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Fun Stuff => CHATTER => Topic started by: Kugai on 17 Jan 2014, 21:43
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Never heard of him?
Hiroo Onoda is the last Japanese soldier to surrender - in 1974!
He held out on the island of Lubang in the Philippines, refusing to surrender at the end of the war in 1945. It took his former Commanding Officer coming to the island in 1974 to relieve him of the orders to never surrender he received when he came to the island in 1944.
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First read about him in one of those stranger-than-fiction kinda books. Cool story, and I'm still amazed by how he managed to get pardoned for killing, like, 30 people on that island.
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No one can say he isn't a dedicated and loyal Imperial soldier that's for sure. Also a little crazy.
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holy fucking shit he decided to stay at war for 30 fucking years
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holy fucking shit he decided to stay at war for 30 fucking years
He was hardly the only one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout
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There were several Japanese Soldiers like that Patrick. Caught out and isolated by the Island Hopping campaign, they were cut off from the Japanese High Command and while many eventually surrendered in the months after the end of the war, there were small bands or single soldiers who refused to believe that Japan had surrendered and continued fighting until they were either forced to face reality, killed or captured, many of them several years after the war had ened. Hiroo had the distinction of being the last of these die hard soldiers.
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Although that Wikipedia article actually mentions that he wasn't the last to surrender, Teruo Nakamura was. (But, I think Onoda was the last living post-surrender holdout?)