DI

The Philippines is the largest colony that the United States held in 1940, or indeed has ever held, and it’s attacked in the same attack as Pearl Harbor, just a few hours apart. It’s a really interesting set of questions that Roosevelt has to answer, to try to convince the mainland public that this is something that should lead to war. I found it so fascinating to watch FDR noodle in his drafts with that, and to try and work it out on the page.

In the first draft, he describes the event as an attack on Hawaii and the Philippines, which it is, although he still omits Guam. And then you can just see him almost rethinking that and wondering if it’s going to work. We don’t know what was in his mind at the time, but I strongly suspect that he was aware of how many in the mainland were not enthused about a defense of the far western territories of the United States. Opinion polls of the time indicate that even when we’re talking about Hawaii, a small majority of people were actually supportive of the US military defending Hawaii; those numbers are smaller for the Philippines and Guam.

So you can see FDR crossing out the Philippines as a prominently listed target, and trying to turn the speech into a speech about Hawaii, which I suspect he thinks will work a little better for his narrative purposes — it’s whiter, it’s closer to the US mainland, and in a pinch, it can be rounded up to quote-unquote “America.” In fact, he inserts the word “American” into his speech — it’s one of the last edits he makes, so that instead of just describing it as an attack on the island of Oahu, it’s an attack on the American island of Oahu.

Ultimately this serves his purpose, as it allows him to make the statement that the empire of Japan has attacked the United States of America. That’s the thing he wants his audience to understand.

There are so many ways in which the US overseas territories are hidden from view, and this is a chance for you to see it in an extremely direct and consequential way, because the sense that the Philippines was foreign to the US was held by the mainland public, and to some degree by leaders in Washington, throughout the war. It had overwhelming, lethal consequences for the Philippines.

World War II was the bloodiest event ever to take place on US soil, and a lot of that has to do with the strategy adapted by the US vis a vis the Philippines, first allowing the islands to become a sacrifice zone to Japan, which would then permit the United States to gather its forces and concentrate on the European theater. And second, when the US “liberated” the Philippines, it did so by fairly general bombing and shelling, which ended up killing Filipinos who were US nationals at the same time as it killed Japanese. That strategy saved the lives of mainland soldiers, but it was profoundly destructive to the largest colony that the United States held. In a month, the US and Japanese forces decimated Manila, which was the sixth-largest city in the [US’s total territorial holdings].