Fighting for the Philippines : SHARE OF HONOR <i> by Ralph Graves (Henry Holt: $19.95; 454 pp.) </i>

Suddenly, swiftly, deadly as the plague, they swarmed ashore to conquer the ill-defended islands in six months and hold them in a vise for three grim years.

They were the “Japs,” or so we called them then, and their occupation of the Philippines was one of the more dramatic chapters of World War II.

For a generation whose notion of war is the ICBM, “Share of Honor” will unfold as a wondrous yarn, woven around an ancient era when the battles were decided by bayonet and secret messages were sent by hand, not computer.

For those who have stored the story in personal memory banks, the tale will trigger a litany of lang synes--the names: MacArthur, Quezon, Yamashita, Wainwright; the places: Bataan, Corregidor, Leyte Gulf; even the songs: “Tuxedo Junction,” “Ferryboat Serenade,” “Amapola.”

Author Ralph Graves was there--as a student before the war, when Americans lapped at the luxury of colonization, and as a soldier after the liberation, when the horror of the Death March was revealed to a stunned world. He has chosen fiction to chronicle the travails of both Americans trapped in the occupation and the Filipinos who resisted as best they could the rape of their country.

To be sure, the fiction is buttressed by fact. In the halcyon days before the Japanese invasion, President Manuel Quezon--”ruthless, devious and vain”--rules the country for the Yanks, while MacArthur--imperious, vainglorious, willfully blind to the inadequacy of his forces--runs the military as his fief.

His troops driven deep into the Bataan Peninsula to the west of Manila, MacArthur proclaims, “I shall return” and leaves the scruffy remnant of his Army to the mixed mercy of the invaders. Stranded--and serving as avatars of the Philippine Resistance--are:

--Amos Watson, aging industrialist who is imprisoned with thousands of fellow Americans and organizes a spy ring operating both inside and beyond the internment camp.

--Papaya, a lush Filipina cabaret singer who seduces an enemy admiral for his secrets and incurs the contumely of her countrymen.

--Coach, a young Yankee schoolteacher who heads a band of Filipino guerrillas.

--Sandy Homobono, putative collaborator who practices the trade of journalism well but not too wisely.

--Jack Humphrey, an Army captain who survives the Death March only to rot in an overcrowded POW compound.

Each is involved, at least peripherally, with the gathering of intelligence, and each handles the indignities--and occasional barbarities--of the occupation according to strength or weakness of character. Their efforts, in anticipation of liberation, are necessarily primitive but as ingenious as they are perilous.

Disappointingly, the conquerors (excepting Papaya’s admiral) are of cardboard, with the requisite number of sadists and (relative) good guys. As a consequence, the rigors of both civilian and military internees--in particular the agony of the Death March from Bataan to prison compound--are downgraded from hideous to merely fascinating. (With mail forbidden, conditions in the POW camps are reported through self-censored “letters” Humphrey imagines himself writing to his wife, a lame device at best.)

In trying to jam into 400 pages the Zeitgeist of an entire nation under siege, Graves has spread himself too thin, has given us breadth rather than depth. Nevertheless the author, while not a stylist, is an instinctive storyteller with a plausible plot, a fine sense of place and a rousing climax.

“Share of Honor” provides a generous measure of suspense even to those who have long since committed the overall outcome to memory. To those for whom the fall and rescue of the Philippines is only a blurred footnote, Graves offers overdue insight into an era of perfidy--and perseverance.