A Japanese soldier kept fighting the Second World War until 1974.
Hiroo Onoda was ordered never to surrender. So when leaflets announced Japan's defeat in 1945, he dismissed them as enemy tricks and stayed in the jungle of a Philippine island for almost 29 years. He finally gave up only when his old commanding officer, by then a bookseller, flew out to relieve him of duty.
Onoda was an intelligence officer trained in guerrilla warfare. In December 1944 he was sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines with orders to sabotage its airstrip and harbour ahead of an Allied landing, and under no circumstances to surrender or take his own life. After Allied forces took the island in February 1945, he retreated into the mountains with three other soldiers.
They first saw a leaflet saying the war was over in October 1945, and decided it was propaganda. Leaflets bearing a surrender order from a Japanese general, letters and photographs from their families, search parties and radio broadcasts followed over the years; all were judged to be fakes. The men lived on bananas, coconuts, stolen rice and cattle. One of them surrendered in 1950; the other two were killed in shootouts, in 1954 and 1972, leaving Onoda alone.
There is a darker side to the story. Filipino media later reported that Onoda and his men killed as many as 30 islanders during their raids, deaths he did not mention in his autobiography. The historian Beatrice Trefalt has also questioned how isolated he really was, noting that he had access to newspapers and carried a transistor radio.
The end came through an unlikely visitor. In February 1974 Norio Suzuki, a young Japanese adventurer who had joked that he was searching for Lieutenant Onoda, a panda and the abominable snowman, in that order, found him within four days. Onoda befriended him but still refused to surrender without orders. Suzuki returned with photographs, the government tracked down Onoda's former commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, and on 9 March Taniguchi met him in the jungle and relieved him of duty. Onoda handed over his sword, a working rifle and 500 rounds. The Philippine president pardoned him, and he returned to a hero's welcome in Japan. He later ranched cattle in Brazil, ran nature camps for young people in Japan, and died in 2014, aged 91.
Source: Wikipedia — Hiroo Onoda · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
