Actually that's not true. A couple hundred Spanish were killed during WW2 and a couple hundred more left on a boat to Spain. The Spanish neighborhoods in Manila were mostly destroyed, but that caused most of their population to shift to the Manila suburbs, where you'll still find them today.
We have census data that shows that most Spanish-speakers were not killed during WW2. The 1948 says the number of Spanish speakers was 345,000. Of that, 225,000 spoke Spanish as their mother tongue.
https://www.google.com/books/edition...sec=frontcover
Keep in mind, that's 3 years AFTER WW2 ended, when supposedly most of the Spanish population of the Philippines died or migrated away. That's clearly a myth because the number of Spanish-speakers from the 1939 Census to the 1948 Census went from 417,375 to 345,111. That's a reduction of 72,000. A big part of that is because the 1939 Census included Chavacano (Spanish creole) in the number of Spanish-speakers. The 1948 Census only included actual Spanish-speakers. The 1948 Census is when Chavacano was added as a language, and there were 100,645 Chavacano speakers. So that's where most of the 1939-1948 reduction in Spanish-speakers went to. Many Chavacano were also mestizos, but they were no longer counted as Spanish-speakers. Many mestizos also didn't even know Spanish and spoke another language as their mother tongue. The number of real Spanish-speakers actually increased slightly from the census before WW2 to the census after WW2
Also, the census at that time only allowed people to choose one foreign language. So if a Filipino spoke English and Spanish fluently, but their English was more fluent, then they would mark English, not Spanish. English was widely popular as a second language at that time. Even more Filipinos spoke English than Tagalog at that time. So clearly there was a number of Spanish mestizos who weren't counted as Spanish speakers because they were more fluent in English. The Philippines had already been under American rule for 2 generations.
It's not that Spanish-speakers died out. It's that the switched to English as their main language. I can guarantee you that none of these three Filipinos can speak Spanish fluently despite looking Spanish
Spanish-Filipinos now use English, Taglish, or Bisaya as their primary languages now
