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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

10. Onoda’s and His Men Dismissed All Evidence of Japan’s Surrender as “Fake News”

Over the years, Onoda and his men came across numerous leaflets announcing that the war had ended. Like other holdouts, they dismissed them as ruses of war and enemy propaganda. When they encountered a leaflet with a copy of an official surrender order, they examined it closely to determine whether it was genuine, then dismissed it as a forgery. It was not. Even when they recovered airdropped letters and pictures from their own families urging them to surrender, Onoda’s band convinced themselves that it was a trick.

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.