Under the Treaty of Manila, the US relinquished sovereignty over the Philippine Islands, fulfilling a promise made a decade earlier in the Tydings-McDuffie Act. The transition came after brutal Japanese occupation during World War II and years of guerrilla resistance, leaving the new republic to rebuild amid widespread devastation.
Manila in July 1946 was still largely rubble. The Battle of Manila the previous year had killed over 100,000 civilians and flattened much of what had once been called the "Pearl of the Orient," caught between retreating Japanese forces and advancing American and Filipino troops. Independence arrived not as a triumphant culmination but as a fragile beginning, layered atop mass graves and burned-out government buildings.
Manuel Roxas became the first president of the newly independent republic, inheriting an economy in ruins and a countryside still simmering with the Hukbalahay guerrilla movement, former anti-Japanese fighters now suspicious of the new arrangement with Washington. The Treaty of Manila severed formal colonial ties but was quickly followed by agreements granting the US extensive military basing rights and trade privileges that critics said kept the Philippines economically tethered.
Filipino leaders had waited since 1898, when the US took the islands from Spain and then crushed the First Philippine Republic's own independence bid in a brutal war. The date chosen for the 1946 handover, July 4, deliberately echoed American independence — a symbolic gesture the Philippines itself would later shift away from, moving its independence day observance to June 12 in 1962 to mark the date it declared freedom from Spain in 1898.