The War That Would Not End

The young man sat beside his campfire in the jungle and waited.

It was February 1974. His name was Norio Suzuki, and he was a Japanese student who loved adventure. He had come to Lubang, a small, hilly island in the Philippines, to look for a man that many people believed was dead.

One night a figure stepped out of the trees, holding a rifle. He wore a patched, faded army uniform. He was thin, sharp-eyed and over fifty years old.

He was Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army. And as far as he was concerned, the Second World War was still going on.

The order

Onoda was born in 1922 in Wakayama, Japan. During the war he was trained as an intelligence officer, in a special school that taught soldiers how to spy, hide and fight behind enemy lines.

In December 1944 he was sent to Lubang. American and Filipino forces were about to land, and Japan was losing the war. His orders were to slow the enemy down, to destroy what he could, and to keep fighting. He was told that he must never surrender, and never take his own life. His commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, promised, as Onoda later wrote, that whatever happened, they would come back for him.

In February 1945 the enemy landed. Most of the Japanese soldiers on the island were killed or captured. Onoda escaped into the hills with three other soldiers.

Leaflets in the jungle

In August 1945 Japan surrendered, and the war ended. But nobody came for Onoda.

Before long, leaflets were dropped over the jungle telling Japanese soldiers that the war was over and that they should come out. Onoda and his men read them carefully and decided they were a trick by the enemy. The wording looked wrong to them. A real Japanese order, they thought, would not read like that.

The years went by. More leaflets came, and newspapers, and later letters and photographs from their families in Japan, dropped from the air. Search parties called out to them with loudspeakers. Each time, the men found reasons not to believe it. Onoda had been trained to expect deception. The more effort the "enemy" made, the surer he became that it was a trap.

So they stayed hidden. They lived in the jungle, moving from place to place, sleeping in rough shelters. They ate bananas and coconuts, and stole rice and killed cattle from the farms below.

The harm

This is not only a story of endurance. Onoda believed he was at war, and he behaved as a soldier at war. Over the years he and his men attacked the island's farmers, burned their crops and stores, and shot at the people they met. Around thirty islanders were killed, and many more were wounded. For the people of Lubang, the men in the hills were a terror that went on for decades.

One by one, Onoda's companions were lost. In 1949 one of them walked away and gave himself up. Another was shot dead in a clash with a search party in 1954. In 1972 his last companion, Kinshichi Kozuka, was killed in a gunfight with Philippine police.

Now Onoda was alone. Japan, believing him dead, had once declared him so. When news of Kozuka's death reached Japan, people realised Onoda might still be alive.

The orders come

Norio Suzuki had made up his mind to find him. And by camping in the right place and waiting, he did.

The two men talked through the night. Suzuki told him the war had ended almost thirty years earlier. Onoda listened. But he said he would come out only if a superior officer came in person and released him from his orders.

Suzuki went back to Japan with photographs of himself and Onoda together, as proof. The Japanese government found Onoda's old commanding officer, Major Taniguchi, now working as a bookseller.

In March 1974, Taniguchi flew to Lubang. In the jungle, he read out an order to Onoda formally ending his mission. Only then did Onoda accept that the war was over.

He handed over his sword, his rifle and his ammunition. The rifle still worked. He had kept it carefully all those years.

Afterwards

The President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, pardoned him for the killings, because he had believed he was still at war. But many families on Lubang had lost people they loved, and the pardon did not end their grief.

Onoda returned to a Japan he hardly recognised, full of cars, skyscrapers and television. He found it hard to fit in. He moved to Brazil and ran a cattle ranch. Later he went back to Japan and opened a nature school, teaching young people to camp and to survive in the wild.

He died in Tokyo in January 2014, aged ninety-one.

His story is often told as one of loyalty. It is also a story about how much a single, mistaken belief can cost, both to the person who holds it and to everyone around them.

Want to read more?

Onoda told his own story in No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, translated into English by Charles S. Terry. Newspapers around the world reported his surrender in March 1974, and wrote long obituaries when he died in 2014.