10 Centavos

One of hundreds of emergency guerrilla currency issues produced across the Philippine islands following the Japanese occupation of 1942, this note was issued by a local volunteer unit operating under the United States Army Forces in the Far East command structure. The USAFFE umbrella gave these local issues a thin veneer of military legitimacy, though in practice each issuing body improvised with whatever printing and paper resources were at hand.

Pambujan Sur, a small municipality on the northern coast of Samar, was sufficiently remote to sustain a degree of resistance activity. The handstamp security feature reflects the near-total absence of formal printing infrastructure — authentication was a matter of a rubber stamp and local trust.