No Surrender

by Hiroo Onoda

  After that, I boiled water and bathed the wound every day. I sucked on and around the opening to bring the blood, and then I applied fresh cow fat. We had no medicine of any kind. An extra loincloth and the cow fat were the only medicaments available.

  While I was trying to be doctor to Shimada, Kozuka took charge of standing guard and procuring food. Shimada could not move, and I had to nurse him, even carrying away his waste. I was grateful that the rainy season had set in. Otherwise, it would have been perilous to remain in the same place long enough for Shimada’s wound to heal.

  After about forty days, there was a thin layer of skin over the wound. Although there was no more danger of festering, it was a serious wound, and there was a distinct possibility that Shimada would be crippled. I told him to try moving his leg at the knee. Slowly he did so, bending his ankle at the same time. Kozuka and I were immensely relieved.

  But Shimada’s big toe was rigid, making it impossible for him to get around very fast. He looked depressed.

  One day when Kozuka and I returned from hunting, we found Shimada lying on his stomach, preparing to shoot at something we could not see. We quickly dropped to the ground, and I asked in a low voice what was up. He glanced back and then, holding his gun, turned over on his back. His face was flushed.

  “After you left,” he said, “I heard voices from the direction of the shore. I think about seven or eight of the islanders must have come pretty close to here. I was going to kill them if I could, but frankly I thought I’d had it.”

  I was afraid that Shimada might develop some side ailment, but he grew stronger by the day. His smile came back, and by the end of October he was able to walk about with his gun on his shoulder, although he still limped. He apologized any number of times for the trouble he had caused.

  I was feeling very happy about his recovery, but around the end of the year, he seemed to lose spirit. He looked gloomy a good deal of the time and began to reminisce about his father and his grandfather. His tone was quiet and somehow sad.

  Shimada lacked the vitality he had had before. I remembered what I had heard from an old soldier a long time ago: “A light wound makes you braver, but a serious wound can make you lose your nerve.” Maybe that was what had happened to Shimada. In the evening, when he sat looking at the picture of his wife and children that had been dropped with the leaflets, I sensed that the weight of nearly forty years rested heavily on his shoulders. He had gotten much grayer.

  He talked to himself a good deal now. One day when I asked him what he had said, he just shook his head and replied, “Oh, nothing.”

  Not many days later, I found him staring blankly at the photograph. Thinking I would cheer him up, I walked up behind him, but before I spoke, I heard him say quietly, “Ten years. Ten whole years.”

  I slipped silently back to where I had been, but with an awful premonition. Back when he was his normal self, he had taken difficulties lightly.

  “Don’t worry,” he had always said, “It’ll all be back in our hands tomorrow.”

  That was his way of saying that everything would be all right tomorrow. He had bucked Kozuka and me up any number of times with that phrase. Now it was different, and I was afraid.

  My fears came true several months later.

  The beach at Gontin was unlucky for Shimada. On May 7, 1954, he was killed at a spot only about half a mile from the place where he had been wounded in the leg.

  After he recovered enough from the leg wound to walk, we moved to a place near Wakayama Point, but catching sight of a search party, we started down toward the south shore. Unfortunately, another search party was waiting for us there. There were about thirty-five of them, clustered on the beach like a flock of seagulls, only about eight hundred yards away. I thought the best thing to do was open fire on them. If we fired ten shots, we would get a few of them. Then we should be able to get away before they recovered from their shock.

  But after I thought a moment, I remembered that Shimada’s leg might not be strong enough for this. As in the case of Akatsu, we would have to adapt our movements to the weakest of the three; Shimada at this point was the weakest. I still thought we could probably make it, but there was a tinge of doubt, and besides, I did not want us to use any more ammunition than we absolutely had to.

  Kozuka was preparing to fire, and I took aim too, but then I changed my mind.

  “Don’t shoot,” I said. “We can always kill some of them whenever we want to. Let’s let them live a little longer.”

  Calling off the attack, we went back into the woods. It looked peaceful enough in the ravine, but we had to be careful. The search party might come inland from the shore.

  We were of three different opinions as to what we should do next. Kozuka wanted to cross the mountains and shift toward the opposite shore in one move. Out of consideration for Shimada’s leg, I argued that we should go around the mountains, trying to stay at about the same level all the way. This would take longer but would involve less physical strain.

  Kozuka turned to Shimada and asked, “What do you want to do?”

  Shimada replied sheepishly, “I have so much trouble moving around that I would like to dig in here.”

  Kozuka was furious. “Your leg’s well, isn’t it?” he shouted. “We’d be crazy to stay here. Akatsu knows this place. The search party is bound to come sooner or later. Are you with us or against us, Shimada? If you’re against us, I’ve got another idea about what to do!”

  Kozuka stuck the muzzle of his rifle against Shimada’s chest. Underneath his visor, his eyes were fiery with rage. I pushed the rifle aside and said, “Calm down, Kozuka. It wouldn’t be very smart to drag him off if he isn’t sure of his leg. Let’s do as he says and hide here for a while.”

  We stayed.

  There was a fruit called nanka that grew in abundance in this area, and the next morning Kozuka and I picked a large bunch of them. We decided to slice them and put them out to dry. There was a recess midway up the cliff by the valley; the upper slope was not visible from the bottom of the valley. We found a fallen tree in a sunny place on this slope and lined the sliced nanka up along the trunk. Then Kozuka and I returned across the valley to our camp and lay down to take a nap, leaving Shimada to stand watch. When we awoke, we found that Shimada had moved the nanka down into the valley, because the fallen tree trunk was now in the shade.

  “That’s not good,” mumbled Kozuka.

  If anyone saw the nanka, he would know we were hiding nearby. I was worried about this too, but I was more worried about the seach party on the shore. The day before, they had moved off toward Two House Point. Now I was afraid they might come back. I decided we should eat while it was still light and then, taking our food with us, move back over toward the shore to see what was going on. I left the nanka where they were and started cooking. By doing so I caused Shimada’s death.

  While I was cooking, I glanced down in the valley and caught sight of some slight movement. I grabbed my rifle. A man who looked like an islander was climbing down into the valley, only about twenty-five yards away. He had obviously spotted the nanka. I fired two quick shots.

  Whether the shots found their mark or not, I do not know. The man screamed and threw himself behind a rock. I fell to the ground, Kozuka hid behind a large tree trunk about three yards away, and we prepared to fire another round.

  But Shimada continued to stand by a tree some yards away. His gun was aimed, but he had not fired a shot. This was peculiar, because he was the fastest shot of us all. He could fire five times while I was firing twice. What bothered me more was that he was still standing.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have shouted, “Get down, you fool!” But for some reason, on that one occasion I had no voice. I did not know where the enemy was, but if the man I had seen was their guide, they were somewhere nearby. If they had come up from the shore through the valley, they might be in a place where they could see us clearly.

  A shot rang out in the valley, and Shimada f
ell forward head first. He did not move. He was killed instantly. The enemy was not in the valley, as I had thought, but on the slope across the river. That meant Kozuka and I were exposed, so we scrambled up the bank behind us. We held onto our guns, but left everything else behind—tools, ammunition pack, bolo knives, everything.

  According to a newspaper that a later search party left behind, Shimada was hit between the eyebrows. The newspaper also said that what we had taken for a search party was a Philippine Army mountain unit practicing for attacks on the Huks. This did not alter the hatred Kozuka and I felt for the people who had shot Shimada.

  We always wondered why Shimada had remained standing without firing a shot. I suspected that the enemy troops might have been displaying a Japanese flag, and that the sight of it might have made Shimada hesitate for that one fateful moment. Perhaps he saw the flag and thought that at last troops had arrived to reestablish contact with us. To display the enemy’s flag would have been a standard ploy for a guerrilla unit.

  However that may be, we had made several mistakes. The first was to hide in that valley, the second was to move the nanka down into the valley, and the third was to leave them there. It had been a mistake for Shimada to remain standing and a mistake for me not to call to him to get down.

  Why had my voice deserted me? The only explanation I can think of is that unless we were fighting with each other, the three of us never talked in a loud voice. I never even gave orders in a loud voice. Conceivably habit could have prevented me from crying out immediately. But did that really hold water? Shouldn’t I have been able to raise my voice when I wanted to?

  I cursed myself for not having done so, but Kozuka said, “It was Shimada who wanted to stay there in the first place. It may sound callous, but we have to get used to the fact that he’s dead. It worries me to see you go on blaming yourself for what happened.”

  About ten days after Shimada died, a Philippine Air Force plane trailing a streamer behind it passed over several times. It dropped leaflets, and a loudspeaker kept saying, “Onoda, Kozuka, the war has ended.”

  This infuriated us. We wanted to scream out to the obnoxious Americans to stop threatening and cajoling us. We wanted to tell them that if they did not stop treating us like scared rabbits, we would get back at them someday, one way or another.

  A few days after that there was a noise in the forest. I listened closely and decided it was only islanders cutting trees, but we quickly moved on to a different campsite. Afterward, I found out from a pamphlet left by a search party in 1959 that around the time in question my brother Toshio and Kozuka’s younger brother Fukuji had been in Lubang looking for us.

  After about two months, we went again to the valley where Shimada had been killed. I had had my fights and quarrels with Shimada, but he was a faithful friend who fought side by side with me for ten whole years. I stood there for quite a while, my hands together in prayer. Together, Kozuka and I vowed that somehow we would avenge Shimada’s death.

  It started to get dark, and Kozuka said, “Come on, Lieutenant, let’s go.”

  I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand. For the first time since I came to Lubang, I was crying.

  FAKED MESSAGES

  One day, in a dense forest not far from the place where Shimada was killed, I found a Japanese flag on which the names of my family and some of my relatives had been written. Among the names were “Yasu” and “Noriko,” which presumably stood for my oldest brother’s wife Yasue and a cousin called “Nori.” But if the signatures were genuine, why was the the final e omitted from Yasue and ko added to Nori? I came to the conclusion that the flag must be a fake message of some sort.

  We did not believe for an instant that the war had ended. On the contrary, we expected the Japanese army to send a landing force to Lubang or at least to send secret agents to establish contact with us.

  As I pondered the flag with the names of my cousin and sister-in-law written incorrectly, I had the feeling that it was trying to tell me something. I finally came to the conclusion that it was a fake message from Japanese headquarters.

  My reasoning was like this. Suppose first that the Japanese army sent a spy to establish contact with me, and the Americans found out about it. The Americans would certainly reason that Japanese forces were planning to reoccupy the airfield at Lubang, because it was the only airfield in the Philippines west of Manila and would be the obvious base for an attack from the west on that city. In order to block this move, the Americans would transfer sea and air forces to Manila, thus releasing pressure on Japanese troops in New Guinea, Malaya and French Indo-China. From the Japanese viewpoint, then, it made good sense to try to make the Americans think a spy was being dispatched to Lubang. Hence the flag, ostensibly intended for me, was allowed to fall into enemy hands. Now the Americans were trying to use it to entice us out of our base in the middle of Lubang. On the chance that this might happen, Japanese headquarters had taken the precaution of writing the names of my cousin and sister-in-law wrong. Since this was something that I was bound to notice, it would warn me that the whole thing was fake.

  Today all this sounds ridiculous, but I had been taught at Futamata always to be on the lookout for fake messages, and it did not seem to me that my attitude was overly cautious. Indeed, I would have considered it extremely careless at the time not to question each and every character written on the flag.

  I still remembered learning at Futamata about a fake message that had made it easier for Germany to overrun France in 1940. As the Germans prepared to attack France, they allowed a known Allied spy to “steal” a plan for a German aerial assault on London. The English were fooled by the plan to the extent that they hastily withdrew airplanes and antiaircraft artillery from Holland to the London area. With the English forces in Holland thus reduced, the Germans fell on that country and Belgium and then broke through the relatively weak end of the Maginot line. With in about a month they occupied Paris.

  As I recalled this incident, it seemed plain to me that the Japanese flag was part of an attempt to make the enemy divert troops to Manila in the belief that Lubang was about to be reoccupied. I was excited to think that a Japanese counterattack was soon to take place.

  I was not alone in regarding the flag as a fake message. Kozuka agreed with me that it could not be anything else. I had taught Kozuka a good deal about the principles of secret warfare, and he, no less than I, had developed the habit of reading even beyond the lines between the lines. By this time he would have been a match for any graduate from Futamata.

  More and more leaflets that we regarded as fake were dropped on the island, and every time they fell, we thought that the Japanese attack was drawing closer. Evidently the Japanese forces in other places were advancing to the extent that they could start harassing the enemy in the Philippines.

  Whenever we found new leaflets, we were happy. We considered these “fake” messages to be in part an attempt to cheer us up. They contained a lot of information about what was going on in Japan, how our families were getting along, and sometimes there were family photographs. One leaflet that fell in 1957, for example, contained a photo captioned “Onoda-san’s Family.” The picture showed my parents, my older sister Chie and her children, my younger sister Keiko and several other members of my family. Everything looked genuine enough, except that a neighbor not related to me was standing over to one side. It was like the time when a person who was only a relative of Shimada’s had appeared in what was supposed to be a picture of his family.

  Another suspicious feature of this photo was that there was no reason why there should be a san after my name. “Onoda’s Family” would have been proper by Japanese standards of etiquette.

  There was also a photograph of “Kozuka-san’s Family.” Kozuka said, “How do they expect me to believe this? Why would my family be standing in front of a new house that doesn’t belong to us?”

  We did not know that Japanese cities had been extensively bombed, and the city of Tokyo largely re
duced to ashes.

  The leaflets were printed on inferior paper, presumably to save costs. This must mean, we decided, that the leaflets were being produced in some quantity and dropped not only in Lubang but all over the Philippines. This in turn suggested that there must be many other Japanese guerrillas holding out on other islands. These leaflets were, we thought, trying to persuade them that if they made known their names and the addresses of their families, they too would receive news from the homeland, like Onoda and Kozuka on Lubang. No doubt this was the enemy’s real purpose, and no doubt that is why the san was added to our names. In mentioning our families to other Japanese, it would be proper to use san.

  With one set of leaflets there were envelopes with the name of the Japanese embassy in the Philippines printed on them. Once again the paper was cheap, and we concluded that the same envelopes had been dropped on Japanese troops on other islands. Each envelope contained a pencil and instructions: “Write your home address and the name of your army outfit, and we will furnish you information that will convince you. As soon as you receive this, come down from the mountains.”

  As to the question of how the Americans had acquired a photograph of my family, I assumed that the explanation must be something like that of the flag. It had probably been passed by a Japanese agent to the Americans or the Filipinos in the course of an attempt to foist some false information off on them. To inform me that the photograph was not to be taken seriously, the Japanese authorities had deliberately included in it a person who did not belong to my family.

  I said to Kozuka, “With both sides sending all sorts of messages like this, the Japanese counterattack must be coming soon.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, “our side isn’t missing any tricks, is it?”