On Good Friday the Japanese opened their final offensive on Bataan. For six hours the guns and the bombers fell on the slopes of Mount Samat, and the dry forest caught fire around the foxholes. The line held by the sick and hungry men of the 21st Division began to break apart under the weight of it. After three months of siege, the end of Bataan had begun.

Two days into the offensive the Japanese took Mount Samat from the Philippine 21st Division. The high ground that anchored the eastern line was gone, and there was nothing behind it but exhausted men and the sea. Units lost touch with one another in the smoke. The defense of Bataan was coming apart faster than orders could follow.

A Japanese bomb struck an ammunition truck beside Field Hospital Number 1 on Bataan, and the blasts that followed tore through the open wards. Eighty-nine patients and medical staff were killed among the cots. The wounded had nowhere to be moved to and no way to shelter. The peninsula had become a place where even the hospitals were battlegrounds.

On the ninth of April Major General Edward King surrendered the forces on Bataan, some seventy thousand American and Filipino soldiers, rather than see them destroyed where they lay. They had held for three months on half rations and less, worn down by malaria and hunger more than by the enemy. It was the largest surrender in the history of the American and Philippine armies. For the islands, the shield that had stood since December was gone.

A few hours after the surrender, from the Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor, the Voice of Freedom spoke to the islands. The words were written by Lieutenant Salvador Lopez and read by Lieutenant Norman Reyes: Bataan has fallen, but the spirit that made it stand cannot fall. It was defeat spoken without shame, defiance in the plainest voice. Those who could still hear a radio in the occupied towns kept the words and passed them on.

The prisoners taken on Bataan, some seventy thousand men, were assembled and marched north under the April sun, sixty-five miles toward the railhead at San Fernando and the camp beyond. They were already starving and sick when the march began. Those who fell, or stopped for water, or could not keep the pace, were beaten, bayoneted, or shot along the road. The villages of Pampanga and Tarlac watched from their doorways, and where they could, they threw food and rice cakes to the passing columns.

The Kawaguchi detachment came ashore near Cebu City. The port and the town fell quickly, and the Japanese moved inland while the defenders pulled back to the hills to fight as they could. Cebu, the old city of the south, now lived under the occupation. The war had crossed from Luzon into the heart of the Visayas.

The Kawamura detachment landed near Iloilo on the island of Panay, and two days later a second force came ashore near San Jose. The port city and its coast passed into Japanese hands. Panay, the rice and sugar island of the central seas, was now a country under guard. The occupation of the Visayas was spreading island by island.

When the enemy landed on Panay, Colonel Albert Christie refused the coast and chose the hills. He led some seven thousand men and their weapons into the mountains of the interior to wage a guerrilla war. The towns were lost, but the island was not surrendered. On Panay, as in the north, holding a port would not mean holding the country.

In Manila the Kempeitai rounded up the consular officials of neutral countries and shut them behind the old Spanish walls of Fort Santiago. Among them was a Navy lieutenant named Charles Parsons, hidden under a consul's papers. The occupation trusted no one it could not watch. The stone dungeons by the Pasig filled again, as they had in older centuries.

In the shadow of Mount Isarog, the guerrillas of Faustino Flor came down on the Japanese-held town of Iriga in Camarines Sur. The collaborationist mayor fled before them. It was a small blow, quickly answered, but it told the Bicol country that the occupation could be fought. In the volcano's forests a resistance had already taken root.

The Manila Tribune, printed now under Japanese control, ran an article blaming the American generals for the fall of Bataan, for spending the strength of starving, ill-equipped Filipino soldiers. The occupation had learned to fight with words as well as guns. The aim was to set the people against their old allies. In the tuned columns of the newspaper the propaganda war had begun.

The Kawaguchi detachment landed near Cotabato and Parang on the coast of Mindanao, and the defenders of the sector fell back before them. For days the Philippine 101st Division had held the Cotabato and Davao line; now the weight of the landing forced it to give ground. The great southern island, which had known the enemy only at Davao, felt him now on its western shore.

Wenceslao Vinzons, the young governor of Camarines Norte, sent his Travelling Guerrillas against the Japanese garrison at Daet. He had refused every call to surrender and had raised the province behind him instead. His fighters moved from town to town, striking and vanishing. For a season the occupation held the roads of Camarines Norte only by daylight.

Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos, taken near Cebu in April and carried south, was brought to Malabang in Lanao. The Japanese offered him office if he would serve them. He refused. On the first of May they executed him. Told of the sentence, he said to his son that it was a rare privilege to die for one's country. A man had chosen death over collaboration, and the islands remembered it.

Two Navy flying boats came down in the dark on Manila Bay, south of Corregidor, carrying medicine to the besieged. When they lifted off again they took with them thirty nurses, a few other women, and a handful of officers. It was the last flight out of the dying fortress. Those left on the rock watched the planes go and knew what their staying meant.

Japanese forces landed at Macajalar Bay on the northern coast of Mindanao and drove inland toward the airfield at Del Monte. The northern towns fell into the advance. The defenders of Mindanao were now pressed from the west and the north at once. The last large island still fighting was being cut apart.

In Camarines Sur the guerrillas of Juan Miranda and Elias Madrid defeated a Japanese squad and took full control of Naga. For a moment the town on the river belonged to the resistance. Such victories could not be held for long, but they were real, and word of them travelled the Bicol roads. The occupation of the south was never quiet.

On the night of the fifth of May Japanese infantry landed on the tail of Corregidor, under the guns that had held Manila Bay since December. Tanks came ashore behind them at dawn. By the afternoon of the sixth the fortress in the mouth of the bay could hold no longer. The rock that had been the last free ground of the islands was in Japanese hands.

After the fall of Corregidor, General Jonathan Wainwright went to the Manila radio and ordered every American and Filipino command in the islands to surrender. He believed that the lives of the men taken on the rock depended on it. Some commanders obeyed with breaking hearts; some would not obey at all. With those words the organized defense of the Philippines came to its end.

The day after Corregidor fell, the Japanese marched six thousand ragged prisoners through the streets of Manila, from the yacht club along Dewey Boulevard, for the city to see. The captives, thin and filthy from the siege, were meant as proof that the Americans and their army were beaten. The people of Manila lined the streets in silence. Many wept; some, quietly, saluted.

With organized resistance broken, the Nagano detachment spread through the eastern Visayas, occupying Negros, Bohol, Leyte, and Samar. Small garrisons settled into the coastal towns while the interiors slipped beyond their reach. Island after island now flew the enemy flag over its plaza. The occupation had become general across the south.

When General Sharp surrendered the forces of the Visayas and Mindanao on the order from Corregidor, thousands of his soldiers did not lay down their arms. They broke into small bands and carried their rifles into the jungle. On Mindoro, Major Jose Ruffy raised a battalion armed with bolos. Across the south the surrender of the armies became the beginning of the guerrillas.

As the enemy neared Bacolod on the north coast of Negros, the defenders set fire to the great tanks of oil, gasoline, and alcohol before they withdrew. Black smoke stood over the sugar capital for days. Better the land keep nothing for the enemy than fuel his advance. The islands were learning the hard arithmetic of denial.

Japanese troops landed at Dumaguete, the capital of Negros Oriental, completing their hold on the island of Negros. The southern port, a town of schools and church bells, came under the occupation. Across the strait lay Cebu, already taken. The central seas were now an enemy lake.

As Camp O'Donnell filled with the dead, the Japanese began moving the surviving prisoners east to a larger camp at Cabanatuan in Nueva Ecija. The men of Corregidor were brought there too, by way of Bilibid prison in Manila. Cabanatuan would hold thousands of them for years. It became, in the plain words of those who survived it, a place of hunger and disease.

To ease the burden of the camps and to win a little goodwill, the Japanese administration announced an amnesty for tens of thousands of Filipino prisoners of war. Men who had marched out of Bataan walked home to their provinces, gaunt and marked by what they had seen. Many carried the war home with them and would return to it as guerrillas. The release emptied the camps of Filipinos and left the foreign prisoners behind.

As the harvest faltered and the markets emptied, the Japanese-run National Rice and Corn Corporation began rationing rice at two and a half pounds for each person a day. The military scrip printed by the occupiers bought less each week, and hunger crept into the towns. Families stretched what they had and learned the taste of substitutes. The price of a cavan of rice became the truest measure of the occupation.

The wet monsoon returned in June, and the rains fell on the prison camps and the newly planted fields alike. In the crowded pens of O'Donnell and Cabanatuan the water bred malaria and dysentery, and men died in numbers the bullets had never reached. For the farmers the same rains meant the planting, and the hope of a harvest the army would try to take. The land gave life and death in the same season.