by Hiroo Onoda
Every morning I brushed my teeth with fiber from the palm trees. After I washed my face, I usually massaged the skin with kelp. When I wiped off my body, I often washed my underwear and my jacket at the same time. Since we had no soap, this amounted to rinsing the clothing in plain water, but sometimes I removed the grime from the neck and back of my jacket with the lye from ashes. I put the ashes in a pot and poured water over them. When the water cleared, I transferred it to a different pot and soaked the clothes in it. We had to be careful to hang our clothing in an inconspicuous place to dry.
There were several clear rivers, but during the whole thirty years I took a real bath only on those occasions when we cut up a cow and got blood and ooze all over ourselves. There is no such thing in the mountains as a valley with just a stream and nothing else. The valleys are also the roads. Except in the narrowest ravines deep in the mountains, we were afraid to undress to the skin, even at night. In the daytime, we bathed the upper parts of our bodies by pouring water over each other. In the evening we each washed off the lower parts of our bodies just before sunset. I would never have done anything so dangerous as to strip completely.
We took as good care of our guns and ammunition as we did of ourselves. We polished the guns with palm oil to keep them from rusting and cleaned them thoroughly everytime we had a chance.
In cool weather, the palm oil congealed. Then we just wiped off the guns and waited until later to oil them. When they got wet, they had to be completely disassembled and cleaned piece by piece. If there was no time for this, we oiled them liberally and waited for fair weather. Since exposure to water tended to make the butts rot, we occasionally had to remove the ammunition and hang the guns where the smoke from our fire would dry them out. The gun butts and slings gradually absorbed so much palm oil that the rats would gnaw at them, particularly the slings, and when we stopped at a place where there were lots of rats, we were forced to hang the guns out of reach on vines.
More troublesome than the rats were the ants. It would be no exaggeration to say that the mountainous section of Lubang was one enormous anthill. There were many varieties of ants. Some of them liked damp places; others thrived only where the ground was virtually parched. Certain types gathered together leaves to make their nests. To us, the biggest nuisance was a type of ant that carried about bits of dirt. These, the most numerous of all, were always crawling into our guns and leaving their dirt. If I just set my gun down for a while on top of my pack, almost immediately a stream of ants would start for the gun butt, and in the process some of them would enter the barrel and deposit dirt in the moving parts. Even a little dirt could cause the guns to jam. When the ants appeared, we would hang the guns from the branch of a tree. There was usually enough wind to keep them from being able to climb very high.
Two kinds of rattraps: the one at left was made of wood; the door would close when the bait was taken. The cloth bag at right was placed near my head when I slept. It would rustle when the bait was taken, then I would close it. The bait was coconut lees.
The snare at left was for jungle fowl, which tasted like pheasant. When the bird put its legs into the circle, the other end of the rope was pulled. Right, a soft copper loop tied to a tree at the height of the animal’s neck was effective for snaring wildcats.
The ants also caused us bodily harm. There are at least five varieties that have stingers like those of bees. These attack the softer parts of the body, and if you are not immune, the sting swells up immediately. Once when I was stung inside the ear, my eardrum became so swollen that I could not hear with that ear for a week. The wound bled a number of times, and I had a fever.
Speaking of stings, there are also lots of bees on the island. Great swarms of them fly around the bushy area near the foot of the mountains like huge sheets. I have seen swarms thirty yards wide and a hundred yards long, flying along with “lookouts” fore, aft and on either side. If we came across one of these swarms, the only thing to do was make for the woods, or if there was not enough time, cover our heads with a tent or clothing and lie flat on the ground. If we made the slightest motion, they would attack. We had to breathe as lightly as possible until the swarm had passed over.
I was also bitten several times by centipedes. If one of these bites a person on the hand, his whole body swells up for a time; even after the swelling is gone, the bite takes a long time to heal. I was bitten on the right wrist in January, 1974, and the bite has not healed as I write these pages months later.
Under fallen leaves there were apt to be scorpions. When we slept outdoors, we always cleared off a place about three yards square, but even so I woke up in the morning several times to find a scorpion hiding under the rock I had used for my pillow.
Other unattractive residents of the jungle include snakes as big around as a man’s thigh.
Every gun has its own quirks. At first the model 99 that I used for thirty years fired about a foot to the right and below the mark at a distance of three hundred yards. After a time I managed to fix the sights so that the aim was more accurate, but I was never able to reduce the error to less than three or four inches.
The stock of this gun was about an inch and a quarter shorter than normal, because at one point I had to remove the butt plate and cut off some wood that had rotted. After replacing the plate and putting in new screws, I was pleased to find that the gun was better suited to my size than before.
In the course of gunfights with enemy troops or islanders, we captured a carbine and a hunting rifle, but without ammunition they were useless to us, so we buried them deep in the jungle.
A slug from an infantry rifle travels about 670 yards in the first second after firing, but a carbine slug goes only about 500 yards in the first second. The islanders usually had carbines, and if we saw them fire on us from a considerable distance, we knew we had about one second in which to dodge. At night, you can even see a bullet approaching, because it shines with a bluish white light. I once dodged a flying bullet by turning my body sideways.
When Shimada was shot, Kozuka and I had to flee so rapidly that we left our bayonets behind. Later we found bayonets for Thompson machine guns in the house of an islander and filed down the bayonet holders on our guns so that these would fit. The file, incidentally, had been requisitioned.
Our ammunition pouches were fashioned from a pair of rubber sneakers. We first put the cartridges in cloth sacks tied at the top with strings. Each of us carried two sacks inside his pouch, one containing twenty cartridges, the other thirty. The top of the pouch came down over the sides and was fastened with a hook, like a camera case, to keep the contents dry. In addition to the ammunition in the pouch, I carried five cartridges with me in my pants pocket, and there were always five in the gun. Altogether, then, I was always armed with sixty cartridges, enough to enable me to make a getaway even if I stumbled across a fairly large search party.
I had six hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition, and in my spare time I fixed all the good ones so that they could be fired from my model 99. A lot of the bullets were faulty and had to be used for other purposes.
Since I could not use the repeater action on my gun with these modified cartridges, I fired them only when I was shooting a cow or firing a single shot to scare off islanders. There were about four hundred good cartridges in all, which I started using around the time Akatsu defected. They were about gone when I came out of the mountains twenty-five years later. I must have fired an average of only sixteen of them a year.
We were very careful about our spare ammunition. We kept it hidden in holes in the sides of cliffs, which we covered with rocks. We inspected the hiding places each year and at the same time put the ammunition in new containers. We marked the ammunition that was definitely good with a circle and that which was probably good with a triangle. We removed the powder from bullets that were too rusty to use and used it in building fires. It could be ignited with a lens we had requisitioned.
The storage of ammunition so that it would be in go
od condition when needed was very important. After the rifle and machine gun cartridges were stacked in bottles, they were covered with coconut oil. The bottles were hidden in caves, which were then covered with stones.
To make a fire at night or when it was dangerous to make smoke, I used split bamboo. One stick was planted firmly in the ground, and the other, holding coconut fiber and gunpowder, was rubbed vigorously up and down against it.
The containers for the ammunition were whiskey bottles and the like left here and there by the islanders. We used rubber from an old gas mask to stop up the bottles. For fear that rats might get in and eat the rubber, we also covered the mouths of the bottles with metal caps that we made from tin cans.
We tried to arrange the rocks covering the mouths of the storage holes to look as natural as possible, sometimes succeeding so well that we had trouble spotting them ourselves. In the course of a year, vines usually grew over them, and sometimes trees fell against them, almost concealing them. If we did not inspect at least once a year, there was a real danger that we might not be able to find them.
As can be seen from what I have said already, the worst years were the early ones, when we were not only afraid to make forays in the open but were at a disadvantage because of Akatsu’s weakness. After Akatsu left, the remaining three of us adopted a more aggressive policy that called, among other things, for requisitioning more supplies from the islanders. They, for their part, were enjoying a rising standard of living, which meant that they not only had more goods worth stealing but also left more things about in the forest or in other reasonably accessible locations. Thus, our standard of living tended to rise in proportion to that of the islanders. Shimada’s death deprived us of a faithful friend and a valuable worker, but it reduced the supply problem to some extent, if only because the meat from one cow will feed two longer than it will three. Life in the jungle was never easy, but so far as food, clothing and utensils were concerned, it was far easier in the later years than in the first five or ten.
DEVILS IN THE MOUNTAINS
In order to clear the way for the Japanese landing party that we continued to expect, we adopted guerrilla tactics aimed at enlarging the territory under our control and keeping out all enemy trespassers.
We conducted what we called “beacon-fire raids.” We would go to various places in the early part of the dry season and burn piles of rice that the islanders had harvested from their fields in the foothills.
The season for harvesting this rice came in early October, around the time when we dismantled our rainy season dwelling and moved farther up into the mountains. From about halfway up we could see them cutting and bundling the rice. To protect it from the moisture, they spread thick straw matting on the ground and piled the unhulled rice on that. We would wait until twilight and then, approaching stealthily to a nearby point, fire a shot or two to scare the islanders away. This nearly always worked, and after they had fled, we set fire to the rice by sticking oil-soaked rags in the piles and lighting them with matches. We thought of the fires as beacons signaling to friendly troops who might be in the vicinity of Lubang that the “Onoda Squadron” was alive and carrying out its duties.
Matches, which were essential to this type of operation, were not always easy to obtain. They had to be requisitioned, of course, and it was important not to waste them. Whenever we acquired some, we first dried them thoroughly, then shut them up tightly in a bottle. In principle, we used them only for our beacon raids, relying at ordinary times on other methods, such as rubbing two sticks of bamboo together or igniting a little gunpowder from unusable ammunition with our lens.
The islanders would of course report our raid to the national police force stationed on the island, and the police would come running. We had only a short time in which to set our fire, seize whatever supplies the islanders had left behind, and beat it back into the jungle.
We thought that the local police would report our raids to the American forces, and that Japanese intelligence units would pick up the messages. The raids would, we reasoned, make it difficult for the Americans to neglect Lubang, while at the same time assuring our own people that we had the situation on the island under control. This would presumably make it possible for them to fight on, wherever they were fighting, without worrying about us. The raids would also help convey to the islanders the idea that it was dangerous for them to leave their villages and go into the foothills to work.
From the mountains, Kozuka sometimes called out toward a village, “Don’t think you’re safe because there are only two of us! One step too far, and you’ll be in trouble!” No one could hear him, I suppose, but this was apparently good for his spirits.
Actually, burning the rice in the same places every year increased the danger that the islanders might anticipate our movements and set a trap for us. We therefore varied our tactics to some extent, putting off the raids for a month in some years or for five months in places where two crops were grown each year. We tried to keep them guessing as to where we might pop up. If we could nurture the fear that we might show up almost anywhere at almost any time, that in itself would accomplish half of our objective.
The eighteen years that Kozuka and I spent together were the ones in which I was most actively engaged in guerrilla tactics. This was due to a large extent to the rapport that existed between us. We nearly always saw things the same way, and frequently we needed only to look at each other to decide what we would do next.
Although I had not known Kozuka before I came to this island, the fortunes of war were such that we became closer than real brothers. I respected his spirit and his daring. He, for his part, deferred to me in matters of judgment. Many times we told each other that when our assignment had been carried out, we would return to Japan together. If by chance we never made contact with friendly forces, we would rot together on Lubang. We laughed as we talked over these two prospects.
Then at times when we had found some particularly fine bananas, or handily eluded a search party, or led the enemy a merry chase, we would suddenly say simultaneously, “If only Shimada were here!”
Besides carrying out our beacon raids, we decided to try to collect information directly from the islanders. To go anywhere where there were lots of people would be dangerous, but there were plenty of lonely spots on the island where we might take one of the farmers prisoner as he went to or from his fields.
We singled out a lonely farm hut near the salt flat in Looc. This was near the edge of the jungle, and it would be easy to escape if we ran into unforeseen trouble.
Coming out of the woods at the salt flat, we approached the hut, staying low and keeping a sharp eye on the surroundings, We looked in. Nobody was there, nor was there anything to requisition. Suddenly Kozuka, who had very good ears, whispered, “Somebody’s coming!”
He pointed toward the ocean, and when I looked, I saw a man of about forty making his way through the tall grass toward us. We waited silently by the hut, rifles ready. When he was about three yards away, I leaped out in front of him with my rifle aimed straight at his chest. He let out a surprised yell, then raised his hands.
Kozuka told him in English to sit down, and he began talking quickly in Tagalog, which we could not understand. I motioned to him to shut up, and he did. We led him at gunpoint into the house. Somewhat to our relief, he made no effort to resist.
When I asked him why he had come here, he answered in a combination of English and Tagalog, with many gestures, “I left a dog near here to keep my cows from being stolen. I came to take the dog back. I’m not a Yankee spy. Don’t kill me.”
Not wanting to stay in the house too long, we took him into the mountains, where we questioned him thoroughly about conditions on the island. He told us everything he knew, down to the price of cigarettes and the average pay for a day’s labor. Throughout the questioning, he continued to shake with fright. When we decided we had learned all we could, we told him to go home and go to bed. His face registered great relief.
In late 1965 we acquired a transistor radio.
It was in the farmlands on the shore opposite Ambil Island, where a number of islanders were putting up in a cabin for a few days to work on their fields. Among them was a man in neat white clothes, who kept going in and out of the cabin. As we watched from among the trees, we saw him work for about thirty minutes and then walk off toward the mountain opposite us. He was carrying a gun, and he was pretty big.
“Who do you suppose that is?” asked Kozuka.
“Probably somebody working for the army or the police,” said I, and we decided to go after him. Before we moved, however, three more men showed up and made as though to join the man in white. The second they were all together, we fired a couple of shots to frighten them, sending them scurrying toward the jungle, two in one direction and two in another. Two more shots, and they disappeared, gathering speed as we lost sight of them. The remaining farmers also scattered.
We went into the deserted cabin and found not only a transistor radio but some good socks, shirts and trousers. The socks were of thin nylon and looked fairly expensive—too expensive at any rate to belong to any of the islanders, to whom nylon was still a novelty. These men had obviously come from somewhere else. We were all the more convinced of this because we did not think the islanders would bring a radio along when they came to work in the fields.
We requisitioned the radio and the other things and then went back into the jungle. The radio was a Toshiba eight-transistor set that seemed to be a very good one. The batteries in it were new, and there were four spare batteries. When we turned it on that night, the first thing we heard was a man saying in Japanese. “Today being December 27, this is my last broadcast of the year. Listen in again next year. In the meantime, Happy New Year to you all!”