On the first of April the Bushmasters — the 158th Regiment — came ashore at Legazpi in the Bikol, the last great amphibious landing on Luzon. The enemy, drawn away to the mountains in the north, could not hold, and the port and airfield fell in a day. The San Bernardino Strait was open again, and the Bikol, the long tail of Luzon, began to come free.

Down the length of the Bikol the guerrillas rose to meet the Americans — the Tangcong Vaca men and all the bands that had held the peninsula since the first year. Town by town the enemy was driven out or hunted down, and the Camarines and Albay, which had known the Japanese terror early and hard, took back their own.

The landings came to the middle islands — a battalion onto Bohol at Tagbilaran, the 185th onto Negros at Pulupandan — and everywhere the guerrillas were already there, holding the ground and joining the fight. Bohol was cleared inside the month. The Visayas, island after island, returned to the flag.

Word came, even into the freed towns, that far across the world President Roosevelt had died. To many Filipinos he had been the face of the promised return, the man whose country had sworn to come back — and he had died on the very eve of the victory he had ordered. The islands he had helped to free mourned him as one of their own.

In the fight for Baguio the guerrillas of the 66th Infantry pulled off a quiet coup. At Cabinet Hill they slipped General Manuel Roxas — the highest Commonwealth man the Japanese held — out of enemy hands with his family and party, and carried him down to the safety of the American division. The man Cruz had found secretly loyal in 1943, and who would be the next president of the republic, was free.

On the coast the enemy gave up the old Spanish city of Vigan and pulled back into the mountains. A guerrilla patrol walked into the historic town and raised the Stars and Stripes over its ancient streets. Up and down the Ilocos the pattern repeated — Magsingal, Cabugao, the length of the Manila North Road — as the north cleared its own coast, town by town.

On the seventeenth the last great island campaign opened: the 24th Division landed at Parang and Malabang on Illana Bay, and drove inland along the highway for Davao. On Mindanao the Americans came not to a hostile shore but to a friendly one, for Fertig's free country had held the interior for years. The largest island in the south began to come free.

On Mindanao the return was a reunion. Fertig's Tenth District — the free Philippine government that had run the interior with its own courts and money and army since 1942 — came down to meet the Eighth Army and put its guerrillas, its guides, and its maps at their service. The freest ground in all the occupation years now helped to finish the occupation.

In the Sulu sea the Moro guerrillas, who had fought the Japanese from Jolo to Siasi since the first Christmas of the war, cleared the last of the enemy from the southern islands alongside the Americans. In the Moro country the resistance had never truly been broken, and now it saw the enemy off its own waters for good.

After a hard climb up the Irisan gorge, the 33rd and 37th Divisions, with the northern guerrillas, took Baguio and Camp John Hay on the twenty-sixth — the mountain city that had been the enemy's northern seat, and where Yamashita himself had lately been. The flag rose over the summer capital, and the enemy was pushed deeper into the last mountains.

As the provinces came free, an old question turned bitter: what to do with those who had served the enemy. The Makapili were hunted through the ruins; collaborationist officials were seized or fled; and word came that Laurel and his ministers had been carried off to Japan. The war against the occupier was ending. The reckoning among Filipinos over who had done what under it was only beginning.

The 24th Division drove up the highway and took Davao City on the third of May, breaking the enemy's hold on the great southern port. The Japanese fell back into the jungle interior to fight and starve. The coasts of Mindanao were coming free; the deep green heart of it would take longer, and cost more.

In the mountains and jungles of Mindanao the enemy fought to the death and took the country people with him — the last of his food seized, the last of his cruelty spent on the villages he passed through as he died. The freeing of the interior was slow and merciless, and the people of the highlands paid for it to the very end.

East of Manila the Marking guerrillas — the Yay Regiment, under Yay Panlilio — stormed the Ipo Dam and took it whole, the dam that held the capital's water. Attached now to an American division, the band that had hidden in the Sierra Madre for years seized and saved the thing a million people in Manila drank from. The hidden army was guarding the peace it had helped to win.

Behind the fighting the land began to live again. In the freed barrios the people put the seed back in the ground, mended the burned dikes, and coaxed the surviving carabao down from the hills. The soil that had been scorched and stripped and left fallow for years took the plough once more. The famine did not lift in a season — but the ground, at last, was answering.

In the ruins of the capital the living began to build. Out of the rubble rose the first markets and the first schools; the government worked from what buildings still stood; relief came in by the shipload. Manila would not be the Pearl of the Orient again for many years, if ever. But its people, who had buried a hundred thousand, turned their backs on the graves and began.

Through the liberated towns the people hunted the hooded men who had pointed them out to the Kempeitai — the Makapili, the informers, the collaborators. Some were caught and killed; some were saved for the courts to come; some vanished into new names and new towns. The wounds of the occupation would not close with the fighting. They would be argued in the islands for a generation.

After three months of the hardest fighting, the 25th Division forced Balete Pass — the Dalton Pass — on Highway 5, the one gate between the central plain and the Cagayan valley. The enemy left near eight thousand dead in its defiles. With Balete taken, the road into the last valley of Luzon lay open, and the ring around Yamashita's mountains drew tighter.

Everywhere he was cornered, the enemy chose death over surrender. In the passes and the jungles his troops fought from caves until they were killed or starved, took their own lives before capture, and spent their last strength in cruelty. The occupation was ending not in a collapse but in a long, hard dying that would go on into the last days of the war.

In June the northern army made its great assault on Bessang Pass, the mountain gate to Yamashita's redoubt. Volckmann's three regiments went up the ridges abreast — Lamagan and the Cadsu ridges cleared by the fifth, Magun Hill and the upper Cadsu taken in the days that followed — climbing into the enemy's guns and taking the high ground foot by bloody foot. The hidden army was storming a fortress in the open.

In the ruined capital, President Osmena convened the Congress of the Philippines — the elected legislature, meeting for the first time since the war swallowed it. It passed emergency measures to put money back into a broken economy, and chose Manuel Roxas, lately rescued from Baguio, as its Senate President. Over the graves and the rubble, Filipino self-government stood up and went back to work.

On the fourteenth of June the guerrillas took the summit. Company L of the 121st stormed Buccual Peak, killed the last defenders, and hoisted its signal flag over the captured guns and the enemy's own papers, while Swick Force cut down the columns fleeing the heights. Bessang Pass was Volckmann's. A Filipino army — the guerrillas who had hidden and starved and watched for three years — had won, largely on its own, the greatest battle the resistance ever fought, and with it set the four Ilocos provinces free. No day in all the long fight belonged more wholly to the Filipino soldier.

What Bessang meant was more than a pass taken. It was the proof, written in Filipino blood on a mountain, that the hidden army of the barrios and the hills had become a real army — one that could beat the enemy not by stealth but face to face, on the hardest ground, at the highest cost. The men who had once stolen rifles in the dark had taken a fortress in the sun. The islands would remember the fourteenth of June.

Sealed in the northern mountains, Yamashita gathered the last of his Shobu Group — fifty thousand men and more — into the high country around Kiangan and fought on. Cut off, starving, hunted from the air and hemmed on the ground, they would hold the terraces and the ridges to the very end of the war. The Tiger meant to die in the mountains, and to make the mountains cost.

With the passes forced, the drive swept into the Cagayan valley, the long green trough that ran to the top of Luzon. Blackburn's 11th Infantry and the 14th — the guerrillas who had kept a hidden war in the valley since Nakar in the first year — closed on the enemy along the great river. From the south up Highway 5, from the north by the airborne jump at Aparri, the trap around the valley was closing.

At the valley's heart the guerrillas fought for its capital. On the twentieth the 11th and 14th Infantry crossed the Cagayan under fire and swept into Tuguegarao, and Company I raised the American flag over the provincial prison. The enemy struck back with tanks and ringed them in the prison yard; an airstrike broke the ring, and the guerrillas held. When the American division marched in days later, it found the flag already flying. The valley's capital had been taken by its own.

Far from the fighting, at a great dinner of admirals and generals — Halsey, Eichelberger, and the rest — Colonel Fertig of Mindanao was toasted as a guest of honor. The commanders praised the guerrillas of the south for the reports that had guided the fleet, the eyes in the coconut groves that had helped win the sea war. The hidden men of the islands were hidden no longer, and the world's great captains rose to thank them.

In the valley and the high sub-provinces of Bontoc the people were caught between the armies — shelled from both sides, driven from their barrios, and, where the retreating enemy passed, made to pay in the old cruel coin of reprisal. Liberation, in the last mountains, came slowly and at a bitter price to those who lived there. The war did not spare its final ground.

The freed began to go home. The internees of Santo Tomas and Los Banos, the survivors of Bataan pulled from Cabanatuan, the guerrillas mustering out — they came down from the camps and the hills to what families and homes the war had left them. Many found only graves and ashes. But they were alive, and free, and home, and for that, in that year, it was enough.

The same mountains that had sheltered the resistance for three years became the grave of the enemy. In the pine ridges and the rice terraces of the Cordillera the Shobu Group died by the thousand — of American guns, of Filipino ambush, of hunger and the cold and the fever of the heights. The land that had hidden the guerrillas now closed over the men who had hunted them.

On the last day of June the great campaigns were declared over: Luzon won, Mindanao won, organized resistance ended. It was not the whole truth — Yamashita still held his mountain pocket, and thousands of the enemy still lurked in the jungles — but the back of the occupation was broken past mending. On the map of the islands only the far Cagayan valley and lonely Batanes still lay in the enemy's hand. The rest was free.