CLARK AIR BASE, Philippines — Almost 70 years after fighting what may have been the biggest naval battle in history, U.S. and Japanese forces are back in the same area — this time as allies working together to help the typhoon-ravaged Philippines.

“This area of the Philippines is where the U.S. fought some of the most important battles of World War II,” Rear Adm. Mark C. Montgomery, commander of the USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group, said during a visit to the battered city of Tacloban on Friday.

Nearby, a contingent of Japanese soldiers worked alongside U.S. Special Operations troops at Tacloban Airport.

“This is where MacArthur landed,” Montgomery said, referring to Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Oct. 20, 1944, “return” to Palo, just over eight miles from Tacloban on Leyte island.

The Battle of Leyte Gulf, off Tacloban, involved more than 200 ships, including 12 aircraft carriers and 200,000 sailors, according to historical accounts.

Many of the airfields that the U.S. military is using to support the relief effort were built by U.S. or Japanese forces during the war.

According to Joint Task Force 505 — the headquarters overseeing the U.S. relief effort — nearly 850 U.S. personnel are on the ground in the Philippines with 6,200 more offshore in the USS George Washington Strike Group. An extra 1,000 Marines and sailors with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit are expected to arrive in about three days.

Almost 1,200 Japanese Self-Defense Forces personnel will soon be working alongside the Americans here, conducting medical activities and helping move supplies in Cebu, Manila and Tacloban, according to a Japanese Joint Staff Office spokesman; 100 are on the ground, with the rest expected to arrive soon.

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships, including the destroyer Ise, transport vessel Osumi and supply vessel Towada, are heading for the Philippines. Japan has also deployed three CH-47s, three UH-1s and 2 SH-60s, two KC-767s, seven C-130s and one U-4 aircraft.

“This is the largest deployment of SDF [Self Defense Force] personnel to an international disaster relief activity,” the spokesman said.

Japan will also provide $52.1 million in disaster assistance, according to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Last week I wrote about the potential for the Obama administration’s Asia-Pivot strategy to inflame anti-colonialist sentiment. I lamented that Washington tries simply to get around this popular opposition to the military surge in East Asia instead of acknowledging that people don’t like to be occupied by foreign militaries.

Cynically, the U.S. has exploited the suffering of the typhoon in the Philippines in order to gain leverage in negotiations with Manila over increased U.S. military presence there. The relief operations performed by U.S. forces are seen as helping to “lubricate” the deal for basing rights, which are one piece of a broader plan to contain a rising China.

According to Robert Farley at The Diplomat, the process of “establishing forward U.S. bases in the Philippines…has moved slowly, largely because of domestic concerns in Manila about a military U.S. presence.”

“Fortunately for U.S. strategic interests (if not the victims of the storm),” Farley writes, “the U.S. Navy’s support in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan may win sufficient goodwill to overcome local opposition to a renewed U.S. military role.”

That is as plain an example of exploitation as you’re going to get. The fact that Filipinos hesitate to welcome the U.S. back onto permanent bases, after kicking us out at the end of the Cold War, should not be belittled. The 1899-1902 U.S. war and occupation of the Philippines was a vicious colonial experiment waged for cynical geopolitical interests. Inclusive estimates that account for excess deaths related to the war say there were as many as 1 million casualties. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were locked up in concentration camps, where poor conditions and disease killed thousands.