No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  I asked why he had not run away with the rest, and he replied, “I need the money. Actually, the way prices are climbing, I can’t even get by on the money I receive from the army. That’s why I make trips to Lubang. The islanders raise a lot of cows, and every time I go I bring back some to sell in Manila. Division headquarters gave me permission.”

  He said he had contracted to make five trips to Lubang and this was the third. I recalled a conversation I had had with Lieutenant Yamaguchi.

  “The other day,” he had said, “when I went to Manila to pick up gasoline, I saw a boat coming from Lubang. There were lots of cows lying on the deck with their legs tied up. You shouldn’t have any food problem on Lubang.”

  That night at nine the Seifuku Maru left the harbor at Manila. At first we sailed due west. Although the sea was smooth, it was still raining, and the harbor was pitch-dark.

  At one in the morning, we passed the island of Corregidor, in the mouth of the bay. Instead of following the shoreline, we continued to sail west, because enemy torpedo boats were always popping in and out of the offshore waters. It was completely dark; the only sound was the engine. We were moving at a speed of about nine knots. I stood by the captain in the tiny steering compartment and peered out into the darkness. At any moment, an enemy boat might loom up by our side. Indeed, there might at that very instant be a boat out there aiming its guns at us. With all those explosives on board, one hit would have sent us sky high in small bits. I cannot say, however, that I was particularly disturbed. If it was going to happen, it would happen. There was nothing I could do about it.

  “If I get killed,” I thought, “I’ll be enshrined as a god at Yasukuni Shrine, and people will worship me. That isn’t so bad.”

  How many more Japanese soldiers must have been telling themselves the same thing!

  The captain shifted the rudder sharply, and the boat tilted slightly as we turned due south. “If we go directly south from here,” he said, “we’ll land at a harbor called Tilik.”

  I nodded without saying anything, but my body tensed. Tilik was the name of the port where I had been ordered to blow up the pier.

  The rain stopped around dawn. I had not slept all night. The island of Lubang began to appear over the distant horizon. Gradually it grew larger, and before long I could make out the individual palm leaves through my binoculars. There were mountains, but it looked as though the highest could not be more than fifteen to eighteen hundred feet high. My first impression of Lubang was that it was going to be difficult terrain for guerrilla warfare.

  The Seifuku Maru picked up speed and approached the island.

  NO WILL TO FIGHT

  Lubang is a long narrow island, about six miles from north to south and eighteen miles from east to west. When I arrived there, the military force included the Lubang Garrison (a platoon detached from the Three Hundred Fifty-seventh Independent Regiment) under the command of Second Lieutenant Shigenori Hayakawa; the Airfield Garrison under Second Lieutenant Suehiro; a radar squad under Second Lieutenant Tategami (who like me was born in Wakayama); an air intelligence squad under Second Lieutenant Tanaka; and a navy group but no navy officers. The Lubang Garrison had about fifty men, the Airfield Garrison twenty-four, the radar and air intelligence outfits a total of about seventy, and the navy group seven. In addition, there was an air maintenance crew of about fifty-five under Second Lieutenant Ōsaki, who had already received their orders to withdraw but were still there.

  It was still not completely light when the Seifuku Maru arrived at the pier in Tilik, but the captain ordered the crew to camouflage the ship with palm leaves. The truck that had brought the aviation fuel to the harbor was standing on the pier. I boarded it, along with the captain of the ship and the sergeant responsible for taking the gasoline back to Luzon, and we set off for the town of Lubang, where Lieutenant Suehiro’s garrison was stationed.

  The town was toward the west end of the island, and the airfield was west of the town. As we drove up a road along the shore, dawn turned into daylight.

  We found Lieutenant Suehiro, and I asked where Lieutenant Hayakawa and his men were. The lieutenant informed me that after the enemy landing at San Jose, they had moved to Mount Ambulong. I found them at the foot of this mountain, a little more than a mile inland, where they had dug some shallow trenches and built a barracks among the trees. I met Lieutenant Hayakawa in front of the barracks and handed him my orders. When he had read them, he looked at me quizzically and asked, “Didn’t they mean ‘boats’?”

  “Boats?” I asked back. The lieutenant, who seemed to be a little more than forty, looked puzzled and embarrassed. When I found out why, it was my turn to be flabbergasted.

  The code they were using with division headquarters was a very simple one, and there was no word in it for “guerrilla warfare.” In the message telling the garrison that I was coming to direct “guerrilla warfare,” division headquarters had simply used the standard word, yūgeki-sen. As it happens, the syllable sen means not only “warfare” but in other instances “boats,” and the garrison commander had interpreted the message to mean that I was going to lead them away from the island on something called “guerrilla boats.” They had already prepared ten small native boats in a nearby inlet, with the intention of setting forth five men to a boat.

  I do not exaggerate when I say that after getting to the bottom of this, I was completely unable to speak.

  It is a fact that yūgeki-sen for “guerrilla warfare” was not a very common word at the time, but then there was no such thing as a “guerrilla boat.” To put this interpretation on the word was nothing more nor less than wishful thinking. These men did not want to wage guerrilla warfare. They wanted to get off Lubang. And the unfamiliar term yūgeki-sen offered them a straw to grab at.

  Ruefully I remembered what Major Takahashi had said in the staff room: “The best outfit in the whole Japanese army.”

  That evening I went back to the harbor with some troops to get my explosives. I left some dynamite near the pier, took some to the airfield, and brought the rest back to Mount Ambulong. While we were on the way, a formation of four Lockheed Lightnings flew over but left without doing anything.

  The next evening the Seifuku Maru, now loaded with gasoline in place of the explosives, left for Manila. If Suehiro’s Airfield Garrison and the maintenance crews who were already under orders to withdraw had left on that ship, the Japanese war casualties on Lubang would have been less numerous.

  But the commanders and their men stayed put, on the theory that the Seifuku Maru would be back two more times. Kōichi Tachibana, a warrant officer who had fought at Truk and Guam, urged those who were authorized to leave to do so rapidly. “If my experience means anything,” he said, “the enemy attack will come sooner than you think. That ship may never come back again. Many of us aren’t armed, and we had better beat it to Manila as fast as we can.”

  But the officers would not listen to him. They kept saying that our side had only lost control of the air temporarily, and that as soon as that situation was remedied, the Japanese forces would counterattack. More wishful thinking! Lieutenant Suehiro held me up on the destruction of the pier until he could ship out all the gasoline, and the air maintenance crew argued against blowing up the airfield.

  “If you blow it up now,” they said, “we won’t be able to use it when we recover control of the air.”

  My difficulty was that I did not have the authority to order them to go ahead. All I could do was direct them in carrying out the operation when their superiors agreed to it. When I tried to make preparations for later guerrilla warfare, the commanders all snapped at me that their troops were much too busy to help.

  At four o’clock in the morning, I finished transporting my explosives to the foot of the mountain. The sun had not yet risen on January 1, 1945. I had not slept since leaving Manila and had been running around the island ever since the boat landed; I was dead tired, so I lay down on the grass. Through the palm leaves I saw the sky g
rowing lighter on this first day of the new year. A new year and a new job, I mused. And as I considered the stubbornness I was encountering, I heaved a deep sigh. I went to sleep there on the grass, my arms crossed on my chest.

  I slept only about two hours, but when I awoke it was fully light. I jumped up and, facing east, bowed to the rising sun.

  At about eight thirty in the morning on January 3, a lookout I had stationed at the top of the mountain came running toward me.

  “Enemy fleet sighted!” he cried.

  Clutching my binoculars, I hurried up the mountain. What the lookout had seen was an enemy fleet, all right. And what a fleet!

  As carefully as I could, I counted the vessels. There were two battleships, four aircraft carriers, four cruisers and enough light cruisers and destroyers to make up a total of thirty-seven or thirty-eight warships. What astonished me most, however, was not this awesome armada, but the host of troop transports that followed it. There must have been nearly 150 of them. As if that were not enough, the sea was literally peppered with landing craft—more than I could possibly count.

  The invasion of Luzon was about to begin.

  I composed a cable giving the number of vessels of various types that I had counted. Toward the end, I wrote, “Besides large vessels, there were innumerable landing craft and subchasers. They were bobbing so in the waves that I could not even make an estimate.” I concluded, “Fleet headed north.”

  For some reason Lieutenant Hayakawa made a mistake and cabled “Fleet headed east,” but I saw the message and quickly sent off a correction. If the fleet had actually been on an eastward course, it would have been heading straight toward Manila, but in fact the northern course was without doubt taking it to Lingayen Gulf.

  I was not sure that this cable had been received until thirty years later, when I saw Major Taniguchi at Wakayama Point. The Lubang Garrison had only a small short-range radio transmitter of the kind used between battalions. For my message to reach army headquarters, it would have to go through a communications squad to regimental headquarters and then division headquarters, and be decoded and reworded at each step.

  Thirty minutes after the message was dispatched, the Airfield Garrison caught a signal from naval headquarters ordering all units in western Luzon to take up battle stations, but we did not know whether this order was based on our warning or not.

  I felt a certain amount of satisfaction at having carried out my first official duty, but I was far from happy, because I feared that a section might break off from the enemy’s Luzon landing force and attack Lubang. If this happened, the attack would begin with a thorough drubbing by enemy artillery, and the explosives that I had brought to the mountain on the last day of the year would go up in smoke.

  At my urging, Lieutenant Hayakawa put his troops on the alert and had them move my explosives farther inland. Fortunately, the entire enemy fleet continued on toward Lingayen Gulf; not a single ship came toward Lubang. At the same time, thanks to the arrival of this fleet, the Seifuku Maru never came back to our island.

  If no boats were coming, there was no further need for the pier. Once again I asked to be allowed to demolish it, but Lieutenant Suehiro was still hesitant.

  “Wait a little longer,” he said. “When the time comes, I’ll take steps to blow it up.”

  The man was trying to put the operation off just as long as he possibly could. The best I could get out of him was permission to let me use his troops to prepare for eventual demolition. I had them distribute the explosives still left on the pier in various strategic points and wired all the charges so that they could be detonated with a switch. In case the switch did not work, I strung out fuses.

  A few days later two coded messages were received from division headquarters. The first said: “The Lubang Garrison is hereby placed directly under division command and will henceforth receive its orders directly from the division commander. Reports from the Lubang Garrison have an important bearing on the division’s battle strategy. Henceforth you are to report directly and in detail to division communications headquarters.”

  Upon receipt of this message, the garrison requested additional code tables and a supply of batteries, but the only answer received was, “Two diesel boats commanded by two transport officers are missing. The garrison is to search the island and report whether they have landed there.”

  I had been told at division headquarters that unless I received word to the contrary before January 10, on that day I would become a full-fledged second lieutenant. No word came, and I assumed that my commission had become official, but during the next thirty years I never once wore a full officer’s uniform.

  On February 1, the enemy began landing operations at Nasugbu in west central Luzon. Nasugbu was on the shore opposite Lubang, and I reacted to this development by urging the garrison troops to move their food and ammunition farther up into the mountains.

  I calculated that this operation would take about a week. As it turned out this was unrealistic, because only about half of the fifty men were available for work. Some were suffering from fatigue, some had fever; even the healthier ones could carry no more than about thirty-five pounds at a time.

  To make matters worse, Lieutenant Hayakawa had had an attack of kidney trouble and needed to stop frequently to rest and take a drink of coconut milk. With their commander in this shape, the men were all the more truculent. It did not seem to me that they had any will to go on fighting.

  The other outfits were no help. They began grumbling that if the enemy attacked, the garrison troops were supposed to stand in the front line and protect them as best they could. If the garrison was going to hide in the mountains, they said, they might as well commit suicide on the spot.

  No matter how I tried, I could convince no one of the necessity for guerrilla warfare. They all talked big about committing suicide and giving up their lives for the emperor. Deep down they were hoping and praying that Lubang would not be attacked. I was sure of this, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had so little real authority that they did not even take me seriously.

  My nickname among them was “Noda Shōyu,” the name of a famous brand of soy sauce. The Noda came from my name and Shōyu was suggested by shōi, the word for second lieutenant. The meaning was that I was not the main course—only a bit of seasoning. Needless to say, this was because I could not actually issue orders to them in the same way as the commanders of their outfits.

  How many times I wished that I were even a first lieutenant! Then maybe some of the work would get done. As it was, I had to listen to these men babbling at the mouth about dying for the cause, and listen silently with the knowledge that I was not permitted that out. I could not even hint to anyone that I had orders not to die. It was frustrating in the extreme.

  I myself put off blowing up the airfield, because the project had ceased to have much meaning. I could crisscross the runway with ditches and potholes, but I had learned that the enemy now had steel plates with which they could make a new runway in no time. They used heavy beams under the plates, and as long as the terrain was roughly flat, holes in the ground were no hindrance. The most I could hope to gain from tearing up the field was a delay of a day or so, and it seemed to me that the explosives could be put to more effective use elsewhere.

  As I was wondering what to do about the airfield, I remembered the famous fourteenth-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige, who during a difficult battle had a lot of straw men made and fitted out with helmets so as to waste precious enemy arrows. I decided to take a leaf out of Masashige’s book. With Lieutenant Suehiro’s assistance, I gathered up pieces of airplanes that had been destroyed and laid them out to look like new airplanes, taking care to camouflage them with grass.

  As I think back on it, the scheme sounds rather childishly simple, but it worked. After that, when enemy planes came, they invariably strafed my decoys on the airfield. At that time, they were coming over every other day, and we utilized the other days to put together fake airpl
anes. I considered it good guerrilla tactics to make attacking planes waste as much ammunition as possible.

  Around this time the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Coastal Advance Squads arrived at the harbor in Tilik. These were army suicide squads that had small wooden boats, powered by automobile engines and loaded with explosives. The idea was that when an enemy ship appeared offshore, the squads would blow it up by ramming their boats into it. The two squads that came to Lubang were sent on the theory that the enemy would soon send a landing fleet to Manila, which they would be able to attack from the flank.

  The Japanese forces had already abandoned Manila, and Fourteenth Area Army headquarters had moved to Baguio. The coastal advance squads, which consisted of forty men under the command of Captain Sadakichi Tsukii, arrived with no food, and the garrison had to divide its rice with them.

  Before I arrived, the garrison had been sent a five-month supply of rice, and I urged the troops to stretch this out as far as possible. With the arrival of the extra men, I began to feel that we would not be able to hold out for very long, unless unusual measures were taken.

  Acting on my own, I ordered the mayor of the town of Lubang to supply us with fifty sacks of polished rice. When the Suehiro and Ōsaki outfits found out about this, without saying anything to me they ordered the mayor to supply them with rice too. The mayor came weeping and said that if the islanders supplied all our demands, they would starve.

  A check revealed that the other outfits had demanded two sacks per man; I talked them into reducing this to one sack, but after this incident the islanders would not listen to anything we said. They started complaining that they could not transport the rice in the daytime, because they might be killed by American planes. When we told them to do the work at night, they replied that they could only work when there was a moon, because otherwise they could not see what they were doing. This was nonsense. The truth of the matter was simply that they did not want to help the Japanese troops. With Manila surrounded by the enemy and American airborne troops landing on Corregidor, things were obviously going badly for Japan. The islanders were taking advantage of our helplessness.