10 Centavos

The Volunteer Service Corps was one of dozens of guerrilla and civilian resistance units operating across the Philippine archipelago under the loose umbrella of USAFFE — United States Army Forces in the Far East — following the fall of Bataan in April 1942. Local commanders, cut off from Manila and facing a complete collapse of the pre-war Philippine Commonwealth currency supply, authorized their own emergency scrip to keep local economies and supply networks functioning under Japanese occupation.

Balangiga, Samar carries its own loaded history — site of the 1901 massacre that triggered one of the most brutal American reprisals of the Philippine-American War. That this same town issued resistance currency forty years later is a detail the catalog data alone will never surface.