The most stubborn samurai who did not give up and fought for another 30 years after 1945

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The war ends only when all its participants remove their weapons and stop fighting. If so, then the Second World War lasted almost thirty years after the signing of the peace treaty. In any case, for a few Japanese soldiers and officers who remained in the jungle and could not believe that everything was already over. Because during their preparation they were warned that the enemy would try to misinform the valiant partisan detachments in this way. There are several such stories, but Onoda Hiroo became the most famous of the "stubborn soldiers".

This man was not even a professional military man. After school, he got a job in a private trading company, mastered the profession of a businessman, but his plans were interrupted by the war. In 1942, Onoda was drafted into the army, and he diligently began to train in order to serve his country as best as possible. In the middle of his studies, he was urgently sent to the Philippines. The young lieutenant became the commander of a sabotage special detachment and began to prepare for military operations behind enemy lines. Before being sent to the Philippine island of Lubang, the Japanese received the following order from the Army Chief of Staff:

As soon as the sabotage group arrived on the island, American troops easily defeated the Japanese on this part of the front, and the group, in accordance with orders, fled to the mountains to start a guerrilla war. Under the command of Onoda were two privates and a corporal. Each of them had a rifle, a pair of grenades and 1,500 rounds of rounds for all. This happened in the fall of 1944. On September 2, 1945, Japan signed an act of surrender.

The valiant Japanese partisans soon saw American leaflets informing about the end of the war, then the planes dropped the order of the commander of the 14th Army in the jungle to surrender their weapons and surrender … Onoda decided that the enemies were trying to deceive them from hiding and continued his war. For about a year, separate groups of Japanese partisans continued to resist. Someone surrendered, believing the leaflets, someone was killed, but the group under the command of Hiroo was elusive. At home, they were declared dead.

Over the next few years of this strange war, one private from their detachment was killed, and the second still surrendered to the authorities. The remaining two Onoda and Corporal Kozuku considered the surrendered traitor, changed all base points and continued to very effectively partisan. In a remote part of the jungle, they dug a well-disguised underground shelter, where they hid from the search parties. Filipino policemen, who sometimes tried to catch them, were mistaken for enemy troops, shot back, or quietly went into the forest. Every year the scouts set fire to a pile of straw not far from the place agreed with the authorities in order to signal to their own that the detachment was still alive and continued to fight.

In subsequent years, the partisan detachment brought a lot of trouble to the local peasants. They called the valiant Japanese "forest devils" and were always against the idea of "requisitioning" things and food from them, but it was difficult to argue with the armed military. For thirty years, Onoda and his only subordinate have adapted to life in the jungle. They had a system of secret hideouts prepared, and they changed their location every five days, moving on new routes to confuse possible pursuers. During the rainy season (and this is two or three months), when none of the locals went into the mountains, the scouts built a temporary hut and rested, fixing their uniforms. The Japanese became true masters of disguise, learned to move silently through the mountains and listen to the voices of birds warning them about strangers in the forest.

The issue of food was also solved (after all, it is easier to survive in a warm climate than, say, in Siberia). The scouts ate food collected from the jungle and peasant fields. Bananas, coconuts, forest rats and wild chickens were the most common foods in their diet. They stole (requisitioned) all the necessary trifles (salt, matches, sometimes clothes and canned food) from local peasants and from loggers' parking lots. The guerrillas were very annoyed by poisonous insects, snakes, heat and humidity - the main problems of the tropics, but they learned to cope with this too. Every day Onoda and his comrade brushed their teeth with palm fibers, tried to maintain hygiene and drank only boiled water. In thirty years in the jungle, they had fever only a couple of times.

It is interesting that in 1965 Onoda requisitioned a transistor receiver in one of the huts, managed to use it, and in subsequent years he was even aware of world news, but most of them perceived a distorted worldview as disinformation - it was precisely such a deception that he was warned about during his studies. … All this time, he believed that the Japanese government reported in the news was a US puppet, and the true Imperial government was in exile in Manchuria. When he heard about the Vietnam War on the air, he decided that it was a counter-offensive by his army and waited from day to day of victory. He did not want to believe in the defeat of his homeland, so he continued to carry out the order of the command - he waged a partisan war in the deep rear. In total, during these "hostilities", Onodu's detachment carried out more than a hundred attacks on the radar base of the Philippine Air Force, officials, police and peasants. His group killed 30 and seriously wounded more than 100 military and civilians. After each such "raid", the Philippine police once again searched for "forest devils", but could not catch them.

However, this could not continue indefinitely. On October 19, 1972, the Philippine police shot and killed Onoda's only subordinate and comrade-in-arms, Kinsichi Kozuka. In the same year, the Japanese government began an action to return its die-hard fighters, who did not believe in the end of the war (it turned out that Onodu's detachment was not the only one). Relatives of Onoda and Kozuki came to the island of Lubang, they tried to appeal to their minds through the loudspeakers, left letters in the forest huts, but Onoda did not believe this time either, because not so long ago a fighting friend was shot right in front of his eyes. The next two years of complete loneliness in the jungle became the most difficult for Onoda.

In February 1974, a man arrived on the island, who nevertheless managed to get through to the stubborn Japanese. The student Norio Suzuki, who knew about the tragic fate of his compatriot, decided by all means to find the soldier lost in time and return him home. Surprisingly, he succeeded. Just four days later, thanks to a fluke, the traveler managed to find Onoda in the jungle and talk to him. However, he refused to surrender, since he could not violate the order of his superiors.

The Japanese government urgently tracked down Yoshimi Taniguchi, a former major in the Imperial Army and the immediate commander of the reconnaissance unit. The old soldier had worked in a bookstore for many years. On March 9, 1974, Taniguchi flew to Lubang, dressed in his uniform, contacted Onoda and announced the following order to him:

The next day, Onoda went to the same radar station that he had tried to capture so many times and surrendered to the Philippine authorities. When he learned that Japan had surrendered in 1945, he burst into tears. In addition to a working rifle, hundreds of cartridges, a dagger and a samurai sword, he also handed over a map with caches where the rest of the cartridges were hidden and a perfectly drawn up report on the activities of the detachment for Taniguchi. The base commander returned the sword to the Japanese and called him "a model of army loyalty." I must say that Onoda was to be sentenced to death for murder and robbery, but he was pardoned and a couple of days later solemnly returned to his homeland.

In Japan, Onoda was greeted as a hero. At the airport, he saw an older brother, an 86-year-old father and an 88-year-old mother. The public had different perceptions of this example of valor, but most Japanese admired its steadfastness and loyalty to the soldier's duty. Having hardly adapted to the changed life, Onodu wrote several books of memoirs and reflections and founded the public organization "School of Nature" to educate a healthy young generation. He did have experience of surviving the jungle and developing fortitude that he could pass on to children. Hiroo died on January 16, 2014 in Tokyo, at the age of 91.

Onoda delighted his compatriots, showing a truly samurai spirit of loyalty to his word. Two hundred years before that, an amazing story happened in Japan, based on which the famous film "The Last Samurai"