The Japanese fell on the camp of the Hunters ROTC at Antipolo and killed Miguel Ver, one of the young cadets who had founded the band in the first weeks of the occupation. The Hunters had begun by stealing rifles; now they had given their first great loss. Under Terry Adevoso the band did not break. It gathered itself and grew into one of the armies of Luzon.

At Dansalan in Lanao, Colonel Wendell Fertig watched a column of American and Filipino prisoners, sick with malaria, driven and beaten through the town by their guards. What he saw hardened him. He resolved then to escape the surrender and fight, whatever it cost. Out of that resolve grew the guerrilla army of Mindanao.

Wenceslao Vinzons, the young governor who had raised Camarines Norte against the enemy, was captured at Barcelonita, betrayed by a former guerrilla named Villaluz. His father and Governor Basilio Bautista were taken with him. A week later the Japanese seized his wife Liwayway and their children in Daet. Vinzons refused to bend, and within days he was killed. A province had lost its bravest son, and did not forget it.

From the mountains of the north, Major Guillermo Nakar's men put a faint signal on the air: detachments of Filipino and American forces had not surrendered, and were raiding the towns of Pangasinan. The message carried out of the islands and told the far command that North Luzon still fought. On the fourteenth his force was recognized as the 14th Infantry, Army of the United States. The resistance now had a name and a voice.

July was the cruelest month at Cabanatuan. Some seven hundred and ninety-nine American prisoners died in those weeks, as many as thirty a day at its worst. The sickest lay in the ward the men called the Zero Ward, because none who entered it left alive. Malaria, dysentery, and hunger did what the battle had not. The camp on the old rice land was a place of the dead.

To escape the Kempeitai, the journalist Yay Panlilio slipped out of Manila into the hills of Rizal. She joined the camp of Marcos Augustin, the guerrilla called Marking, and became the conscience and the organizer of his band. A newspaperwoman had become a soldier of the resistance. Her pen and her judgment would serve the guerrillas as much as any rifle.

The Japanese administration and the Philippine Executive Committee approved a five-year plan to turn nearly half the sugar land over to cotton for the empire's looms. Cotton could not be eaten. As the fields were changed, the rice that was already short grew shorter still. The order made in an office in Manila reached every table in the islands as hunger.

Low on ammunition, Major Ernest McClish and Colonel Clyde Childress made a quiet truce with the Japanese at Butuan, dividing the town between them. Behind the arrangement they built a working free government in the hills of Agusan. It was an odd peace, and it did not last, but it bought time to organize. In the far south the guerrillas learned to bargain as well as to fight.

Lieutenant General Shizuichi Tanaka arrived in Manila to take command of the Japanese Fourteenth Army in place of General Homma. The change at the top made little difference in the streets and the barrios. The garrisons stayed, the passes and the curfews stayed, and the hand on the country only tightened. A new name signed the proclamations; the occupation went on.

On the eighth of August a wave of spontaneous uprisings broke out on Negros and spread across the Visayas. Ordinary people, pushed past fear, turned on the occupiers. The Japanese answered with a hard autumn of pacification, and dragged paroled Filipino soldiers back into the camps for forced labor. But the rising had shown that the islands would not lie still.

After weeks of sweeps by the Furuki battalion, and the surrender of the guerrilla leader Isabelo Monje, the Japanese declared Ilocos Norte cleared of resistance. The word on paper was neater than the truth on the ground. The far north stayed restless, and Governor Ablan's free government still lived in the hills. But for now the occupation claimed the province quiet.

A Filipina named Naomi Flores came to the fence of Cabanatuan as a peanut vendor, and began to smuggle food, medicine, and messages to the prisoners for the underground of Margaret Utinsky, the woman the POWs called Miss U. It was quiet, deadly work, carried on under the eyes of the guards. The men in the camp lived a little longer for the courage of those outside the wire. The resistance fed the prisoners it could not free.

The Hunters under Terry Adevoso laid an ambush for a Japanese column on the road between Rizal and Laguna. When it was over they counted many of the enemy dead and carried off arms. Word of the victory ran through the barrios, and recruits came to the Hunters in numbers. A beaten band of cadets had become a force the country believed in.

Under Japanese guard, the Ishihara mining company shipped its first iron ore from the Larap mine on the Camarines Norte coast. The minerals of the land were now the empire's to take. What the earth of the islands held was dug and carried off across the sea. The wealth of the country was made to serve the war against it.

Tipped off by a runner, the Japanese struck the headquarters of Claude Thorp's Central Luzon guerrillas on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo. Thorp and his staff escaped into Tarlac, but the base was scattered. The enemy had learned that the hills could be reached, if an informer showed the way. Betrayal, more than the sweep, was the danger the guerrillas came to fear most.

Through these months the paper pesos the occupiers printed bought less and less, until the people called them Mickey Mouse money. Rice was rationed and lined up for; the black market grew in the alleys. The schools reopened under the new order, with Japanese language and Japanese ideas set in the lessons. Daily life became a long lesson in doing without.

In the mountains of Benguet, Russell Volckmann and Donald Blackburn, escapers from Bataan, met with Colonels Martin Moses and Arthur Noble to knit the scattered bands of North Luzon into one command. The resistance of the Cordillera was disorganized and jealous of its leaders. Out of meetings like this one it slowly became an army. The work was patient, dangerous, and unseen.

Near Tamparan on the shore of Lake Lanao, a Japanese company under Lieutenant Yoshioka was ambushed and all but destroyed by Maranao bolomen. It was answer for the massacres the occupiers had done in the lake country. The Moros fought on their own ground and by their own honor, and the enemy learned to fear the Lanao shore. The south had its own way of resistance.

The Philippine Executive Committee issued Executive Order Number 77, setting up neighborhood associations across Manila. Each block was made to watch itself, to report strangers, and to hand out the rationed food. It was an old tool of control, worn new: the city divided into small cells that policed their own. Fear and the ration card did the work the garrisons could not.

The wet monsoon lay over the islands through the quarter, flooding the fields and the prison camps alike. In the camps the water bred the malaria and dysentery that killed the prisoners by the score. In the countryside the planting was disrupted, and the seized harvest and the cotton fields promised worse to come. The season that should have fed the islands deepened their hunger instead.

A Japanese raid on San Gabriel in La Union captured the complete personnel rosters of Colonel Barnett's 121st Infantry. With the names in hand, the arrests began. The town mayors Domingo Nera and Matias Barba were seized and executed. A single lost list had put a whole province of names into the enemy's ledger.

In Misamis Occidental, Colonel Wendell Fertig issued a bold proclamation. He raised the American and Filipino flags together, declared the Commonwealth government restored, and took command of what he called the Mindanao and Sulu Force, with the rank of brigadier general. The claim was greater than his strength that day. But Fertig would make it true, building on Mindanao the largest guerrilla command in the islands.

Benigno Aquino, high in the collaborating administration, sent the Japanese a seven-page proposal asking for five million pesos to arm the Philippine Constabulary against what he called lawless elements. The lawless elements were the guerrillas. Filipino would be set to hunt Filipino, in the name of order. The occupation was learning to fight the resistance with Filipino hands.

Naokata Utsunomiya, the new director of general affairs, arrived in Manila and set the propaganda department to work on the Church. A sponsored Mass was arranged to win over the Filipino clergy. The occupiers understood that the faith of the islands was a power, and they meant to turn it. The priests, and the people in the pews, made their own quiet judgments.

For five days the guerrillas of Panay pressed a heavy attack on the copper mine the Japanese were working in Antique. They killed as many as sixteen of the enemy staff before Japanese aircraft came to break the siege. The mines the occupiers seized were never safe for them. The land itself, and the people on it, fought the taking of its wealth.

On Cebu, James Cushing led a thousand fighters he called the Cebu Patriots, with mortars, against the Japanese garrison at Toledo. The mining engineer turned commander had raised an island force from nothing. Cebu, taken in April, had never truly been given up. In its hills the war went on.

Tracking his frequent radio signals, a Japanese patrol closed on Major Guillermo Nakar and his transmitter crew at Minuri in Jones, Isabela, and took them after a betrayal. The most prominent guerrilla officer in North Luzon was in enemy hands. Major Manuel Enriquez took over the 14th Infantry. The radio that had spoken for the resistance fell silent, but the resistance did not.