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Hiroo Onoda, Last to Surrender

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Hiroo Onoda, Last to Surrender GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE HIROO ONODA, LAST TO SURRENDER 1922 Hiroo Onoda was born in Kainan, Japan. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 1939 When Hiroo Onoda turned seventeen, he went to work for a trading company in China. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1942 May: Drafted into the Japanese military, Hiroo Onoda attended a school for guerilla warfare. Being taken as a prisoner of war was considered by the Japanese to be a failure deserving of death, and in addition to this, what Onoda was being told was that it was the duty of a lurking guerilla fighter to stay alive at any cost. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1944 December 26, Tuesday: George Smith Patton, Jr. relieved the defenders of Bastogne. The German offensive through the Ardennes had stalled. On or about this date, my friend Hans Theodore Zink, a US citizen who had been inducted into the German army, searched out a contingent of US soldiers and surrendered. He would finish out the war, and give up his adolescence, as the Geneva Protocols representative of a POW camp in the desert of the American Southwest. Japanese naval vessels bombarded United States positions on the coast of Mindoro, Philippine Islands. Japanese naval vessels sunk: • Destroyer Kiyoshimo, by naval vessels and Army aircraft, Philippine Islands area, 12 degrees 20 minutes North, 121 degrees 0 minutes East “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Apprentice Officer Hiroo Onoda was sent to the small tropical island of Lubang, which is approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila in the Philippines. His orders were straightforward. He was to do anything to hamper enemy attack on the island. This included destroying the Lubang airport and the pier at the harbor. He was sent in alone, ordered not to die by his own hand, and was told to take as many years as was needed to accomplish his mission. When he landed, he found a group of Japanese soldiers that had been sent there previously. The officers in this group outranked Onoda and prevented him from carrying out his assignment in a timely manner. This just made it all that much easier for the Americans to take control of the island when they landed on February 28, 1945. Within a short period of time, all but four of the Japanese soldiers had either died or surrendered. Onoda, having just been promoted to Lieutenant, ordered the men to take to the hills. The war ended shortly thereafter, but the four surviving soldiers would not know of this for quite some time. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 1949 September: The first of the four Japanese war holdouts on Lubang Island in the Philippines to give up was Private First Class Yuichi Akatsu. He got fed up with the whole thing and stormed off. The remaining men figured that there was no way that this weakling could survive on his own. Yet, unbeknownst to them, Akatsu managed to live six months on his own before surrendering to the Philippine Army. HIRU ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 4 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1950 The remaining three Japanese diehards on Lubang Island in the Philippines found a note left by Akatsu stating that he had been greeted by friendly troops. He even led a group of soldiers into the mountains in search of the remaining men. However, nothing was more important, to these people of this mentation, than loyalty. Hiroo Onoda and his men quickly concluded that Akatsu was now working with the enemy, and retreated to the other side of the mountain. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 1952 Japanese companies licensed the technology of the transistor from the USA. The end of the occupation of the Japanese home islands by the US Army, as Japan returned to full independence (was this a clever hoax?). Letters and photographs of family and friends were dropped all over Lubang Island in the Philippines from an airplane. The Japanese war holdouts there concluded that the enemy had finally outdone themselves with this clever trick — to the eyes of those trained in guerilla warfare, this had to be a clever hoax. HIRU ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 1953 June: Corporal Shimada, a member of the group of Japanese diehards from World War II on Lubang Island in the Philippines, was shot in the leg during an altercation with local fishermen. They both got away, so the search for them in the jungles would need to continue even longer. The other surviving uncaptured combatant, Hiroo Onoda, would be able to nurse the injured corporal back to health. LAST TO SURRENDER “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1954 May 7: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, the war came to an end for Corporal Shimada as he was shot dead by a search party sent in to find these Japanese holdouts. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II At 5:30PM, the 10,000 French soldiers remaining alive at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. By that point, an estimated 8,000 Viet Minh and 1,500 French had perished. These French prisoners would be marched for up to 60 days to camps some 500 hundred miles away. Nearly half would perish during this march, or during their captivity. France would proceed to withdraw completely from Vietnam, ending a bitter eight year struggle against the Viet Minh in which 400,000 soldiers and civilians from all sides would have perished. 6 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE May 17: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, more leaflets were dropped. A loudspeaker blurted out “Onoda, Kozuka, the war has ended.” Clearly, to the Japanese war holdouts, this was another trick by the Americans. They were sure that the war was still on and they intended to get even with the enemy for Shimada’s death. Hiroo Onoda and Kozuka were positive that the Japanese would be landing on the island any day and that control would be taken back from the Americans. One day, Onoda’s own brother stood by at the microphone and pleaded for them to give up. Onoda could not see the speaker’s face from his great distance and concluded that the Americans had gone to a really great length to trick him this time. They believed that the Americans had found a man that was built and sounded just like his brother, but was really an impostor! LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II The United States Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that 6-year-old Linda Brown had been unfairly treated when the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas had obligated her to attend a substandard all-Black school. It further ordered that “separate but equal” had been nothing more than an operating fiction, and that therefore schools across the country must be desegregated. At the Army-McCarthy hearings, Army Counselor John G. Adams refused to testify about a “highlevel” meeting wherein Adams had been advised to make a written record of his dealings with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Adams was refusing at the order of President Dwight David Eisenhower. The subcommittee decided to go into recess until May 24th. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1965 The Japanese Government made another generous gift of 3,800 Yoshino trees to another First Lady devoted to the beautification of Washington DC, Lady Bird Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. American-grown this time, many of these were planted on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Lady Bird Johnson and Mrs. Ryuji Takeuchi, wife of Japan’s Ambassador, reenacted the planting ceremony of 1912. Late in the year, on Lubang Island in the Philippines, Hiroo Onoda and Kozuka “requisitioned” a transistor radio from a local and listened to reports from Peking. Oddly, with their minds still trapped in 1945 war time, they did not believe anything that they heard on the radio regarding military or foreign relations. Yet they followed the horse races, and understood that Japan had risen to be a great industrial power. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 8 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX HIROO ONODA LAST TO SURRENDER GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1972 October 19: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, each autumn, to continue their World War II military assignment, Hiroo Onoda and Kozuka would attempt to torch the sheaves of rice collected by farmers in the fields. This time the two Japanese soldier diehards were intercepted on this errand by local police, who managed to kill Kozuka. LAST TO SURRENDER WORLD WAR II 1974 February 20: On Lubang Island in the Philippines, war holdout Hiroo Onoda encountered a young Japanese university dropout named Suzuki living alone in a tent. Suzuki had left Japan to travel the world and told his friends that he was “going to look for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order.” Onoda approached cautiously and the two soon struck up a conversation that lasted many hours.
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