by Hiroo Onoda
The three of us automatically looked at Akatsu, who said in a low voice, “I’ll go on too, if that’s what you’re going to do.”
And so the four of us vowed to each other to keep on fighting. It was early April, 1946, and by this time we four made up the only Japanese resistance left on Lubang.
At the time, Corporal Shimada, the oldest of us, was thirty-one. Kozuka was twenty-five, and Akatsu twenty-three. On my last birthday, which was March 19, I had turned twenty-four.
We four were always moving from one place to another on the island. The enemy might attack at any time. It was dangerous to stay in one place very long.
During the first year we slept crowded together in our little tent, even in the rainy season.
The rainy season in Lubang lasted from July until mid October. Often when the rain came down in buckets all night long, it did no good to stay huddled up in the tent. We still got soaked to the bone. Our skin would turn white, and we would shiver from the cold, even though it was summer. Often I felt like screaming out in protest.
But how wonderful it was when the rain stopped! We would fall all over each other to get out of the tent, then stand there stretching each numb finger. I remember how I welcomed the sight of the stars through the clouds.
Corporal Shimada, the only one of us who was married, was of a naturally cheerful disposition. He always had something to talk about, and he took the lead when we sat around chatting in the evening. Tall and well filled out, he was the best shot of the four. He said he had won an award at a shooting contest held by his company, and I saw no reason to doubt this. His hometown was Ogawa in Saitama Prefecture, not far northwest of Tokyo. He came from a farming family, and in the off season he had gone to the mountains to burn charcoal. In the area where he lived, young men were often sent up into the mountain for a month or so at a time to tend a charcoal kiln. Living alone in little huts, they learned to fend for themselves. Shimada taught me how to weave the straw sandals known as waraji. These were ideal footgear for the life we led, because we constantly had to make our way across rough or swampy territory.
Kozuka, who was even slighter of build than I, was very reticent. Only rarely did he speak without having been spoken to. On those occasions when he did loosen up, he talked with great feeling about the days before he entered the army, but even then he had trouble expressing himself. He was the son of a farmer in Hachiōji, a distant suburb of Tokyo, and I gathered that his family was fairly well-off. He said he had owned a racehorse.
Kozuka asked me what I had done before I went into the army. “I worked in the Hankow branch of a Japanese trading company,” I replied. “My brother was an army lieutenant stationed in Hankow at the time, and I used to cadge money from him so I could go to a dance hall and dance all night.”
They had trouble believing that I could dance, let alone that I had been something of a playboy in the cosmopolitan city of Hankow. I did not blame them. At this point I had trouble believing it myself.
Akatsu was the weakest of us, both physically and morally. He said he was the son of a shoemaker in the poorer quarters of Tokyo, and I suppose it was unfair to judge him by the side of two healthy farm boys. But without doubt he was a liability for us. When we brushed up against the enemy, he was always the one who fell behind or lost track of the others. I concluded that Kozuka had been right not to want him with us.
Living together the way we were, we had to adjust everything to the capabilities of the weakest. In dividing up the work we tried to take into account each man’s strength, as well as his likes and dislikes. Shimada did most of the hard physical labor, Akatsu took charge of such chores as gathering firewood or bringing water from the nearest brook, and Kozuka and I made tools, stood guard, and planned our overall movements. When someone was in poor physical condition, we tried to lighten his load. We were conscious that we must avoid dissipating our physical strength.
Since I had the highest rank, I was officially the leader, but never once did I try to impose an order arbitrarily. It was all in all a cooperative effort.
I kept a constant eye on the physical condition of the other three. The important point was to maintain balance. It would not do to ask too much of any one man. The other three understood this and helped each other out cheerfully enough when the need arose.
At that time, each man had an infantry rifle, mine a 99 and the other three 38s. We each had two hand grenades and two pistols. There were three hundred cartridges for the 99 and nine hundred for the 38s. In addition, we had six hundred Lewis machine gun cartridges, which we later fixed so that they could be used in the 99.
We started with a three-month supply of rice, which we stretched out as long as possible. For a time we ate so little that it was difficult to force ourselves to move from one spot to another. When our own rice was gone, we went and found the rice that had been hidden for other Japanese troops remaining on the island. Before very long, that too was gone. And the islanders came and stole one of the two drums of rice the other forty-one men had left behind when they surrendered.
As soon as the Americans landed, the islanders went over to their side. They often acted as guides for the enemy, and we took great care to steer clear of them. After our number was reduced to four, they considered it safe enough to come in droves to the mountains to cut timber. They carried bolo knives at their side, and one person in the group always had a gun. We were more leery of them than we were of enemy patrols.
Whenever we caught sight of islanders, we hid. If they spotted us, we fired shots to scare them away, then moved our camp to a different spot as quickly as possible, because we knew they would report us.
When we sensed that any of them might be around, we hid in the bushes to avoid being seen, but no matter how cautious we were, they occasionally caught sight of us. When that happened, there was nothing to do but fire without hesitation and then run. Such encounters occurred three or four times during the first year.
When they came to the mountains to work, they brought uncooked rice and cooked it as they needed it, often leaving some in sacks hanging from trees for use on their next trip. These sacks of rice might have been classed as a gift from heaven but for the trouble involved in stealing them. We could not just walk off with a sack when we found one, because its disappearance was sure to reveal that we were in the vicinity.
Whenever we came across some of this rice, we first tried to ascertain how long it had been there. Since the islanders cooked the rice on the spot, there were always traces of a fire. We could tell from the ashes roughly how long ago the fire had been built. We would also examine the stumps of the trees the islanders had cut. If the woodcutters had been here only a day earlier, the stump was still damp, and there were usually green leaves lying about. If the stump was dry and the leaves had withered, we knew that more time had elapsed.
Footprints were an important aid, because we could often see that a set of footprints had been smeared by last night’s shower or the heavy rain we had had three days ago, and we would know that the woodcutters had been here before that. If they left food, it meant that they were coming back. The question was how soon. Whenever we took the rice, we had to move to a new location. Since that took time, even if we were half-starved, we had to decide whether we would have enough time to make a getaway before they came back.
The northern part of Lubang was a gentle plain, but on the southern side, other than three or four small sandy beaches, there were only rugged, sea-torn cliffs.
The population of the island was about twelve thousand, most of whom were farmers living on the north side. Only a few fishermen lived in the south. Largely because of Akatsu’s physical weakness, we centered our movements on the less populated, and therefore safer, mountains toward the south. We had a number of more or less fixed campsites, to which we gave names like “Twin Mountains” and “Two House Point,” but we were afraid to stay in any of them very long.
Gradually, we developed a circuit of sorts, around which we move
d from point to point, staying nowhere very long. This circuit was a rough ellipse coursing around the mountains in the central sector of the island (see endpaper). Starting at Gontin and moving counterclockwise, the next stop was Two House Point (or Kainan Point), then Wakayama Point, then Twin Mountains (or Kozuka Hill), then Shiokara Valley (or Shingu Point), then Snake Mountain Abutment (Kumano Point), then Five Hundred (later the radar base), then Binacas, then Six Hundred Peak and finally Gontin again. Sometimes when we reached Binacas we turned around and started back the other way.
We usually stayed in one place from three to five days. When we went fast, we covered the whole circuit in as little as a month, but usually it took about two months, so that in the eight-month dry season, we did about four circuits.
The amount of time we spent in one place depended to some extent on the availability of food. When there turned out to be more food somewhere than we had expected and little danger of being discovered by the islanders, naturally we lengthened our stay.
We carried all our belongings with us, dividing up the load equally. When we moved, we tried always to take along enough food for the next day, but sometimes we ran out and had to count on finding food at the next stop. The average load that each man had to carry was about forty-five pounds.
Although I had a pencil that I had found, I kept all the reports I intended to make in my head. I firmly believed that when friendly troops eventually established contact with us, they would need my reports in planning a counterattack. Their first objective would be to recapture the airfield, and I made mental notes about that area, as well as about the central part of the island where we were now living.
Since I returned to Japan, there has been some speculation in the press as to whether I was left by the Japanese army as a spy, but I do not consider that I was a spy. I was sent to conduct guerrilla warfare, which is not the same thing. Cut off from the Japanese forces and reduced to the circumstances our group was in, there was no way for us to engage in guerrilla warfare in the ordinary sense. I could only perform those functions of guerrilla warfare that resemble the work of a spy.
The techniques I had been taught at Futamata were of little use to me. I had learned to tap telephone lines, open letters surreptitiously and undo handcuffs, but these all involved there being a lot of other people around. Here in these mountains, it was far more important to know how to build a fire without making much smoke. My course at Futamata had done nothing to fit me for a primitive life in the mountains, where the greatest enemy was nature. Shimada was better equipped for this because of his experience at burning charcoal. I learned a lot from him about the art of staying alive. He knew, for instance, how to make a net, and Kozuka and I were always searching for bits of string for him.
In Lubang, besides the cows raised by the islanders for meat, there were wild water buffaloes, wild boars, wild chickens and iguana ranging up to three feet in length. In hunting for food, we aimed mainly at the islanders’ cows.
Our supply of ammunition was limited, and we had to use it as effectively as possible. The object was always to kill with a single shot. Two bullets for one cow would mean one less cow in the long run.
When we found food, we brought it all to one place for storage, and I meted out each day’s portion. But as time went on, it seemed as though every time I went to the storage place, there was less there than there ought to have been. I knew why. Shimada and Akatsu were sneaking in and taking the food. Every time it happened, I spoke to them about it, but to little effect.
One day Kozuka complained strongly to me, “If we continue to let this go on, I’m going to die. From now on, I’m going to eat all I want too.”
Bananas were our principal staple. There were banana fields here and there all over the island, but we had to be careful not to harvest too many. With a war of endurance in mind, I had set up a long-range plan in which I had calculated the amount of bananas to be harvested. If I allowed things to go on as they were, there was a very real danger that the plan would break down, and we would be destroyed from within. The fact of the matter was that we were all suffering from malnutrition.
Finally, I had had all I could stand.
“From now on.” I decreed, “we’ll keep our food separately. Do not touch anyone else’s food. That is absolutely forbidden.”
It goes without saying that in those days eating was our only pleasure. What we ate largely determined how well we would feel on the following day. It would have been unfair in these circumstances to blame anyone too severely for giving in to his appetite. We had vowed to fight to the end, but as time went on, it was all we could do to keep out of sight of the islanders. Maybe it was only natural that animal instincts came to the surface.
Still, as the person technically in charge, it was my responsibility to see that some restraints remained in force. I myself would have liked to eat all I wanted. I would have liked to sleep all I wanted to, too. But even aside from the shortage of food, if we ate all we wanted, we would get fat, making it harder than ever to do the work we had to do. And if we did not develop the habit of suppressing our baser instincts, we would gradually become demoralized to the point of admitting to ourselves that we were stragglers from a defeated army. We definitely did not want to be classed as stragglers. There was no possibility at that point of adopting aggressive guerrilla tactics, but when we learned all we needed to about the terrain, we would go on the offensive and take control of the island.
In this connection, Kozuka was very important to me. I had not told him my special mission, but he seemed to sense something and was always cooperative. He never complained, nor did he once look resentful. He was quick to make decisions, and there was a positive air about him. Whenever I watched him in action, I remembered the saying about big things coming in small packages.
Akatsu finally deserted in September, 1949, four years after the four of us had come together.
I had thought this would happen some day. Kozuka, too, just shrugged and said, “This kind of life was too much for him from the beginning.”
Akatsu had disappeared three times previously; each time Shimada had found him and brought him back. The first time he left, we later saw a little fire burning at night a long way off. It was deep in the mountains, and we knew it could be no one but Akatsu, so Shimada went and got him.
The second time was in the middle of the rainy season. Shimada showed me where he had lost sight of the man, and I figured out the direction in which he must have gone. Shimada, taking a pup tent with him, went off to search and six days later came back with Akatsu.
I was able to guess where he had gone because I knew where on the island he might find food in any given season. Shimada found Akatsu almost exactly at the point I had predicted.
There was a reason why it was always Shimada who went to look for Akatsu when he ran away, and this was that Akatsu always got lost when he and Shimada were out somewhere together.
The four of us had paired off, Kozuka with me and Akatsu with Shimada. The twosomes took turns doing various tasks. When something had to be done that could not be done by two men alone, we all joined forces. In hunting, for example, three men would go out, while the fourth stood guard at the encampment. Most of the time, however, we moved in pairs. When the four of us were together, I kept a close enough watch on Akatsu so that he never once fell by the wayside. Shimada, unfortunately, was not that careful.
I felt some responsibility for Akatsu’s desertion. From watching his everyday actions and listening to what he said, I concluded that he would not last very long. When I worked on plans and strategy for our future movements, therefore, I discussed them only with Shimada and Kozuka and kept them secret from Akatsu. I did not even tell him where the ammunition was hidden. I remember once whispering in Kozuka’s ear, “I’m taking Akatsu out an on errand with me. While we’re gone, transfer the ammunition to a different place. I placed a marker on the trunk of a palm tree about thirty yards away, so you can see where to put it.”
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br /> If Akatsu deserted and surrendered, he would certainly be forced or persuaded to give the enemy information about the rest of us. This prospect seriously affected my attitude. We were after all at war with a fearsome enemy, and nothing could have been more infuriating to me than the idea that one of our group might betray the others. Suspecting that Akatsu might defect, I took the precautions that seemed necessary, but this may have had the effect of making him feel left out.
When Akatsu disappeared the fourth time, Shimada started to go look for him, but this time Kozuka and I argued that it was a waste of effort. We did this with the knowledge that Akatsu would eventually tell the enemy everything he knew about our group.
We expected that the enemy would launch an attack based on the information Akatsu supplied, but we were confident now that if we made advance preparation, we would not be captured.
Beyond that, there was a possibility that Akatsu on his own might not survive long enough to be taken by the enemy. While he was with us, he was never sick once, largely because we were always thinking of his health and always protecting him. On the three previous occasions when he had gone away, he had come back in a depleted physical condition. I thought to myself that if we were in the dry season, he might have a chance, but now, in the rainy season, I doubted whether he would have the stamina to survive. I predicted that he would die somewhere in the mountains, wet, shivering and emaciated.
But then Akatsu must also have been aware of what he was up against. If that was the case, his departure must mean that he was really fed up. Unlike me, he had no assignment, no objective, and the struggle to keep alive here in the mountains may well have come to seem pointless to him.
Shimada went off in the rain to look for him anyway, but came back a week later alone and completely worn out. My feeling was one of relief. I did not believe in chasing after a defector to begin with, and by this time I had come to regard Akatsu’s departure as good riddance.