East of Manila, Major Ramsey of the guerrillas fell ill with a burst appendix, and his men carried off a doctor, Teng Campa, to cut it out in a field camp. When the spinal anesthetic proved to be nothing but water, Ramsey dulled the pain with Tanduay rum and bore the knife awake. The commander of the East Central Luzon guerrillas kept his command from a sickbed of banana leaves, and lived.

To Manila came the enemy's most famous soldier, Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, to take command of all the forces in the islands and hold them against the return he knew was near. He came too late to save the occupation and just in time to make its end long and bloody. The islands would be defended now to the last man and the last village.

Five days after he arrived, Yamashita gave the order that would darken the last year: subjugate the guerrillas, kill or be killed, spare nothing. He set his special-works officer, Sato, to raising a volunteer army of Filipinos to fight their own countrymen. The policy of terror that had scarred Panay would now be turned on the whole of the islands. The cornered enemy meant to burn his way to the end.

The war in the sky reached Bikol. American planes struck the Japanese at Naga and Sipocot and Pili, roaring low over towns that had not seen a friendly aircraft in years. The people looked up and knew the return was near. But the enemy, humiliated from the air, would take his revenge on the ground, on those who could not fight back.

Judy Geronimo, a dancer who carried messages for the underground, was seized by the Kempeitai, tortured, and driven up into the Mountain Province at Bining, where three soldiers shot her and buried her in a shallow grave. But she was not dead. The Igorots of the place dug her out, hid her, and nursed her back to life. The enemy had killed her and failed; the mountains gave her back.

Three days before the great landing, American rangers seized the little islands at the mouth of Leyte Gulf — Suluan, Dinagat, and Guiuan — the first Philippine soil taken back from the enemy in nearly three years. It was a small thing, a few rocks and a lighthouse; but on them, for the first time since the dark spring of 1942, the flag went up on free ground.

When the American planes came over Pili, the Japanese garrison could not reach the sky, so it turned on the barrio. At Agdangan in Baao the soldiers killed no fewer than fifty — men, women, and children — in cold blood, in answer to a raid the villagers had no part in. It was Yamashita's order made flesh: the guerrillas and the planes struck from above, and the innocent below paid in blood.

At ten in the morning General Krueger's Sixth Army came ashore on Leyte — at Palo, at Tacloban, at Dulag — four divisions onto beaches the enemy could not hold, while across the whole archipelago the guerrillas rose on the signal, blasting bridges and cutting the wires to blind the enemy. In the afternoon MacArthur waded in through the surf at Palo with President Osmena beside him, and his voice went out over the radio: People of the Philippines, I have returned. The promise of the matchboxes had become a man standing on a Leyte beach.

The people of Leyte came down to the beaches in disbelief and then in joy — touching the soldiers, weeping, pressing food and flowers on men who had none to spare, calling out the names of towns and asking if the Americans had really, truly come. Children who could not remember a free Philippines saw one that day. The flag flew over their own soil, and they wept to see it.

The guerrillas of Leyte came out of the hills to meet the Sixth Army — Kangleon's 92nd Division, the men who had watched and waited and kept the island's secrets for two years. They led the Americans up the trails, marked the enemy's guns, and fought at their side. The long hidden war and the open one had joined at last, on Leyte, hand to hand.

At Tacloban, President Osmena reestablished the government of the Commonwealth on Philippine soil — the first free Filipino government in the islands since the fall. Civil authority, courts, a governor, the flag over a provincial capitol: the Republic the enemy had built in Manila now had a true rival standing on Leyte, and this one was the people's own.

In the waters around the islands — the Sibuyan Sea, the Surigao Strait, off Samar, off Cape Engano — was fought the greatest sea battle in the history of the world. The enemy threw in his whole remaining fleet to break the landing, and lost it: the giant Musashi and the carriers of Pearl Harbor went to the bottom. After Leyte Gulf the Japanese navy would never sail in force again.

Unable to win by any ordinary means, the enemy turned to a terrible new one. Off Samar, Japanese pilots for the first time deliberately crashed their planes into the American ships — the kamikaze, the divine wind — and sank the escort carrier St. Lo. It was the mark of an enemy who had given up hope of victory and would now only sell his death dearly. The last year would be fought under this shadow.

In the northern mountains, Volckmann's 66th Infantry carried the family of President Osmena up the trails in chairs, and pushed their motorcar over a cliff so the enemy would believe they had simply vanished. Guided by the guerrilla Bamboo Telegraph, the president's wife Esperanza and their children were spirited out of Baguio and, by late November, brought safely clear along the Naguilian Road. The hidden army of the Cordillera had guarded the first family of the free Philippines.

The easy beaches gave way to a hard mountain war. On Breakneck Ridge and in the valleys the enemy fought from caves and rain-soaked ridges, and reinforced his men by night through the port of Ormoc. What had begun as a triumph became a grinding campaign in the mud. Leyte would be won, but it would be won the hard way, ridge by ridge.

The season turned against the return. Typhoons and monsoon rains drowned the Leyte lowlands, flooded the new airfields to useless mud, and slowed the American advance to a crawl. The land and the sky that had sheltered the guerrillas for years now fought the liberators too. Nature kept no side but its own.

Beyond Leyte the rest of the archipelago still lay under the enemy, and there the waiting grew hardest of all — so near to freedom, and under a garrison grown cruel with fear. The people of Luzon and the western islands heard of the return and prayed it would reach them before the enemy's fury did. For them the worst was not yet over.

Yamashita knew he could not hold everywhere, and chose where to die. He would give up the lowlands and the cities and pull his armies into the mountains of Luzon, to bleed the Americans in a long defense that could not win but could delay. The order went out: hold the islands to the last, and make the price of every mile as high as flesh could make it.

Across the still-occupied islands the guerrillas rose openly now — cutting the roads and the wires, ambushing the columns, seizing the towns ahead of the advancing Americans, gathering the intelligence that guided the coming landings. The whole resistance, hidden for so long, was in the field at once. The islands were rising to free themselves.

Near Nueva Vizcaya a Japanese transport plane came down in the hills, and Major Manriquez's guerrillas reached the wreck first. In it they found a prize beyond price — Yamashita's own plans for the defense of Luzon. What the enemy meant to keep most secret was carried off by the men he had ordered exterminated, and sent on toward the Americans. The hunted had taken the hunter's map.

Three years to the day since the war began, the Americans landed at Ormoc on the far coast of Leyte and cut the enemy's lifeline. No more troops or supplies would come through to the Japanese in the hills. With Ormoc taken, the battle for Leyte was decided; the rest was the hard, bloody finishing.

On the third anniversary of the war, the enemy raised its last Filipino weapon: the Makapili, a militia of the pro-Japanese Ganap under Benigno Ramos, with old Ricarte lending his name — the volunteer army Yamashita had ordered in October made real. They swore to fight and to inform for the empire against their own people. In the occupation's dying hour, a handful of Filipinos took up its cause, and became the most hated men in the islands.

At Puerto Princesa the enemy did a thing that even his own record could not excuse. Fearing a landing, the guards drove their American prisoners into the air-raid trenches, poured gasoline over them, and set them alight, shooting and bayoneting those who tried to climb out. Of some hundred and fifty men, eleven crawled away alive. It was among the blackest crimes of the whole war, done as the end closed in.

The Americans landed on Mindoro against almost no resistance — a stepping-stone thrown down toward Luzon, and airfields to cover the great landing to come. The front leapt north across the sea. From the Mindoro fields the planes could reach Manila and the Lingayen coast. The enemy's last citadel, Luzon, was now within reach.

At Larap in Camarines Norte the great iron mine fell silent. Guerrilla raids, the American blockade, and the ruin of the roads had strangled it, and the Japanese company gave it up. Like the copper of Mankayan before it, the iron of Larap would go to Japan no more. The wealth the empire had come to take was slipping, mine by mine, out of its hands.

Laurel's republic was coming apart. Its declaration of war was a dead letter, its ministers divided between flight and fear, and the government the enemy had built prepared to follow the enemy into the mountains rather than face the return. The paper nation the occupation had raised in 1943 had two months left to it.

As it fell, the enemy killed the men it had held. General Vicente Lim — the first Filipino of West Point, taken in June — was carried from Fort Santiago to the Chinese Cemetery and beheaded with dozens of others. Captain Praeger of the far north, who had never surrendered, met the same end. The occupation murdered its bravest captives on its way down.

The hooded Makapili walked the zona lines now beside the Kempeitai, pointing out the guerrillas and their families from behind their sackcloth masks. A nod of the hood sent a neighbor to Fort Santiago or the ditch. Neighbor betrayed neighbor for a sack of rice and the enemy's favor. It was the occupation's cruelest instrument in its cruelest season.

The third wartime Christmas came with the sound of American guns on Leyte and American planes over Luzon. On the free island they gave thanks in churches no longer afraid; in the occupied towns they kept the old whisper, closer now to true — next year, free. Between the two Philippines lay a sea and a few months. The people held the line of the calendar and waited.

By the day after Christmas the organized enemy resistance on Leyte was broken, and the island was declared secured — the first province of the return, free after two years and a half under the rising sun. On the map of the islands the red lifted from Leyte, the first color to change in almost three years. Where liberation had begun, it would not stop.

In still-occupied Manila and Luzon the famine reached its very worst. The enemy hoarded what food there was, the war had closed the roads and the sea lanes, and people died of hunger in the streets of the capital even as liberation neared. The land had been stripped to nothing. Freedom, when it came here, would come to the starving.