On the 15th of August 1945, the Japanese empire capitulated after the United States threw
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the last country of the Axis powers that
continued its war, and as such with its surrender the Second World War came to an end. On the
second of September, the formal signing of the treaty aboard the USS Missouri reaffirmed
this. Even though Japan had formally surrendered and the preparations were made to both rebuild
the Japanese mainland and put on trial the men responsible for this deadly conflict,
it did not mean the war had ended for all Japanese soldiers. As a matter of fact, some
soldiers took their mission to “never surrender” quite literally, a bit too literally.
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Onoda’s Garrison
Today is about the last Japanese soldier to lay down his weapons and surrender after the
second world war. Whereas the last German unit surrendered in September 1945, a bit
over half a year after the war had ended, the Japanese took it to a whole new level.
If you want to know about the last Germans to surrender, make sure you check out my video
on Wilhelm Dege and his unit after this one. Right, so the last Japanese soldier to surrender
was Hiroo Onoda. He was born in 1922 in Japan, into a family that had roots with the old
samurai. His father was a sergeant in the Japanese cavalry and was killed in China in
1943. When Hiroo was 17 years old he started working at a firm in China, but not for long
because soon he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He wasn’t just drafted as
a regular soldier, though, but was sent to a special academy, the Nakanoschool, where
soldiers were explicitly trained in guerilla warfare.
On the 26th of December 1944, it was evident, even to the Japanese, that they were fighting
a losing battle. Hiroo, together with his command unit, was sent to the Philippine island
of Lubang. The unit received orders to, together with the Japanese soldiers already on the
island, wage guerilla warfare against the approaching Americans. As the unit was preparing
to leave, the division commander added another order to that: under no circumstances should
they commit suicide. You see, it was custom that Japanese soldiers, once they realized
defeat was imminent, committed suicide or died in a suicide attack on the enemy. So
it wasn’t a random order, the commander actually wanted the division to fight to the
bitter end instead of taking their own lives when the war was over, something that was
considered honourable in Japanese culture. The division was tasked with charging against
enemy landing strips and blowing up the pier at the harbour. But when they arrived on the
island they found the Japanese troops that were already there utterly discouraged and
without morale. The garrison commanders refused to help Hiroo and his men, and Hiroo lacked
the seniority to order them to. This lack of action eventually translated to Allied
forces landing on the island. In the ensuing four-day battle the Allied troops overran
and conquered the island by February 1945. The surviving Japanese didn’t surrender,
however. Those that weren’t captured split up in groups of 3 to 4 and made their way
inland, to hide in the mountains and jungle and wage their guerilla war, as they had been
trained to do.
Post-war Guerilla Warfare
As the months passed by eventually only Hiroo remained together with corporal Shoichi Shimada
and the soldiers Kinshichi Kozuka and Yuichi Akatsu. They lived in the wilderness, foraging
for their food and sleeping in makeshift huts. The men quite literally only had their clothes
and their weapons with an apparent shortage of ammunition. Their diet wasn’t very varied
since the natural vegetation of the island only provided bananas and coconuts. Now they
didn’t just stay on the island for months - no - these men remained there for years
on end, occasionally carrying out their guerilla tactics in skirmishes with adventurers, philippine
soldiers and any lost person that happened to come close. All in all, the message that
Japan had surrendered in August 1945 never reached them.
By 1949 one of Hiroo’s men, Akatsu “deserted”, after an entire unit of 41 men led by corporal
Fujita closeby had surrendered earlier that year. Now keep in mind the war had been over
for 4 years by now. Hiroo and the two remaining soldiers carried out many sabotage-attacks
and guerilla skirmishes. They burned rice-supplies from the local population and they tried to
get as much territory as possible under their control, in Hiroo’s words “to clear the
way for the Japanese landing party that we continued to expect.” The burning rice stocks
were thought of as signals to Japanese troops that might have been close to the island,
in order for them to notice the ‘Onoda Squadron’ was alive and continuing the fight. In reality,
Philippine soldiers, United States soldiers and even the local population was getting
very fed up with these Japanese guerilla’s, or ‘hill-devils’ as they called them,
that refused to surrender, years after the war had ended.
For years Hiroo together with soldier Kozuka continued their attacks and raids on the local
population until in 1972 Kozuka was killed in a firefight with island police. The death
of Kozuka, instead of making Hiroo willing to surrender, only made him hide better and
carry out his raids and attacks more diligently and better-prepared.
Now it wasn’t like authorities didn’t try to get these men out of their “last
stand mentality”, unresponsive to the fact the war had ended. Since they knew soldiers
remained on the island during the 1950s and 60s authorities left pamphlets, letters and
newspapers spread around the jungle to try and convince the soldiers the war was over.
They even used megaphones to broadcast to the wilderness that the war was over, even
using family members of soldiers they knew were in there. In 1959 Hiroo’s brother even
made a statement asking him to surrender. Hiroo was convinced a prisoner of war that
looked like his brother was forced to read a statement. His belief the war was still
going on was only strengthened when Akatsu, who they deemed a deserter, led a broadcast
to his former comrades in arms telling them the war had ended and the Philippine army
had received him with dignity. Pictures of his parents and brothers were left. Still,
he thought they were faked and often times he refused to believe letters by his family
were real because of supposed spelling mistakes or weird vocabulary such as “Onoda-san”
instead of just Onoda. Hiroo was thoroughly convinced Japan was winning
the war and the Japanese battalion to carry on the attack could arrive any day. Okay,
so there is another part why it is understandable Hiroo thought the war was continuing: he often
heard bombs go off in the distance. What he didn’t know was that his hiding location
was very closeby a training ground for the Philippine airforce, and he heard exercise
bombing raids.
The final years (1972-1974)
So in 1972, both Kozuka died and another Japanese soldier, sergeant Shoichi Yokoi was retrieved
from the island of Guam. Because of his appearance after 28 years, the Japanese authorities increased
their search efforts for Hiroo, assumed to be the last, if not one of the last remaining
soldiers. More letters were dropped and sound recordings of his brother and sister were
broadcast in the jungle to get him to come out. According to Hiroo, he knew the “enemy”
could ‘manipulate voices, as they had done earlier with his other brother in 1959.’
And here’s where it gets interesting. Nothing seemed to work until a university dropout
that wanted to go on an adventure, Norio Suzuki, decided to look for Hiroo. The young man stated
his goals as follows: he wanted to “Find Onoda, a panda and the abominable snowman,
with which he meant a yeti.” Norio went to the island and set up camp in terrain that
was known to be controlled by Hiroo. This way he forced a meeting and when Hiroo appeared,
he asked him what was necessary to convince him the war had ended. Hiroo told Norio he
would only surrender if an official order came from his commander. Norio relayed this
message to Japanese authorities, and fortunately one of Hiroo’s former commanders was still
alive. As such, on the 9th of march 1974 one of his old commanders, major Taniguchi, flew
to the island, met with Hiroo and gave him the order to surrender. Suddenly Hiroo’s
make-believe world of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’ collapsed.
Hiroo later said about this that when he was alone, he believed in the Imperial Japanese
Empire that would never surrender. He said he was unable to respond psychologically to
family members calling out to him. Not until he returned to Japan did he realise he had
been living in a fantasy world and the Japanese Empire had been a figment of his imagination
for decades. 29 years after Japan had surrendered Hiroo emerged from the jungle with his tattered
clothing and gun. When he returned to Japan he received a hero’s welcome. But he himself
could not enjoy it. “For thirty years on Lubang, I polished my rifle every day. For
what? I cursed myself. For thirty years I thought I was doing something for my country,
but now it seemed as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.” It is
a very tragic story about a man that literally went beyond the call of duty. The Philippine
government pardoned him for killing between 10 and 30 Philippine citizens.
Even though Hiroo was incredibly famous in Japan upon his return, he could not correctly
reintegrate in Japanese society. He eventually emigrated to Brazil, married there and wrote
his autobiography: No Surrender. It became a bestseller worldwide. During the 80s Hiroo
returned to Japan in order to establish the Onoda Shizen Juku, a sort of boy scouts fraternity
group throughout Japan that taught children survival skills in nature. In 1996 he returned
to the island he had spent nearly 30 years of his life. Hiroo Onoda died in January 2014
at the age of 91. As for Norio Suzuki, the adventurous explorer,
well, he continued exploring for a little while, but he met a tragic fate. He did manage
to find a panda but died in an avalanche as he was looking for a Yeti in 1986, at the
age of 37. And although Hiroo was the last Japanese soldier to surrender, there was another
Japanese holdout held by a Taiwanese volunteer, Teruo Nakamura, that held out several months
longer than Hiroo, until december 1974. A surveillance aeroplane spotted his hideout
by accident upon which contact was sought and he was repatriated to Taiwan.
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