No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  After seeing him off, Shimada and I moved on, but we found no sign of the enemy. After a time, we decided to stop and wait for the young scout. If we went any farther, it would be impossible to return to the others before dark.

  We waited one hour, two hours, but the boy did not show up. The sun began to set, and I was worried. In the dark we had nothing to fear from the enemy, but it would be next to impossible to establish contact with our own men.

  Shimada looked closely at my face and asked, “What shall we do, Lieutenant?”

  I did not know the answer. If we started back now, it would be dark before we arrived. On the other hand, we had brought nothing at all to eat, and we were out of water.

  Finally I said, “Before it gets too dark, let’s go down into the valley and find some water.” We clambered down about 150 yards into a ravine and found a brook, but as we were making our way back up, the sun set, and we found ourselves in total darkness.

  “Where are you, Lieutenant?” asked Shimada.

  “I’m still here,” I replied.

  It was so dark that we had to keep reassuring each other that we were still together, but we pressed on in an effort to find the ridge again.

  That was a mistake. After a while, we realized that we were going in circles. We decided to sit down and wait until morning.

  At dawn we started out again, and before long we spotted the place where we had been the evening before. From among the trees, I looked out at the road and got the shock of my life. Not one hundred feet away was an American scouting party!

  Shimada had a rifle, but I had only a pistol and my sword. We were hopelessly outmatched. We threw hand grenades simultaneously and the instant they went off scrambled down into the valley. After crawling around down there for about thirty minutes, we cautiously worked our way back up to a point just below the spot where our young scout had been instructed to lead our men. Feeling fairly sure that it would be safe this time, we started up the cliff above us, and almost immediately found ourselves in a shower of mortar shells. They arced up into the sky one after another, landing in the valley below us. We hugged the cliff, not daring to move.

  The young scout had followed my orders and brought the troops to the appointed place, where they had set up their machine guns and spent the night. In the morning, the enemy scouting party we had seen appeared, and our troops opened fire on them with machine guns, killing one American. The other enemy soldiers withdrew, but almost immediately there was a barrage of mortar fire.

  I did not know all this until later, of course. The shells Shimada and I saw falling in the valley were misses from the barrage aimed at the men on the hill. Misses or not, they were falling all over the valley, and there was nothing we could do but stay where we were.

  Finally the firing ceased, and quiet returned, but we were afraid to go up the hill immediately. The silence itself had an eerie quality. The sky above was a transparent blue. There was not a cloud to be seen.

  Something else I did not find out until later was that while we were on the cliff, Captain Tsukii had ordered the men to disperse. He sent some toward Vigo and some in the direction of Tilik. When we reached the top of the crest, there was nobody there. I decided to go back to our former barracks, where supplies had been cached. It seemed likely to me that any Japanese troops would eventually go there for food.

  On the way I saw American chewing gum wrappers by the side of the road. In one place a wad of chewing gum was sticking to the leaf of a weed. Here we were holding on for dear life, and these characters were chewing gum while they fought! I was more sad than angry. The chewing gum tinfoil told me just how miserably we had been beaten.

  Any semblance of organized warfare on Lubang ended that day. Afterward there were only occasional mopping-up operations by the enemy.

  Lieutenant Hayakawa was attacked in the upper reaches of the Vigo River while he was taking a break after eating. He and ten of his men were killed.

  Captain Tsukii and the Fifteenth Coastal Attack Squad attempted to storm the enemy barracks at Tilik, but failed. They were later attacked on the Vigo River and again on the south coast. In the meantime, Captain Tsukii fell ill and died.

  I heard that Lieutenant Ueno and the Sixteenth Coastal Attack Squad also launched an unsuccessful raid in the Tilik area and later hid in the hills south of the port, but I had no further word from them. So far as I could tell I was the only Japanese officer left on the island.

  The only men I was able to communicate with were ten members of the garrison unit, four members of the air intelligence squad, four members of the air maintenance crew and two members of the navy squad—twenty in all. The only army noncoms left were Corporal Shimada and Corporal Yoshio Fujita.

  One day Corporal Fujita picked up a model 99 infantry rifle in the woods. I had earlier found a model 38, and I traded it to Fujita for the model 99, because I had about three hundred cartridges for a 99. I carried this model 99 for the remainder of my thirty years on Lubang.

  I hoped eventually to lead the troops in an attack on the airfield, and I ordered them to stretch out the rice supply as long as possible. It was March, and I calculated that if each man ate four bowls a day, we could hold out until August. But the soldiers were more worried about their own bellies than about anything else, and some of them took to filching rice from the storage bins. At mealtimes they griped over the tiniest difference between their helping and the next person’s; sometimes they would have come to blows if I had not stopped them. If the enemy had ever attacked us at mealtime, we would have been wiped out on the spot.

  Just as I was wondering what to do to maintain order, Corporal Fujita said to me, “I don’t think it is safe for us all to be in one place. We might be surrounded at any time. Would you permit some of us to split off and go somewhere else?”

  I immediately consented. I knew that I could not rely on this motley crew of soldiers who had given themselves over to being pigs. I also knew, however, the real reason why some of them wanted to leave. It was not that they feared encirclement. That was only an excuse. What they really wanted was their share of the remaining rice.

  As if this were not apparent, Fujita said, “If we split off from the group, each of us will have to have a supply of food.”

  “That’s right,” I replied, “but I can’t allot it all to the men who are here right now. There may still be others on the island who will come here to get food. Everyone knew this was the place where the provisions were hidden.”

  I decided upon their allotment and ordered them absolutely not to take more, though I knew then that they would probably find a way to do so. I also told them always to stay in groups of three or more. If there are three, two can stand guard front and rear while the other prepares the rice for meals.

  And so we broke up into cells. I joined up with Corporal Shimada and one private. The others split into four small groups, each man deciding for himself which of his friends he wanted to stick with.

  After a time I decided that my group should move to a new location, and on April 18 we started transferring supplies. We were in the midst of this when an enemy clean-up squad stormed into the woods firing like crazy. The private, apparently paralyzed by the guns, stood rooted to the spot and was killed. Of the men in the other groups, only Kozuka ever showed up at the place where Shimada and I were camped, and that was sometime later. Shimada and I were therefore alone for a while.

  After the attack, Kozuka went to join some of the air intelligence squad. He soon came down with acute nephritis, however, and the others left him. After wandering around in the foothills for about a week, living on potato vines and coconut milk, he recovered enough to make his way to where Shimada and I were. After that the three of us were together.

  Around the middle of May, for the first time in some weeks, we heard the sound of mortars and machine guns. It was coming from the vicinity of Binacas, on the south shore. We just looked at each other—there was no need to speak. One of the other groups had been d
iscovered and surrounded.

  I found out later that a group of survivors from Captain Tsukii’s squad had made their way to Binacas and were resting there when they were attacked by the enemy. All were killed but two, who by some miracle managed to flee. One of them told me that during the attack two of Captain Tsukii’s subordinates stood up waving their pistols and shouted “Banzai to the Emperor!” before being gunned down.

  We referred to this incident as the “May Suppression Campaign.” It was the last organized enemy attack on Japanese survivors, but afterward an enemy squad patrolled the ridge every morning, occasionally firing a few menacing shots.

  It was around the middle of October that I first saw one of the leaflets urging us to surrender. A group of Japanese had killed a cow in the mountains and were taking it back to their camp when they met five or six islanders. One of them started to pull a bolo knife but gave up when he saw that the Japanese had guns. The islanders fled, leaving behind them a piece of paper. Printed on it in Japanese was a statement saying “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”

  Neither I nor the others believed this, because just a few days before a group of Japanese who had gone to kill a cow had bumped into an enemy patrol and had immediately been fired on. How could that happen if the war was over?

  After we split into cells, we lived in the woods on the slopes of the mountains. We set up little tents and spread boards on the ground to sleep on. My group at least was trying to stretch out its rice supply, and sometimes we were able to supplement the rice with bananas or meat from a cow we had killed.

  The groups stayed in touch with each other and occasionally exchanged reports, but I refused to tell the other groups where our tent was. My orders to carry out a guerrilla campaign came directly from the division commander, and I could not be bothered with the groups who were thinking of nothing but food. To the best of my ability I was trying to study the terrain so that I could be useful when the Japanese army launched its counterattack. It was necessary for me to remain alive, and to live with a group of disorderly, irresponsible soldiers was simply to invite danger.

  I told neither Corporal Shimada nor Private First Class Kozuka of my special mission. I did not know whether they were reliable, nor could I tell yet how capable they were.

  From May until August, enemy patrols came into the mountains daily, and we could hear shots from their guns. After the middle of August they stopped coming. Still, we frequently heard shots from the lower reaches of the mountains, and it appeared that the enemy had control of the accesses. I thought this meant that they were trying to starve us out.

  We saw our second surrender leaflet around the end of the year. A Boeing B-17 flew over our hideout and dropped a lot of big, thick pieces of paper. On the front were printed the surrender order from General Yamashita of the Fourteenth Area Army and a directive from the chief of staff. On the back was a map of Lubang on which the place where the leaflets were dropped was marked with a circle.

  We gathered together and considered whether the orders printed on the leaflet were genuine. I had my doubts about a sentence saying that those who surrendered would be given “hygienic succor” and “hauled” to Japan.

  Somebody said, “What’s ‘hygienic succor’? I never heard of it.”

  Somebody else mused, “They’re going to ‘haul’ us to Japan? We aren’t cargo, are we?”

  What bothered me from the very first was that General Yamashita’s command purported to have been issued in accordance with a “Direct Imperial Order.” I had never heard of a “Direct Imperial Order.” An intelligence squad man, who had been through law school, said he had never heard of one either.

  There were other suspicious features. For example, a close reading of the text suggested that General Yamashita was issuing the order to himself, among other officers. I later found out that this was simply a printer’s error, but at the time I could only conclude that the leaflet was phony. The others all agreed with me. There was no doubt in our minds that this was an enemy trick.

  THE VOW TO FIGHT ON

  We began a new year, 1946. This meant that I had been on Lubang for a full twelve months. On New Year’s morning we bowed to the rising sun and swore to do our best in the coming year.

  We rarely heard guns anymore, but every once in a while we were frightened by machine gun fire, apparently directed at the mountains where we were hiding. I saw an aircraft carrier off the coast, and Grummon fighters passed over from time to time. Obviously the war was still going on.

  At the beginning of February, Corporal Shimada went hunting with Eishichi Irizawa and Shōji Kobayashi of the garrison squad and a soldier named Watanabe from the air intelligence squad. They found no game, and after parting from Watanabe, who was returning by a different route, they started back empty-handed toward our base.

  During the daytime they had seen some Philippine soldiers in a truck at the bottom of the mountains, but it did not occur to them that the soldiers were coming into the woods on the mountainside. Chatting and laughing as they made their way back, they suddenly discovered that they had entered the Philippine soldiers’ bivouac. The Filipinos, startled to see Japanese troops, thought they were being attacked and immediately opened fire. Corporal Shimada dived into the nearby bushes and escaped down a hill, but both Irizawa and Kobayashi were killed.

  Very shortly after that, Private First Class Yūichi Akatsu joined the three of us. He had been camping with Irizawa and Kobayashi, but their death left him all alone. You could tell from looking at him that he was a weakling, and Kozaka tried to send him away.

  “Go somewhere else,” he urged. “You can’t keep up with us. Your body is weak, and you don’t know much about soldiering. We can’t use you. Go over to Corporal Fujita’s group.”

  Akatsu said he would, but he kept hanging on to us, because we had more food than any of the others. The other groups were almost out of rice; they kept coming to ask us to give them some. I gave them all the same answer: “You men made pigs of yourselves when you had rice, so now you don’t have any. Don’t come asking me to give you any of ours. I was sent here to destroy the airfield, and I still plan to do it. We’re eating as little rice as possible. We fill out our diet with bananas and meat, and that’s what you should have been doing. If we give you rice, we’ll all be in trouble. You don’t know how to conserve.”

  Afterward it occurred to me that my refusal to supply the others with rice might have been what caused them to surrender, as forty-one of them, including Corporal Fujita, did in April.

  After March there were more and more leaflets urging us to surrender, and from time to time we heard people calling to us in Japanese. Later on, the Japanese who had surrendered began leaving notes for us saying, “Nobody is searching for you now but Japanese. Come on out!”

  But we could not believe that the war had really ended. We thought the enemy was simply forcing prisoners to go along with their trickery. Every time the searchers called out to us, we moved to a different location.

  I grew accustomed to their pleas. “Lieutenant Onoda,” they would say, “we have established contact with the search party. Please come out. We’re now at Point X, combing this whole area. Please come to this point.”

  They dropped leaflets written in pencil in good Japanese, which made a deep impression on Private First Class Akatsu. One evening after we had eaten, he said, “Lieutenant, don’t you suppose the war really has ended?”

  When I replied that I did not, Shimada said, “I sort of have a feeling that it has, too.”

  Kozuka remained silent. After studying their faces for a moment, I said, “All right, if that’s what the three of you think, I’ll go and make sure. All three of you have 38s. Even if you lose two of them, you’ll still be able to use the ammunition. If I lose my 99, however, the ammunition will go to waste. I’ll leave it here and take only hand grenades with me. I should be back soon. If things are the way Akatsu says, I’ll go out into the open with you. But if I don�
��t come back, you’ll know that the war is still going on. You can decide for yourselves then whether you want to fight to the end or not.”

  My real intention was to try to rescue the Japanese who had been taken prisoner. A lot of them must have been tricked into surrendering by other Japanese whom the enemy was using as pawns. I thought that if I could get into the prison where they were, I could foment some kind of disturbance, and we could all escape together.

  The enemy must have heard from their prisoners that I had come to Lubang to engage in guerrilla warfare. They would see through my sham surrender and no doubt clamp handcuffs on me immediately. That meant I would have to act fast. If I failed, I would be killed, but if I succeeded, we would get back quite a few men. Once again I was preparing to ignore the division commander’s orders and risk death, just as I had when I threw away my scabbard and launched a suicide attack.

  At this point Kozuka spoke up.

  “Wait a minute, Lieutenant! Why do you have to take the responsibility? Didn’t everybody agree with you about that ‘Direct Imperial Order’? You probably think it reflects on your honor that the others got taken prisoner because of a phony leaflet. I don’t think it’s your fault.

  “I’ll stay on with you. I’ll fight to the end. If these two cowards want to surrender, let’s let them do it!”

  I nodded to Kozuka and said, “Do you mean it? Will you stay? If you will, I have nothing more to say. I don’t really want to take responsibility for that bunch of nimcompoops that let themselves get captured. You yourself haven’t said anything up till now, so I was wondering whether you wanted to surrender too. If you’re willing to go on, I’ll go on too.”

  In the back of my mind I thought of General Yokoyama telling me that as long as I had one soldier, I was to lead him even if we had to live on coconuts.

  “Lieutenant,” said Shimada quietly, “I’ll go on with you too.”