Philippines, U.S. Military Involvement in the

Philippines, U.S. Military Involvement in the began with Adm. George Dewey's stunning victory over the Spanish Pacific Fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay on 1 May 1898, at the beginning of the Spanish‐American War. The situation was complicated by the presence of a Filipino colonial rebellion, which declared independence from Madrid and created a national government under the leadership of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo. Both Americans and Filipino nationalists besieged Manila, but the Spanish surrendered to the U.S. forces, which excluded Aguinaldo's forces from the capital.

President William McKinley decided to ask Spain to cede the Philippines to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1898). Annexation was opposed by most Democrats and some Republicans, but supported particularly within the Republican Party for a variety of reasons, commercial as well as strategic. At Manila, fighting, largely provoked by the U.S. commanding general, Elwell S. Otis, broke out between American and Filipino forces on 4 February 1899, two days before the U.S. Senate narrowly ratified the treaty annexing the archipelago.

The Philippine War lasted from 1899 to 1902. Conventional unit warfare the first year, resulting in heavy Filipino casualties, was succeeded by substantial guerrilla warfare until Aguinaldo was captured by Frederick Funston in 1901. Atrocities occurred on both sides in the guerrilla war.

The U.S. military commander, Gen. Arthur MacArthur, who succeeded Otis in May 1900, continued to hold executive power even after a commission headed by federal Judge William Howard Taft arrived and began exercising legislative authority in September 1900. When Gen. Adna Chaffee relieved MacArthur in July 1901, McKinley transferred executive authority from MacArthur as military governor to Taft as civil governor. One of the civil government's first moves was to establish a Philippine Constabulary, consisting of American officers and Filipino enlisted men to maintain order in pacified areas while the U.S. Army and Philippine Scouts and Constabulary concentrated against the guerrilla bands.

American enthusiasm for formal overseas colonies diminished after the war, in part because of the price of more than 4,000 American deaths and 20,000 Filipino soldiers killed, along with a huge number of civilian casualties. American farmers worried over competition from Filipino produce while U.S. Army officers felt increasingly vulnerable in defending these distant islands against Japanese expansion. By 1907 a Philippine legislature, dominated by independistas, controlled the archipelago's internal affairs, and only the timing of full independence divided America's two main political parties. The Jones Act (1916) promised independence as soon as the Filipinos were ready.

But under the Republicans, progress slowed. From 1921 to 1927, the appointed governor general was U.S. Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, who ruled with a heavy hand. The Great Depression and the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt led in 1934 to the Tydings‐ McDuffie Act, which provided for a ten‐year transition to Philippine independence under a commonwealth government. Manuel Quezon was elected commonwealth president in 1935.

With the growing threat from Japan, Quezon sought to build up the Philippine military. With President Roosevelt's permission, Quezon hired recent U.S. Army chief of staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur (son of Arthur MacArthur) as a military adviser with the rank of field marshal, the only American ever to hold that title. When the Japanese invaded the islands in December 1941, they overwhelmed both the U.S. and the Philippine military. General MacArthur and Quezon left before the surrender of the besieged American forces on the island fortress of Corregidor in the Battle of Manila Bay. Three years later, despite the navy's plan to bypass the Philippines, MacArthur obtained Roosevelt's permission to liberate the archipelago, and in October 1944 he and American troops waded ashore after the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Less than a year after the end of the war, the Philippines was granted independence on 4 July 1946.

Particularly because of the Cold War, the American military presence continued in the Philippine Republic. Americans provided assistance to President Ramon Magsaysay (1953–57) and others in the suppression of the Communist‐led Huk rebellion (1946–54). In 1947, the United States was granted leases on several military bases there, including Clark Air Base and the U.S. Navy base at Subic Bay. President Ferdinand Marcos (1965–86) renegotiated those leases, and, at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson, sent a battalion of Philippine Army Engineers to South Vietnam.

In the post‐Marcos era, President Corazon Aquino (1986–92) survived the most serious attempted coup against her, in December 1989, through the help of U.S. military aircraft. The end of the Cold War made the U.S. military bases in the Philippines less crucial. As Filipino opposition to them mounted and the Philippine legislature increased its demands for lease renewals, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991 covered Clark Air Base with volcanic ash, and the Philippine Senate rejected a proposed treaty, the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy abandoned the bases they had held for nearly a century.
[See also Philippines, Liberation of the.]

Bibliography

Theodore Friend , Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1965.
Peter W. Stanley , A Nation in the Making: The United States and the Philippines, 1899–1921, 1974.
Richard Welch , Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine‐American War, 1899–1902, 1979.
Stuart C. Miller , “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903, 1982.
Stanley Karnow , In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines, 1989.
Glenn Anthony May , Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War, 1991.

Stuart Creighton Miller