lingers to this day that Ramos was in charge of is the whereabouts of the hidden Yamashita's Gold treasure hoard. This hoard was the huge amounts of gold and valuables stolen by the troops of Imperial Japanese Army General Yamashita during the invasion and subsequent occupation of the Philippines during WW II and hidden at the endo the war by the retreating Japanese and the Japanese were sworn to secrecy. Ferdinand Marcos wasted huge amounts of time and resources looking for that hoard with a lot of people being tortured and disappearing. It is rumored that a lot of the gold and jewels that the Marcos's and their cronies carried with them when they boarded the USAF transports that flew them out consisted of a portion of Yamashita's treasure hoard, but nobody knows for sure. If it existed, the general took the secret to his grave when he was hanged for war crimes at the end of the war. Many treasure hunters are still scouring the jungles of Luzon searching for it convinced of it's existence. A intriguing side story in the history of the Philippines.
I kind of have that feeling as well. There is always an anti-American twist to just about every news story.
A intriguing side story in the history of the Philippines.
One of many. Another being the secret salvaging of old WWII sunken ships around Indonesia. Some of them registered as sacred burial grounds. Example A: The HMS Prince of wales and the Repulse.
Yep. Chinese/CCP owned Salvage ship "Chuan Hong 68" Has been detained by Malaysian authorities for said illegal salvage operations not only of Prince of Wales and Repulse, but also numerous other Allied wreck sites.
Studied Modern Arnis from a Filipino grand master back in those days and as I recall he had negative emotions regarding Marcos. We didn't talk politics much but he seemed to be thoroughly in favor of promoting due to skill and determination rather than race or nationality.
Bruce Lee was much the same in his inclusive policies with Jeet Kune Do. His choice of Danny Inosanto (US/Filipino), Takauri Kimura (Japanese) and James Coburn (US) etc... as his top tier students was indicative of this same sense of globalism.
Isolationism/nationalism/racism are diseases that should be avoided at all costs.