Japanese forces entered the outskirts of Manila. The open city, undefended since the last week of December, changed hands without a battle. Over the radio Jorge Vargas, left behind to head the city government, urged the people to stay calm and cooperate. In the streets people watched the columns pass and kept their thoughts to themselves.

The Japanese Military Administration declared martial law in the occupied territories. Proclamations went up on walls and in the newspapers: obedience would be rewarded, resistance punished by military law. The occupation now had its legal face, and every Filipino in the occupied towns lived under it.

The Japanese Military Administration opened the Santo Tomas Internment Camp and ordered Western civilians to report to the university campus. Families arrived with what they could carry. Behind the old walls of the university, thousands of men, women, and children began an internment that would last for three years. Filipino friends came to the fence with food, and kept coming.

The USAFFE completed its retreat into the Bataan Peninsula — some eighty thousand soldiers and twenty-six thousand refugees crowded into the mountains. On almost the first day, the order came down: half rations. The food that should have been moved to Bataan in December had been left in the warehouses of the central plain. The army would fight the whole campaign hungry.

Heavy Japanese air raids struck Corregidor. Inside the Malinta Tunnel the lights went out briefly, and the people sheltering there — soldiers, nurses, the government of the Commonwealth — stood in the dark under the shaking rock. The island fortress had become the last address of free government in the islands, and the enemy knew it.

In the far north, Captain Ralph Praeger and his troopers — cut off since December — refused to surrender. On the thirteenth and the fifteenth of January they raided the Japanese-occupied airfields at Tuguegarao and Aparri, striking at night and vanishing back into the Cagayan valley. The occupation learned early that holding a town was not the same as holding the country around it.

At a church in San Juan, cadets Miguel Ver and Terry Adevoso — young men of the Philippine Military Academy and the ROTC, too young for the army that had retreated to Bataan — formed a guerrilla band they called the Hunters. They began by stealing rifles. Before the war ended, the Hunters ROTC would be one of the great guerrilla armies of Luzon.

Japanese troops under Major General Kimura worked their way across the slopes of Mount Natib — ground the defenders had judged impassable — and turned the flank of General Wainwright's line. The USAFFE fell back to the reserve battle line across the peninsula. The defenders had lost the first line of Bataan, but the line did not break.

Major Walter Cushing, a mining engineer turned guerrilla, ambushed a Japanese column at Candon in Ilocos Sur. Among the captured baggage were Japanese military maps of Bataan and Corregidor — intelligence worth more than the ambush itself. The maps were carried south by runner and boat, from hand to hand, toward the defenders who needed them.

The Japanese Military Administration issued Order Number 1, establishing the Philippine Executive Committee under Jorge Vargas. Filipino officials would administer the occupied country — under Japanese direction. Some called it collaboration; some called it shielding the people from worse. The question of who served whom, and why, would divide families for years after the war.

The Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, seized and executed Crisanto Evangelista, the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and Agapito del Rosario, the mayor of Angeles, in Manila. The message was plain: leaders who would not bend would be killed. The labor movement and the political left went underground — and began to arm.

In the darkness, President Quezon, his family, and members of his cabinet boarded the submarine USS Swordfish at Corregidor and slipped out through the Japanese blockade. The Commonwealth government did not surrender and did not dissolve; it moved — first to the Visayas, to keep governing free Philippine soil for as long as any remained.

The Japanese Military Administration approved projects to convert sugar cane fields to cotton for the needs of the empire. For the people, the new economy arrived as hardship: the military scrip the occupiers printed fed inflation, and rice grew scarce in the markets. The price of food, more than any proclamation, taught the islands what occupation meant.

On Bataan the defenders won their clearest victory. Japanese troops who had broken into the lines were sealed into pockets and destroyed — three battalions of the Japanese 20th Infantry wiped out by Filipino and American units fighting side by side. The enemy pulled back to regroup. For a few weeks, the hungry army on Bataan allowed itself to hope.

From the southern islands President Quezon spoke to the people by radio. He urged them to keep faith — in America, in the USAFFE, in the Commonwealth that had not died. Radios were forbidden or watched in the occupied towns, but the words traveled anyway, the way words do in the islands, from those who heard to those who had not.

In Candaba, the peasant guerrilla leader Felipa Culala — called Dayang-Dayang — raided the municipal jail and freed her captured men. On the road out she led an ambush that killed some forty Japanese soldiers and collaborators. A woman of the peasant movement had shown central Luzon that the occupiers could be beaten in open fight.

At dusk, General MacArthur, his family, and sixteen staff officers left Corregidor aboard Lieutenant John Bulkeley's torpedo boat PT-41, ordered out by Washington to take command in Australia. On Bataan the soldiers heard of it and made their bitter jokes; but they also repeated the promise that followed him south: I shall return. The islands would hold him to it.

Governor Roque Ablan of Ilocos Norte reached the USAFFE by radio with plain news: his free provincial government was still operating from the hills. He had refused to surrender his office, and with a small force he kept Philippine civil authority alive in the mountains of the north — a government of the people, above the occupied towns.

In the forests of central Luzon, communist and socialist leaders of the peasant movement formally organized the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon — the People's Army Against the Japanese, the Hukbalahap — under Luis Taruc. Its soldiers were the tenant farmers of the rice plain. The occupation now faced not only stranded soldiers but an armed peasantry on its own ground.

By late March the defenders of Bataan were an army of the sick — worn down by malaria, dysentery, and starvation, on a fraction of a soldier's ration. Across the line, fifty thousand fresh Japanese troops moved quietly into position with new artillery for the final offensive. The men in the foxholes could hear the preparations and could do nothing but wait.