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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

1972 search party for Hiroo Onoda. Observer

7. While Lauded in Japan, Onoda Was Reviled in His Philippine Stomping Ground

Hiroo Onoda returned to adulation in Japan. However, back in Lubang, the locals did not see him as an honorable man devoted to duty, but as a bloody-minded idiot who had plagued them throughout his 29-year holdout. He had stolen, destroyed, and sabotaged their property, and killed about 30 local farmers and cops while “requisitioning” food and supplies to fight a war that had ended decades earlier. And a war that he knew or should have known was over, making the subsequent deaths little more than criminal homicides by a maniac. He was pardoned by the Philippines’ president.

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.