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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

18. The Anatahan Castaways

In June of 1944, a Japanese convoy was sunk off Anatahan, a small Marianas island about 75 miles north of Saipan. 36 soldiers and sailors swam to Anatahan, where they were taken in by the Japanese head of a coconut plantation and his wife. American forces invaded the Marianas shortly thereafter, seizing the main islands and bypassing the smaller ones such as Anahatan. The Japanese on Anatahan ended up cut off and isolated from the outside world. Conditions grew dire on the resource-poor island, and the castaways barely survived by consuming coconuts, lizards, bats, insects, taro, wild sugar cane, and any edible that they could find.

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.