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The Mongols Dined Atop their Live Enemies and Other Fascinating Historic Facts

Khalid Elhassan March 2, 2020 36 min

Battle of the Kalka River - Mongol Empire — Mongols feasting atop captives. Pintrest

American troops advancing across a bridge during the Battle of Luzon. Flickr

3. Living on Lizards

After fleeing deep into the jungles of Luzon, Noboru Kinoshita ended up isolated from contact with the outside world. He managed to eke out a precarious existence, surviving on lizards, frogs, fruits, monkeys, and any other edibles he could find. When the war ended, the cutoff Kinoshita knew nothing about it. He struggled to stay alive, as he awaited the day when victorious Japanese armed forces would return to recapture the Philippines and rescue him. It was a long wait.

Kinoshita ended up waiting for a decade, until 1955, when he was apprehended by Philippine police as he raided a villager’s sweet potato patch. In custody, Kinoshita asked his Filipino guards to kill him, because he was too ashamed to return to Japan in defeat. They declined, but a month after his capture, Noboru Kinoshita managed to commit suicide by hanging himself. He was 33 years old.

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.