The Philippines: Allies During the Vietnam War

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Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos’ official request in February 1966 for congressional approval to send a combat engineer battalion to the assistance of South Vietnam could not have shocked the citizens of the Philippines more than if he had turned somersaults in public. Marcos’ predecessor, Diosdado Macapagal, had attempted to persuade the Philippine Congress at the end of 1965 to send troops to South Vietnam–and the opposition to that proposal had been led by Marcos, then president of the senate. Marcos had recently deserted Macapagal’s party, the Liberals, and when he later ran for president on the Nacionalistas ticket, he won.

Marcos’ change of heart bewildered his supporters. One congressman pointed out that Marcos had questioned the right of the previous administration to commit the country indirectly to war, and he had maintained that the best way to help the Republic of Vietnam was to increase medical and humanitarian activities. ‘A few months later,’ Filipino Congressman Pablo V. Ocampo said, ‘the same Ferdinand Marcos advocated the sending of combat engineers–a euphemism for combat troops….What made him adopt the position of the Macapagal administration, which he had criticized?’

In hearings before the U.S. Subcommittee on United States Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, beginning September 30, 1969, committee members also questioned the reasons for Marcos’ decision and the successful passage of the bill to send combat engineers to Vietnam, eventually totaling more than 2,000 men. Senator Mike Mansfield asked the deputy chief of mission from the U.S. Embassy in Manila, James L. Wilson, ‘Did the Filipinos dispatch this battalion…of engineer[s] to Vietnam on the basis of their own initiative or…pressure from the United States government?’ Wilson replied, ‘There was an active interest on the part of the United States government in bringing forces from other nations into the conflict in Vietnam,’ and said that the government of South Vietnam had also directly asked the Philippine government for aid. He added that Filipino public opinion had been in favor of some contribution, although the form of that aid was in debate.

The U.S. government’s active interest in bringing other nations into the war had been part of U.S. policy discussions as early as 1961. President Lyndon B. Johnson first publicly appealed for other countries to come to the aid of South Vietnam on April 23, 1964–in what was called the ‘More Flags’ program. Chester Cooper, former director of Asian affairs for the White House, explained why the impetus came from the United States instead of from the Republic of South Vietnam: ‘The ‘More Flags’ campaign…required the application of considerable pressure for Washington to elicit any meaningful commitments. One of the more exasperating aspects of the search…was the lassitude…of the Saigon government. In part…the South Vietnam leaders were preoccupied with political jockeying….In addition, Saigon appeared to believe that the program was a public relations campaign directed at the American people.’

An editorial in the Manila Times on March 1, 1966, shows that some Filipinos agreed with Saigon concerning the More Flags program: ‘The fact is that this proposal [to send combat engineers] is just so much window dressing for such an unattractive proposition as sending Filipinos to fight in an undeclared war which…Americans themselves are coming to deplore. [T]he troops we are sending there are…merely to add to the show of flags on the U.S. side.’

According to the former special assistant to the commander, U.S. MACV, Brig. Gen. James Lawton Collins, Jr., as the personal representative of General William C. Westmoreland to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff on Allied Participation, the real problem was that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of obtaining aid alone, having few diplomatic ties. Therefore, the American embassies made requests on their behalf, leaving the Vietnamese to make formal requests after aid had been agreed upon.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Foreign Affairs, Historical Conflicts, Politics, Vietnam War

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