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40 Facts About the Japanese Who Refused to Surrender After WWII Had Ended

Khalid Elhassan January 3, 2019 25 min

Hiroo Onoda - Ishinosuke Uwano — Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who kept fighting for nearly three decades after WWII had ended. Observer

Ei Yamaguchi returning to his cave in 1994. Pacific Wrecks

30. Ei Yamaguchi in Peleliu

When American forces captured the island of Peleliu in 1944, lieutenant Ei Yamaguchi was among the few Japanese survivors. He took charge of 32 other Japanese survivors, and went to ground in the island’s extensive underground defensive network. There, the Japanese evaded capture by hiding in and moving about via the system of tunnels beneath Peleliu. Cut off from communications with Japan, they received no official word of the war’s end and dismissed American announcements that the war was over as an enemy trick. Dreaming of retaking Peleliu someday, the holdouts kept up a desultory guerrilla resistance.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.