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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

Kazuko Higa, after turning herself in. Paleric

14. The Anatahan Castaways Dismissed News of Japan’s Surrender as “Fake”

Leaflets were airdropped on Anatahan, informing the castaways that the war was over, but they refused to believe it. The island being unimportant, and its inhabitants being isolated and harmless to the outside world, American authorities did not deem it worth the trouble to send in troops to root them out. So the castaways were left to their own devices, with an airplane dropping more leaflets every now and then, which was dismissed as “fake news” each time. Finally, in 1950, a desperate Kazuko flagged down a passing American ship, and asked to be taken off the island.

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.