The Philippines had been a colony of the United States since the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Following the end of the Pacific War, the Philippines was granted full independence on July 4, 1946, with Manuel Roxas as the first president.
After independence, the United States retained control over the military facilities at Clark AB and the naval base at Subic Bay. The United States funded much of the activities of the Philippine military during this time. A contingent of Philippine troops had been sent to Korea in 1950, and in 1951 the two nations signed a mutual defense treaty.
In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines. He dominated the political scene for the next twenty years. During his first term, he introduced a series of ambitious public works, including roads, bridges, schools, health centers, and urban beautification projects. These provided generous pork barrel benefits for his friends and cronies. Marcos had actually also planned to introduce a land reform program, but it was allowed to languish because it would have alienated the elite landowners, who were a powerful base of his support.
As part of his ambitious public works programs, Marcos sought to upgrade the equipment of the Philippine military, and lobbied vigorously for military aid from the United States. In 1966, the Philippine Air Force received 19 F-5As and three F-5Bs for use by the 6th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Basa Air Base. The first aircraft arrived on October 25 to replace the F-86 Sabre in the air defense role. The aircraft all retained their USAF serial numbers, which were 64-13310/113313, 64-13320/13324, 65-10499/10507, 66-9148/9150, 64-13379/13380, and 65-10589.
Marcos was elected to a second term in 1969, but by this time the corruption had gotten so bad that the general quality of life had significantly deteriorated. The crime rate had increased, economic growth had slowed, and Communist insurgencies had begun to spread. Marcos used a series of random bombings as a pretext to declare martial law in 1972. Opposition figures were jailed, weapons were confiscated, newspapers were shut down, and the Congress was closed. Marcos invested himself with dictatorial powers and ruled by decree.
Many people, especially those in privileged positions in Philippine society, initially supported Marcos’s martial law. The United States, seeing Marcos as a staunch anti-Communist, initially did not protest the loss of Philippine democracy. Under martial law, the economy initially benifitted from the increased stability that it provided, but the largest and most advanced manufacturing and business enterprises came under the control of Marcos loyalists and cronies, including his wife Imelda’s relatives. A series of monopolies were established in the sugar and coconut market, and millions of dollars from these monopolies were skimmed off and diverted into the Swiss bank acounts of Marcos’s friends and relatives. The corruption spread into the ranks of the military, with top ranking officers participating in the general looting of the country, and personal loyalty to Marcos rather than talent became the major factors in promotion and advancement. The military proved to be ineffective in dealing with a rapidly-growing Communist insurgency and a Muslim separatist movement. The scale of corruption became truly awe-inspiring.
In the mid-1970s, the F-5s were supplemented by a delivery of a batch of ex-US Navy F-8 Crusaders, but these F-8s had to be retired in 1986 due to corrosion, unserviceability and lack of spare parts, leaving the F-5 the only fighter in the Philippine Air Force inventory. However, the serviceability of the Philippine Air Force Freedom Fighters was not helped by the corruption and mismanagement of the later years of the Marcos regime. The F-5s also underwent an upgrade which equipped it with surplus AN/APQ-153 radars with significant overhaul at the end of the 1970s to stretch their service life by another 15 years.
On January 27, 1981, Marcos ended martial law and some controls were lifted, but the economy remained dominated by his relatives and cronies and the corruption continued unabated on a rampant scale. In June of 1981, he was re-elected as president in an election boycotted by the main opposition groups.
Benigno Aquino, Marcos’s primary political rival, had been jailed at the time of the declaration of martial law in 1972. Aquino was allowed to go to the United States for medical treatment in 1980, and became a major leader of the opposition in exile. On August 21, 1983, Aquino returned to the Philippines to attempt to try and build a viable opposition, but was murdered at Manila International Airport as he tried to get off the plane. It was later determined that a group of military officers were responsible for the killing.
It turned out that Aquino was a more formidable opponent dead than alive, and became a martyr who focussed popular indignation against a corrupt regime. The Aquino assassination caused a general loss of business confidence, and a general panic took place in which capital began to flow out of the country. The Catholic Church’s leaders had traditionally been aligned with the elites, but parish priests and nuns began to protest against the poverty and suffering that the corruption had inflicted on the common people. Even some of the Church leaders such as Cardinal Jaime Sin began to express open opposition to the regime. Left-wing groups played a prominent role in anti-regime demonstrations, and an insurrection led by the New People’s Army continued to spread in rural areas. The military had especially suffered under the corruption and was by now thoroughly demoralized and many officers were increasingly unhappy with Marcos. Marcos’s traditional allies now began to desert him in droves. Millions of rural, working-class, middle-class, and professional people became united not by ideology or class interests, but by their esteem for Aquino’s widow, Corazon, and their disgust with the Marcos regime. After her husband’s assassination, Corazon Aquino assumed first a symbolic and then a substantive role as leader of the opposition.
In November of 1985, Marcos suddenly announced that he was going to hold a “snap” presidential election. This was a year before his six-year term would run out, but Marcos was hoping that his early re-election would shore up his American support and would silence his critics. It turned out that the decision to hold this “snap” election was a colossal blunder. The opposition was able to agree on the candidacy of Corazon Aquino, Benigno’s widow. Marcos was declared the winner of the election, despite evidence of massive voter fraud. Despite the election fraud, the Reagan administration support for Marcos remained strong. However, policy makers in the White House, Department of State, Pentagon, and Congress quickly began to turn against the regime and advised a withdrawal of support from Marcos. On February 22, elements of the military revolted against the regime, and hundreds of thousands of people rushed out into the streets to demand the ouster of Marcos. Many government troops defected to the revolt. Recognizing that their US support was gone, the Marcoses fled the country on February 25 and took up exile in the United States. Corazon Aquino was sworn in as president.
Following the departure of Marcos, Philippine AF F-5s continued to fly, but attrition was heavy, and only eight As and two Bs remained by the early 1990s. These planes were serving with the 6th TFS of the 5th Fighter Wing based at Basa on north Luzon.
In 1989, there was an attempted military coup against the Corazon Aquino government, led by military officers loyal to former president Ferdinand Marcos. The most notable F-5A pilot of the Phil Air Force is Major Danilo Atienza. He led a flight of F-5s in the effort to retake the Sangley Point Air Base during the 1989 coup attempt, conducting air strikes, inflicting heavy damage on aircraft and facilities controlled by the rebels. He was killed in action after flames from the explosion of a fuel depot engulfed his plane during his last strafing run. Sangley Point Air Base was renamed Major Danilo Atienza Air Base in his honor. The coup ultimately failed, and the US armed forces in the Philippines actively backed the Aquino government.
In 2005, the Philippines decommissioned its remaining F-5A/B fleet, including those received from Taiwan and South Korea. The Philippines is reportedly interested in acquiring IAI Kfirs as an F-5A/B replacement.
Sources:
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F-5: Warplane for the World, Robbie Shaw, Motorbooks, 1990
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Northrop F-5/F-20, Jerry Scutts, Ian Allan Ltd, 1986.
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Northrop F-5, Jon Lake and Robert Hewson, World Airpower Journal,
Vol 25, 1996.
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Library of Congress Country Studies — Philippines
- Northrop F-5, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5
