No Surrender! Seven Japanese WWII Soldiers Who Refused to Surrender After the War
The Imperial Japanese Army deployed hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers across the islands across the Southwest Pacific. As the Allied island-hopping campaign encircled Japan, thousands of Japanese soldiers were cut off from their command and were presumed killed-in-action. Faced with a desperate decision between dying in suicidal charges and going into hiding, most Japanese soldiers chose suicide.
The holdouts, on the other hand, chose to live, even if that meant suffering deprivation, hardship and shame. Most of the holdouts gradually emerged from hiding during the late 1940s and 1950s. A few holdouts—the most famous of the lot—only came down from the mountains ten to thirty years after the war.
The legacy of the holdouts is a complicated one. It would easy to dismiss men like Yokoi, Onoda and Nakamura as fanatic soldiers, or simply deluded men. That simply was not the case, as this book will show.
The holdouts, on the other hand, chose to live, even if that meant suffering deprivation, hardship and shame. Most of the holdouts gradually emerged from hiding during the late 1940s and 1950s. A few holdouts—the most famous of the lot—only came down from the mountains ten to thirty years after the war.
The legacy of the holdouts is a complicated one. It would easy to dismiss men like Yokoi, Onoda and Nakamura as fanatic soldiers, or simply deluded men. That simply was not the case, as this book will show.
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Excerpt
The Holdouts
The Imperial Japanese Army deployed hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers across Asia during World War II, from the cold northern steppes of Manchuria to the sweltering islands of the South Pacific. Fascist and militarist leaders in Tokyo sought to carve out a vast domain for Japan, which was an emergent world power long before Pearl Harbor. Farmers' sons had become Japan's infantrymen, taught that Japan was divine, invincible and destined to rule all Asia. By 1910, Japan had soldiers in Korea, Taiwan, and Beijing. In the 1930s, the Japanese Army took Manchuria, rich with the mineral resources to fuel Japan's industrial and imperial growth, and entered China in force. By the time Japan officially entered World War II in December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army was spread across Asia. The vast distance between Japan and America made direct confrontation impossible. Neither side had a foothold close enough to attack the other. The war between America and Japan had to take place in the South Pacific islands, tiny points of land separated by hundreds of miles of ocean. The Japanese Army spread itself thin to protect this artery, the gateway to the home islands.
Japanese soldiers were stationed on islands across the Southwest Pacific, with names exotic and yet familiar: Guam, Guadalcanal, Saipan, Lubang and Peleliu. As the Allied island-hopping campaign encircled Japan, thousands of Japanese soldiers were cut off from their command and were presumed killed-in-action. One by one, Japan's island fortresses fell to the Americans. Many Japanese soldiers chose to die in futile banzai attacks to retake what they had lost. Faced with a desperate decision between dying in suicidal charges and going into hiding, most Japanese soldiers chose suicide. Surrender was anathema to soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army: it was considered a grave dishonor and was punishable by death under the military codes of conduct. To a man, Japanese soldiers were taught to prefer death over capture or defeat. Even to retreat was considered a disgrace. Rather than fall back and reform, to attempt to restore communications with their superiors, countless Japanese infantrymen on dozens of islands across the Pacific chose to die in last-ditch, banzai attacks on the enemy. To die gloriously in battle was preferable to them than the shame of defeat or capture. It was a desperate choice.
The holdouts, on the other hand, chose to live, even if that meant suffering deprivation, hardship and shame. However strange the stragglers may seem for their decision to run and hide—sometimes for decades—it was either that or to die “honorably.” Many stragglers were burdened with survivor's guilt and felt immense shame that they had not died in battle with their comrades. Their sense of guilt was so great that some preferred to endure decades of hunger, exposure and isolation rather than face their countrymen again.
Most of the holdouts gradually emerged from hiding during the late 1940s and 1950s. In the chaos of the final months of the war tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were abandoned at remote outposts in the Pacific Islands and Manchuria.
A few holdouts—the most famous of the lot—only came down from the mountains ten to thirty years after the war. Each had their own reasons for refusing to surrender, but the longest-running holdouts had a lot in common. They were all hopelessly cut off from their commanders and had no way of knowing how the war was going. When stranded Japanese soldiers found out the war was over through the proper channels, they usually surrendered. Some soldiers were so isolated and so far from any trusted source of information about the war that they were left to imagine the worst and hope for the best. Military indoctrination had taught Japanese soldiers that their country was invincible, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, most assumed that the war was still ongoing. Ignorance kept them from surrendering more than anything else.
Some stragglers, like Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, one of only a handful of Japanese survivors of the Second Battle of Guam, knew that Japan had lost the war but nevertheless stayed in hiding for 28 years. Many holdouts believed they would be killed, either by the Allies or by islanders seeking revenge for Japan's wartime atrocities. American Marines hunted down Japanese survivors in relentless search-and-destroy missions: those who did not surrender immediately were killed. Those who survived the search-and-destroy missions were often traumatized and fearful of surrender. Why then did some holdouts stay hidden even years after the Americans had left?
They stayed hidden because they were sincerely afraid of being looked down upon if they returned to Japan. And their fear was sometimes justified. A few stragglers even received letters urging them to commit suicide to atone for their supposed disgrace. Yokoi summed up how many stragglers felt when he famously said in 1972, “It is with much embarrassment, but I have returned.”
Still other holdouts, like Teruo Nakamura, the last Japanese holdout to emerge from hiding in 1974, firmly believed that Japan had won, or at the very least, was still fighting. Nakamura was stranded on Morotai in late 1944 after the Allies retook the island in preparation for an assault on the Philippines. He was declared dead in March 1945. For the next thirty years, he grew his own food, raised fowl, hunted wild boar, and lived in a small thatched hut deep in the mountain jungles of Morotai. He would occasionally trade with the islanders, who tried to explain to him many times that the war was over and Japan had been defeated. Nakamura simply refused to believe them. “Japan is invincible,” he would say. It wasn't until the Indonesian government learned of his presence and sent out a search party to arrest him that Nakamura left Morotai.
Nakamura was not the only holdout who thought Japan could never be defeated. Lt. Hiro Onoda held out on the island of Lubang for almost as long as Nakamura: from 1945 to 1974. For thirty years Onoda waged a one-man “guerrilla war” on Lubang—meaning he occasionally stole food and supplies from the Lubang islanders, and killed many of them in the process. Onoda was a true holdout: he was simply waited for the Japanese army to retake Lubang, and until then he had to stay alive and keep up the fight, which he did, in his way, for nearly three decades. He was confronted with leaflets and the shouted pleas of former Japanese soldiers telling him the war was over, all of which Onoda steadfastly refused to believe. Onoda would sometimes muse about how the war was going, but it never crossed his mind that Japan had actually lost. Defeat was unthinkable.
The legacy of the holdouts is a complicated one. It would easy to dismiss men like Yokoi, Onoda and Nakamura as fanatic soldiers, or simply deluded men. The term “fog of war” comes to mind to describe the mindset of the holdouts. They were misled—as all soldiers are—to believe in the might and right of their own cause; they were not worldly; they were lost and abandoned in a strange place, far from home; and they had survived what most of their comrades had not. The holdouts believed whatever they had to believe to stay alive, to keep from despair and to stay true to their sense of self.
Captain Sakae Oba
Captain Sakae Oba arrived in the South Pacific a survivor, and he left Saipan a survivor. He took part in one of the most gruesome battles of the Pacific War, the American assault on Saipan. Of the tens of thousands of Japanese, soldiers and civilians, Oba was one of the few who returned to tell his story. Captain Sakae Oba saved his small platoon from the bloodiest banzai attack in the war. He evaded capture and led attacks deep behind enemy lines, and chose to continue fighting rather than die futilely or take his own life. Against all odds he and his soldiers defended a group of two hundred Japanese civilians, many of them women, children, and elderly. He fought the Americans, narrowly escaping capture countless times, for 512 days. He and his 46 men surrendered in a formal ceremony on December 1, 1945, three months after Japan officially capitulated. Before he left Saipan, Captain Sakae Oba was feted by the same American Marine officers who had pursued him furiously across the island with no success, and who had dubbed him "the Fox."
Sakae Oba was born March 21, 1914, in the coastal town of Gamagori by Mikawa Bay. The year of his birth coincided with the Japanese occupation of the Mariana Islands in the South Pacific. Germany had purchased the Marianas from Spain in 1898 after the Spanish-American War, except for Guam, the southernmost island in the Mariana archipelago, which America took alongside Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In 1914, the Japanese military occupied the northern Marianas, including Saipan, and the government encouraged Japanese to settle there as agriculturalists. By the time Captain Sake Oba arrived on Saipan, there were over 20,000, more than outnumbering the native Chammorro population.
Before joining the military, Sakae Oba married his sweetheart, Mineko Hirano. In 1934, at the age of twenty, Sakae Oba enlisted in the 18th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army garrisoned in Gamagori. He was made an officer candidate and, after special training, was sent to join the rest of the 18th Regiment in Manchuria on occupation duty. Sakae Oba participated in the amphibious assault on Shanghai at the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 before rotating back to Manchuria. For the next seven years he saw little combat but steady promotion, earning the rank of captain.
The Imperial Japanese Army deployed hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers across Asia during World War II, from the cold northern steppes of Manchuria to the sweltering islands of the South Pacific. Fascist and militarist leaders in Tokyo sought to carve out a vast domain for Japan, which was an emergent world power long before Pearl Harbor. Farmers' sons had become Japan's infantrymen, taught that Japan was divine, invincible and destined to rule all Asia. By 1910, Japan had soldiers in Korea, Taiwan, and Beijing. In the 1930s, the Japanese Army took Manchuria, rich with the mineral resources to fuel Japan's industrial and imperial growth, and entered China in force. By the time Japan officially entered World War II in December 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army was spread across Asia. The vast distance between Japan and America made direct confrontation impossible. Neither side had a foothold close enough to attack the other. The war between America and Japan had to take place in the South Pacific islands, tiny points of land separated by hundreds of miles of ocean. The Japanese Army spread itself thin to protect this artery, the gateway to the home islands.
Japanese soldiers were stationed on islands across the Southwest Pacific, with names exotic and yet familiar: Guam, Guadalcanal, Saipan, Lubang and Peleliu. As the Allied island-hopping campaign encircled Japan, thousands of Japanese soldiers were cut off from their command and were presumed killed-in-action. One by one, Japan's island fortresses fell to the Americans. Many Japanese soldiers chose to die in futile banzai attacks to retake what they had lost. Faced with a desperate decision between dying in suicidal charges and going into hiding, most Japanese soldiers chose suicide. Surrender was anathema to soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army: it was considered a grave dishonor and was punishable by death under the military codes of conduct. To a man, Japanese soldiers were taught to prefer death over capture or defeat. Even to retreat was considered a disgrace. Rather than fall back and reform, to attempt to restore communications with their superiors, countless Japanese infantrymen on dozens of islands across the Pacific chose to die in last-ditch, banzai attacks on the enemy. To die gloriously in battle was preferable to them than the shame of defeat or capture. It was a desperate choice.
The holdouts, on the other hand, chose to live, even if that meant suffering deprivation, hardship and shame. However strange the stragglers may seem for their decision to run and hide—sometimes for decades—it was either that or to die “honorably.” Many stragglers were burdened with survivor's guilt and felt immense shame that they had not died in battle with their comrades. Their sense of guilt was so great that some preferred to endure decades of hunger, exposure and isolation rather than face their countrymen again.
Most of the holdouts gradually emerged from hiding during the late 1940s and 1950s. In the chaos of the final months of the war tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers were abandoned at remote outposts in the Pacific Islands and Manchuria.
A few holdouts—the most famous of the lot—only came down from the mountains ten to thirty years after the war. Each had their own reasons for refusing to surrender, but the longest-running holdouts had a lot in common. They were all hopelessly cut off from their commanders and had no way of knowing how the war was going. When stranded Japanese soldiers found out the war was over through the proper channels, they usually surrendered. Some soldiers were so isolated and so far from any trusted source of information about the war that they were left to imagine the worst and hope for the best. Military indoctrination had taught Japanese soldiers that their country was invincible, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, most assumed that the war was still ongoing. Ignorance kept them from surrendering more than anything else.
Some stragglers, like Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, one of only a handful of Japanese survivors of the Second Battle of Guam, knew that Japan had lost the war but nevertheless stayed in hiding for 28 years. Many holdouts believed they would be killed, either by the Allies or by islanders seeking revenge for Japan's wartime atrocities. American Marines hunted down Japanese survivors in relentless search-and-destroy missions: those who did not surrender immediately were killed. Those who survived the search-and-destroy missions were often traumatized and fearful of surrender. Why then did some holdouts stay hidden even years after the Americans had left?
They stayed hidden because they were sincerely afraid of being looked down upon if they returned to Japan. And their fear was sometimes justified. A few stragglers even received letters urging them to commit suicide to atone for their supposed disgrace. Yokoi summed up how many stragglers felt when he famously said in 1972, “It is with much embarrassment, but I have returned.”
Still other holdouts, like Teruo Nakamura, the last Japanese holdout to emerge from hiding in 1974, firmly believed that Japan had won, or at the very least, was still fighting. Nakamura was stranded on Morotai in late 1944 after the Allies retook the island in preparation for an assault on the Philippines. He was declared dead in March 1945. For the next thirty years, he grew his own food, raised fowl, hunted wild boar, and lived in a small thatched hut deep in the mountain jungles of Morotai. He would occasionally trade with the islanders, who tried to explain to him many times that the war was over and Japan had been defeated. Nakamura simply refused to believe them. “Japan is invincible,” he would say. It wasn't until the Indonesian government learned of his presence and sent out a search party to arrest him that Nakamura left Morotai.
Nakamura was not the only holdout who thought Japan could never be defeated. Lt. Hiro Onoda held out on the island of Lubang for almost as long as Nakamura: from 1945 to 1974. For thirty years Onoda waged a one-man “guerrilla war” on Lubang—meaning he occasionally stole food and supplies from the Lubang islanders, and killed many of them in the process. Onoda was a true holdout: he was simply waited for the Japanese army to retake Lubang, and until then he had to stay alive and keep up the fight, which he did, in his way, for nearly three decades. He was confronted with leaflets and the shouted pleas of former Japanese soldiers telling him the war was over, all of which Onoda steadfastly refused to believe. Onoda would sometimes muse about how the war was going, but it never crossed his mind that Japan had actually lost. Defeat was unthinkable.
The legacy of the holdouts is a complicated one. It would easy to dismiss men like Yokoi, Onoda and Nakamura as fanatic soldiers, or simply deluded men. The term “fog of war” comes to mind to describe the mindset of the holdouts. They were misled—as all soldiers are—to believe in the might and right of their own cause; they were not worldly; they were lost and abandoned in a strange place, far from home; and they had survived what most of their comrades had not. The holdouts believed whatever they had to believe to stay alive, to keep from despair and to stay true to their sense of self.
Captain Sakae Oba
Captain Sakae Oba arrived in the South Pacific a survivor, and he left Saipan a survivor. He took part in one of the most gruesome battles of the Pacific War, the American assault on Saipan. Of the tens of thousands of Japanese, soldiers and civilians, Oba was one of the few who returned to tell his story. Captain Sakae Oba saved his small platoon from the bloodiest banzai attack in the war. He evaded capture and led attacks deep behind enemy lines, and chose to continue fighting rather than die futilely or take his own life. Against all odds he and his soldiers defended a group of two hundred Japanese civilians, many of them women, children, and elderly. He fought the Americans, narrowly escaping capture countless times, for 512 days. He and his 46 men surrendered in a formal ceremony on December 1, 1945, three months after Japan officially capitulated. Before he left Saipan, Captain Sakae Oba was feted by the same American Marine officers who had pursued him furiously across the island with no success, and who had dubbed him "the Fox."
Sakae Oba was born March 21, 1914, in the coastal town of Gamagori by Mikawa Bay. The year of his birth coincided with the Japanese occupation of the Mariana Islands in the South Pacific. Germany had purchased the Marianas from Spain in 1898 after the Spanish-American War, except for Guam, the southernmost island in the Mariana archipelago, which America took alongside Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In 1914, the Japanese military occupied the northern Marianas, including Saipan, and the government encouraged Japanese to settle there as agriculturalists. By the time Captain Sake Oba arrived on Saipan, there were over 20,000, more than outnumbering the native Chammorro population.
Before joining the military, Sakae Oba married his sweetheart, Mineko Hirano. In 1934, at the age of twenty, Sakae Oba enlisted in the 18th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army garrisoned in Gamagori. He was made an officer candidate and, after special training, was sent to join the rest of the 18th Regiment in Manchuria on occupation duty. Sakae Oba participated in the amphibious assault on Shanghai at the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 before rotating back to Manchuria. For the next seven years he saw little combat but steady promotion, earning the rank of captain.
