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CBS Funded Invasions to Televise and Other Extreme Lengths in History

Khalid Elhassan February 26, 2021 35 min

Cuban exiles captured by Castro's forces during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Agence France-Presse

Teruo Nakamur’s unit, the Takasago Volunteers. Wikimedia

11. One of the Few Survivors of a Bloody Defeat

Teruo Nakamura was born in 1919 into an aboriginal tribe in Formosa – today’s Taiwan – which was a Japanese possession at the time. In 1943, he was conscripted into a colonial unit of the Imperial Japanese Army and was posted to Morotai Island in the Dutch East Indies – present-day Indonesia. Soon after his arrival in Morotai, American and Australian forces invaded that island successfully seized their objectives, and broke organized resistance while inflicting heavy losses on the Japanese defenders.

Invasion fleet landing Allied troops on Morotai Island. Wikimedia

The relatively few Japanese survivors fled into the jungle, where they endured diseases, hunger, starvation, and other extreme hardships as they hid from the victorious invaders. When World War II officially ended with the signing of Japan’s surrender on September 2^nd, 1945, Nakamura was not among the Japanese survivors who surrendered to the Allies in Morotai. He was presumed dead, having perished during the Allied invasion of the island, and was officially declared so in 1945. However, Nakamura was very much alive.

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.