50 Centavos

The Volunteer Service Corps was one of scores of local Filipino guerrilla and civil resistance organizations that issued emergency currency during the Japanese occupation. Salcedo is a small municipality on the eastern coast of Samar, an island where Japanese control was consistently contested and conventional banking had completely collapsed by 1943. Notes of this type were printed locally to facilitate basic commerce and pay irregular forces — the issuing authority, not any central bank, stood behind the paper.

Provincial emergency issues from Samar are among the more difficult Philippine guerrilla notes to authenticate, given the primitive printing conditions and the number of later fabrications that entered the market.