“No Surrender: my thirty year war” by Hiroo Onada

Just over eighty years ago the Second World War came to an end. Germany's unconditional surrender finally occurred on 8th May 1945 (VE Day) following Adolf Hitler's suicide and Berlin's fall to advancing allied armies. But this did not, of course, mark the end of hostilities. The Japanese government had no intention of surrendering whatsoever and continued to broadcast its preparedness, should it be necessary, to fight on for a hundred years in order to secure ultimate victory.

At this time Japan occupied and controlled vast tracts of territory, including the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, Hong Kong, most of modern-day China (with all its major cities), Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the eastern Philippines, Palau, several Pacific Islands, most of New Guinea, Manchuria, Mongolia and much of Siberia. Japan had started to lose ground as a result of advances by mainly American, Russian and Chinese Communist troops, but from its perspective the war was anything but lost. The Japanese had just managed successfully to build one of history's biggest ever empires, comprising over three million square miles (more than 5% of the world's landmass) and now ruled over around 450 million people with some ruthlessness. They were absolutely digging in for the long haul.

The fact that Emperor Hirohito announced his intention to surrender on 15th August 1945 and that his government finally did so on September 2nd, was wholly due to the dropping of two devastating atomic bombs by the US Airforce on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August respectively. And for 99.999% of combatants, VJ day finally marked the end of this biggest and most destructive war in human history.

But not quite for everyone.

I have always been fascinated to hear about the fate of isolated groups of Japanese soldiers who remained holed up in East Indian jungles after 1945, either fighting on in the mistaken view that the war was still progressing and that one day soon Japanese forces would be arriving to relieve them, or just surviving for as long as they could without surrendering. Being captured alive was, of course, too shameful for diehard Japanese soldiers steeped in Samurai traditions to contemplate.

The soldier who held out longest – probably - was an intelligence officer by the name of Hiroo Onada who finally emerged from the jungle in March 1974 more than twenty-nine years after VJ day and over thirty years since he had first been deployed as a young intelligence officer trained in the art of guerrilla warfare to the Philippine island of Lubang not long before its fall to American troops. It is not a big place, being just sixteen miles long and six miles wide - so about twice the size of Manhattan, but is hilly and covered in thick vegetation.

Initially one of four soldiers who survived the attack, Second Lieutenant Onada and his comrades moved from place to place, convinced that a Japanese counter-attack was imminent and that their in-depth knowledge of the island's terrain would be of vital assistance. The first of the foursome gave up in March 1949 after becoming separated from the others and surviving alone for a further four years. In May 1954, following a skirmish with Philippine soldiers a second was mortally wounded in a shoot-out. This left Onada and his comrade Private Kozuka, who stayed together, effectively living as bandits until Kozuka was shot by police while setting light to a rice storage facility in October 1972.

Onada's autobiography - entitled 'No Surrender: My Thirty Year War' - is an extraordinary read, not least because it details all the attempts that were made to find him over the years and his absolute refusal - in the manner of a real life Don Quixote - ever to accept that Japan had been defeated and that the war had ended. Large numbers of leaflets were dropped by air, all of which he read and ignored. Japanese newspapers were regularly left about the place which he picked up, read and decided were fakes mocked up by the Americans to trick him into surrendering. He reached the same conclusion when he found copies of letters and photographs sent by his family that had been left in the jungle for him to stumble across. At one point his brother came looking for him and sang obscure songs from their childhood close to where he was thought to be hiding out. Onada heard the singing but thought that the voice the actor the Americas were paying to impersonate his brother was not quite accurate, so he ignored the pleas. He also had access to a transistor radio for much of the time, allowing him to listen to news bulletins in Japanese. But he constructed an elaborate fantasy about the existence of some kind of South East Asian Co-operation Organisation which was supposedly still under Japanese control and would soon be liberating Lubang.

It is hard to know whether or not Onada was just extraordinarily stupid, a crazed fantasist, or whether he had just been so effectively brainwashed during his training that he had lost the ability to reason properly for himself in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Onada and his comrades did not spend the decades after 1945 hiding away peacefully while evading capture in their island’s interior. Instead, they carried on fighting as bandits. They had heaps of ammunition and they used it to terrorise islanders from whom they would loot food, clothing and all manner of other things, before heading back inland to their jungle hideaways. While his book says nothing about this aspect, Hiroo Onada is personally reckoned to have killed at least thirty people while effectively continuing to pursue his own private war.

Onada finally emerged and surrendered in 1974 after he was discovered by a young Japanese journalist who visited Lubang to seek him out. They had long conversations during which Onada was finally persuaded that the war really had ended in 1945, that Japan had been defeated and that it was now thriving liberal democracy closely allied to the USA. He took a lot of persuasion, insisting that he would only do it if he first received direct orders from his commanding officer. This man, fortunately, was still alive, and the journalist tracked him down. He was now running a second-hand book shop, but agreed to fly out to Lubang to give the required order, face-to-face.

Lieutenant Onada was extraordinarily fortunate in not subsequently being put on trial for mass murder. He had, after all, terrorised and shot more than two dozen unarmed civilians, as well as destroying a lot of property despite having been clearly told that the war was well and truly over. But in 1974 the (then) young Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was desperately trying to befriend Japan and encourage Japanese investment into his country. So instead, Onada was given the red carpet treatment. A ceremony was held in which he presented his ceremonial sword to Marcos, only to have it immediately returned to him – a kind of non-surrender surrender that seemed to satisfy everyone. He then also returned to Japan as a hero.

Onada, like others who held out for decades, was welcomed home in a blaze of publicity and was paid full military back-pay, as well as his pension, by the Japanese government. But he did not find life in post-war Japan at all comfortable. He could not adjust to the way the place had changed, and hated all the bright lights, consumerism and liberal norms that had taken root during his long, lonely absence. Onada ended up emigrating to Brazil where he lived on a remote cattle ranch in a rather different jungle. He finally died in 2014 aged ninety-one.