Last Japanese soldier to surrender 29 years after WW2 ended | Hiroo Onoda's 1974 surrender

The last German unit to surrender: https://youtu.be/rEb__G88b30

On the 15th of August 1945, the Japanese empire capitulated after the United States threw atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the last country of the Axis powers that continued its war, and as such with its surrender the Second World War came to an end. On the second of September, the formal signing of the treaty aboard the USS Missouri reaffirmed this. Even though Japan had formally surrendered and the preparations were made to both rebuild the Japanese mainland and put on trial the men responsible for this deadly conflict, it did not mean the war had ended for all Japanese soldiers. As a matter of fact, some soldiers took their mission to “never surrender” quite literally, a bit too literally.

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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:54 Onoda's Garrison
3:15 Post-war Guerilla warfare
6:50 Final Years (1972-1974)

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Right, so the last Japanese soldier to surrender was Hiroo Onoda. He was born in 1922 in Japan, into a family that had roots with the old samurai. His father was a sergeant in the Japanese cavalry and was killed in China in 1943. When Hiroo was 17 years old he started working at a firm in China, but not for long because soon he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He wasn’t just drafted as a regular soldier, though, but was sent to a special academy, the Nakanoschool, where soldiers were explicitly trained in guerilla warfare.

On the 26th of December 1944, it was evident, even to the Japanese, that they were fighting a losing battle. Hiroo, together with his command unit, was sent to the Philippine island of Lubang. The unit received orders to, together with the Japanese soldiers already on the island, wage guerilla warfare against the approaching Americans. As the unit was preparing to leave, the division commander added another order to that: under no circumstances should they commit suicide. You see, it was custom that Japanese soldiers, once they realized defeat was imminent, committed suicide or died in a suicide attack on the enemy. So it wasn’t a random order, the commander actually wanted the division to fight to the bitter end instead of taking their own lives when the war was over, something that was considered honourable in Japanese culture.

The division was tasked with charging against enemy landing strips and blowing up the pier at the harbour. But when they arrived on the island they found the Japanese troops that were already there utterly discouraged and without morale. The garrison commanders refused to help Hiroo and his men, and Hiroo lacked the seniority to order them to. This lack of action eventually translated to Allied forces landing on the island. In the ensuing four-day battle the Allied troops overran and conquered the island by February 1945. The surviving Japanese didn’t surrender, however. Those that weren’t captured split up in groups of 3 to 4 and made their way inland, to hide in the mountains and jungle and wage their guerilla war, as they had been trained to do.

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