On New Year's Day the word came down from Australia, and Robert Lapham threw all seventy of his central-plain squadrons into the open — sabotage on every road and rail line, the enemy's lines cut and cut again. The long patient watching was over. The guerrillas of the rice plain were no longer an underground; they were an army, and the army was loose.

A guerrilla lookout on the plain watched a Japanese convoy roll north through Nueva Ecija, and in it, the enemy's commander himself — Yamashita, pulling his headquarters back into the mountains. The eyes of the resistance saw even the Tiger move. What the guerrillas saw, Australia soon knew.

Five days before the great landing, Volckmann gave the order and the north rose on its own. The 121st Infantry came down from its hidden camps to open the liberation of San Fernando in La Union; Company B struck the guards at the Baroro River bridge; a detachment laid siege to the garrison at Bitalag in Ilocos Sur. USAFIP-NL had launched its own D-Day, and the far north began to free itself before a single American set foot on Luzon.

At the Baroro River the 121st Infantry drove off the Japanese guards and took the bridge whole — the first clean victory of a guerrilla unit over armed Japanese troops on Luzon before the Americans came. In the same days they seized San Juan, wiped out the garrison at Bangar, and opened thirty kilometers of Highway 3. And at Currimao the bolomen fell on a Japanese ship at Gaang, killing eleven and carrying off two guns. The north was winning its own war.

On the ninth the ships came into Lingayen Gulf — the same waters the enemy had used to invade three years before, now the road of the return. Krueger's Sixth Army came ashore against little resistance on the beaches, for Yamashita had drawn his armies into the mountains. That evening the word reached Volckmann: all his guerrillas of the north now stood under Krueger's command. The great landing on Luzon had begun.

On the beaches the enemy was weak, but over the fleet in the gulf he was terrible. The kamikaze came in waves against the ships, crashing into them and killing thousands of sailors in the crowded water. The divine wind blew hardest as the end drew nearest — the mark of an enemy who could no longer win and would only die harder.

Far to the north-east the war reached the Cagayan valley. The 11th Infantry of USAFIP-NL took Babayuan in northern Cagayan, carrying the rising into the valley that ran up to the top of Luzon. The resistance was closing on the enemy from every side of the great northern mountains at once.

At Laoag the 15th Infantry fell on the enemy's airfield at Gabu again and again. They burned fifteen thousand gallons of aviation fuel, destroyed the grounded planes and the trucks, and ambushed the retreating columns at the San Mateo bridge. Raid after raid through the last week of January left the Ilocos airfields in ruins and the enemy blind and grounded in the north.

While the Sixth Army drove down from the north, more Americans came ashore to close the ring — the Eleventh Airborne at Nasugbu in the south, XI Corps in Zambales to seal off Bataan. Manila would be caught between the pincers. The city that had fallen without a fight in 1941 would not be given up without one now.

In the night the Sixth Army Rangers and the Alamo Scouts, guided and shielded by Lapham's guerrillas and Pajota's men at the Cabu bridge, fell on the Pangatian prison camp near Cabanatuan and freed the last survivors of Bataan — more than five hundred men, some held since the Death March, long thought dead. In minutes it was done. The skeletons of Bataan walked out to freedom, carried on the backs of Filipino farmers.

The First Cavalry reached Manila at dusk and broke open the Santo Tomas camp, and out came the internees — near four thousand of them, the civilians and the nurses, the Angels of Bataan, held behind the old university walls for three years and a month. Skeletal, weeping, disbelieving, they touched their liberators and could not speak. The longest captivity in the islands was over.

In the far north the guerrillas pushed toward the great mountain gate of Bessang Pass. The 121st Infantry took Suyo, and Company L fought a bitter thirty-eight hours to overrun an entrenched enemy outpost north of the pass. Bessang was the door to Yamashita's redoubt, and the long, cruel fight to force it had begun.

At the old Bilibid prison the Americans freed more than a thousand — prisoners of war and the men and women of the underground the Kempeitai had swept up over the years. Some had been behind those walls since the first spring of the war. The city was giving up its captives one grim building at a time, even as the battle for it began in earnest.

Then the true battle began. The enemy's naval troops under Iwabuchi, defying Yamashita's word to leave, chose to fight and die in the city, behind the Pasig and in the stone maze of Intramuros. For a month the Americans fought street by street, house by house, through a Manila ground to rubble around them. There would be no easy liberation of the capital.

As the city burned, the enemy turned on its people. In the hospitals and the convents and the churches — San Juan de Dios, Santa Rosa, Santo Domingo, the Cathedral, Paco, De La Salle — Japanese troops bayoneted, shot, and burned the civilians of Manila, women and children among them, in a slaughter without mercy or reason. More than a hundred thousand died. It was the worst crime of the whole war in the islands, and it is set down here as it happened, in grief.

In the doomed city the enemy killed the last of the men he held. In the dungeons of Fort Santiago the prisoners were left to drown in the flooded cells or to suffocate and burn as the Americans closed in. The old fort that had swallowed so many for three years gave up its dead only when its walls were finally taken.

The resistance judged its own as well as the enemy. The rogue guerrilla leader Emilio Escobar, called Sagad, who had abused and preyed on the people he claimed to protect, was tried by the USAFIP-NL inspector general and shot by musketry. The free army meant to be worthy of the freedom it fought for, and it would not carry its own tyrants into the new day.

American paratroopers dropped onto the Rock and amphibious troops came ashore below, and in a bitter fight they took back Corregidor — the island fortress that had held out to the last in 1942 and become the symbol of the islands' defiance. The flag rose again over Corregidor. The circle begun in the dark spring of 1942 had closed.

Manila itself was dying. Shelled by both sides and burned by the enemy, the Pearl of the Orient — its churches, its university, its old walled city, its bridges and homes — was ground to ruin street by street. When it was over, Manila was the most destroyed Allied capital of the war save Warsaw. A city three centuries in the building was unmade in a month.

In the eastern valley the 14th Infantry of USAFIP-NL met the enemy in the open for the first time at Santa Cruz in Isabela. The guerrillas of the Cagayan valley, who had kept a hidden war alive there since Nakar and Adduru in the first year, now stood up to fight the retreating enemy face to face. The whole north was aflame at once.

At dawn the Eleventh Airborne and the guerrillas fell on the Los Banos camp, twenty miles behind the enemy's lines, and carried off all two thousand of its internees across the waters of Laguna de Bay before the garrison could kill them. Not one was lost. It was among the most perfect rescues in the history of war — and it was done with the guerrillas who knew every trail to the camp.

On the twenty-fourth the word went out from the north: Ilocos Norte was free. USAFIP-NL had cleared the province the guerrillas had never truly surrendered, and pushed on — the GHQ battalion under Elizondo taking Cervantes in the mountains beyond. The first whole province of the north had come back to the flag, freed largely by its own sons.

At Malacanang, amid a city still burning, MacArthur formally handed the government of the Commonwealth back to President Osmena. The free Philippine state stood once more in its own capital — three years and two months after it had fled. It was restored to a ruin, over the graves of a hundred thousand; but it was Filipino, and it was free, and it had come home.

The north was not won yet. The enemy gathered and struck back, throwing the guerrillas out of Cervantes in a sudden counter-offensive. In the mountains the front swayed back and forth — a town taken, lost, and taken again — for Yamashita meant to hold the passes to the redoubt at any cost. The hardest fighting of the north was still to come.

On the twenty-eighth the Eighth Army landed on Palawan, the long western island, opening the campaign to free the south. On the ground where the enemy had burned his prisoners alive only weeks before, the liberators came ashore. The freeing of the islands was no longer only Luzon's. It was spreading now to all of them.

On the third of March the guns fell silent and Manila was declared free. The battle was won; the city was a graveyard. A hundred thousand of its people were dead, the old city gone, the survivors wandering the rubble in search of the living. They came out into a bitter, hard-won freedom, and they buried their dead, and they began — with nothing — to build again.

Across the freed island the families came back together — the guerrillas down from the hills at last, the prisoners walking home, the hidden emerging into the light. There was joy in it, and grief in the same breath, for every reunion counted also the ones who would not come: the dead of Bataan and the camps, the massacred of Manila, the vanished of Fort Santiago. The islands wept and gave thanks together.

On the rice plain the Hukbalahap rose with the liberation and seized the towns and the land, setting up governments of their own and settling old scores with the landlords and the collaborators. The returning authorities and the Americans eyed them warily. The war against the enemy was ending; the older war of the plain, over who should hold the land, was only beginning again.

The landings came to Mindanao's western arm: at Zamboanga the Americans and the guerrillas together drove the enemy from the coast. In the Moro country, where the resistance had never truly been broken, the liberation was as much a homecoming as a conquest. The south was coming free.

The fiercest fighting of the north closed on San Fernando in La Union. American carrier planes struck the hidden guns on Mount Dayaoen; the 121st Infantry scaled the mountain under fire, and on the Bacsil front the battalions took Reservoir Hill and Bacsil itself in days of hard climbing and closer fighting. The guerrilla army that had begun in secret was storming fortified ridges in the open now.

The Fortieth Division landed near Iloilo and found the beaches open — for Peralta's guerrillas had already freed most of Panay themselves and held it waiting. The island the enemy had burned and terrorized in 1943 welcomed the return not as a rescue only but as a reunion of two armies, the one that came and the one that had never left.

On the twenty-first the 121st Infantry completed the liberation of San Fernando, the capital of La Union, driving the last enemy out of the coastal town and its ridges. The great port of the north was free, and with it the coast road that fed the drive toward Bessang Pass. Province by province, the north was coming back to the flag.

Where the war passed on, the land began to turn again to life. The freed barrios put seed back in the ground, mended the dikes, brought the surviving carabao down from the hills. The soil that had been burned and stripped and left fallow for years took the plough once more. It would be slow, and the famine would not lift in a season; but the country had begun, at last, to grow again.

At Talisay near Cebu City the Americans came ashore, and Cushing's guerrillas — who had kept the island, and once its greatest secret — came down to meet them. The command that had captured the enemy's whole battle plan two years before now helped to take the enemy's ground. On Cebu the hidden war and the open one closed their long circle together.

By the end of March the north gathered itself for the great blow. The battalions of the 121st drew together at Butac for a unified drive to seize Bessang Pass, the gate to Yamashita's mountain redoubt, while patrols clashed on Lamagan Ridge to the west and the 14th Infantry fought on at Hapid in Isabela. The hardest battle the Filipino guerrilla army would ever fight, for the pass itself, was now only weeks away.

By the end of March half the islands were free and half were not. Manila and the Luzon lowlands, Ilocos Norte, Palawan, Zamboanga, Panay, Cebu — the flag flew over them again. But the enemy still held the northern mountains, Bicol, much of the Visayas, and the heart of Mindanao, and the fighting would go on for months yet. The tide could not be turned now. But the war was not over, and the dying was not done.