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Saturday, 15 July 2017

6. I am...


They said they would return, they promised. I will keep on fighting until that point. The Allies, keep sending us surrender notices but are fighting on us. We have been hiding and fighting for so long. They cannot have surrendered. 

I am,

The man who kept fighting, Hiroo Onoda


Onoda was a Japanese soldier who did not surrender until 1974 as he did not know that the war (WW2) had ended. In December 1944 he was put on the Lubang Island of the Philippines and told not to surrender or take his own life and his commander would come to relive him of his duty when the war ended, his mission was to prevent the Allies from taking the Island. When the war ended, no-one came to get him so he assumed the war was still on. Leaflets and flyers were dropped ordering his surrender, saying that the war was over, but he and the 3 others with him believed them to be propaganda. He kept launching attacks on the people of the island, finally in February 1974, Norio Suzuki a Japanese explorer came across Onoda and took the news that he was waiting to be dismissed by his senor officer. Suzuki returned to Japan and the senor officer was found and brought to the Philippines to order Onoda to surrender, which he did.

Onoda was one of several Japanese's holdouts, they were soldiers who fought in the Pacific and did not surrender in August 1945, either because they doubted the surrender or they were not aware of it as communication had been cut off by the Allies. He and Teruo Nakamura (December 1974) are the last confirmed holdouts.)

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