The Japanese Holdouts: Hiroo Onoda

Although the Japanese Instrument of Surrender (1945) and Treaty of San Francisco (1952) ended World War II and dismantled Japan as an imperial power (respectively), it was a sad and strange fact that, for decades following the end of the war, dozens (even hundreds) of individual Japanese soldiers and officers scattered across the Pacific refused to surrender (or even refused to believe that the war was over). There were minor cases, soldiers who lost contact with their superiors and surrendered a few months, or a year late… and then there were the holdouts. The last three of the “holdouts” were captured or discovered throughout the early 1970s.

The discovery of Shoichi Yokoi in 1972 led to a renewed search of more stragglers, which leads us to the second-to-last confirmed straggler, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who was discovered in the Philippines in February of 1974. His story is rather different.

Onoda and his three companions, throughout the last year of the war and after, engaged in guerrilla attacks, killing dozens of Filipinos. In 1945, they first began receiving leaflets printed with surrender orders, and in the 1950s, further attempts were made to convince the men to surrender. In 1959, years after one of their group had already died, Onoda was declared to be dead.

In 1974, a college dropout decided to embark on a search for the missing officer and found him after four days. Even then, Onoda refused to surrender without explicit orders from his commanding officer; in fact, he never officially “surrendered”. Onoda’s former commanding officer, long retired, flew to Lubang to meet him, then relieved him from duty, and even Ferdinand Marcos eventually granted him a pardon for his crimes. Onoda, who celebrates his ninetieth birthday this year, is the only one of the last three holdouts still alive.