I love this story. I remember reading a very abridged version of it in one of my Super Fact Books when I was 8 or 9 (it omitted the fact that he murdered dozens of people, for instance). Still, he's an amazing (if very, very dumb) character.
I don't know why you call him dumb. In his situation there are few ways to verify that Japan had indeed surrendered. If it really was an elaborate scheme by the Allied troops then he would have been called dumb for surrendering so easily.
His belief that the Allies would go through so much trouble to stop a group of people who had killed relatively few people over a 30 year period is what makes him dumb.
What troop movements was he observing? What logistics was he disrupting? How effective could he possibly be gathering intelligence if he couldn't even report his findings to his superiors? Even if the war was still going, his contribution to the war effort was minimal compared to the effort the Allies appeared to be putting forth to "capture" him.
Hiroo Onoda may be dumb, but I believe you can't tell that based on this story. To suggest otherwise is myopic.
Apply Occam's razor: news of Japan's surrender is a (probably not uncommon) Allied trick vs. the US created a magic secret weapon that would force Japan -- a country so dedicated to winning they crash planes into boats -- to surrender shortly after Hiroo left it.
In Hiroo's Japanse solider's shoes, which seems more likely?
So, true, you'd think he'd eventually figure it out (i.e. give up), but perhaps his grip on reality became a skewed after living alone in a jungle for decades (i.e. he's made of tougher mettle than I am).
Still doesn't indicate dumb to me though.
(Edit: Added epiphanic id ests to last paragraph.)
In 1946, perhaps, in 1950? 1955? 1960? 1970? no. At that point, 5, 10, 15, 30 years after the fact the idea that Japan had not lost the war, the war was still going, and yet they had not reconquered the Phillippines doesn't pass the smell test.
I think we have to question if Onada really still thought in days, weeks or years. At least to me, it does not sound totally unbelieveable that he eventually stopped counting days and weeks and rather lived a sequence of days. A very long sequence of days, long enough to make him lose track how long it was.
At least to me, this is kind of plausible, because he had no more reference in his days. You know: Hey, every seven days there is this special day where I cannot go shopping if I need something. This coincides with a week going by, and thus, you have a fairly "natural" notion of a week. For him, I guess, a day consisted of getting up, checking his surroundings, gathering intelligence, staying hidden, maintaining his weapons and eventually hiding and going to sleep again. Day after day after day.
I think extreme isolation can lead one to believe anything... even in the face of all those facts. The human mind is an elaborate machine and will comfort you in the strangest ways.
Yes, but maybe in a different way than you'd think. There was a divide in Imperial Japanese politics - the Emperor wanted to end the war and was looking to surrender pre-Hiroshima. The heads of the military were split on a course of action - some wanted to fight to the end, but a more common position was trying to fight enough to get more favorable terms than just unconditional surrender.
It's common enough to fight a losing effort to get better surrender terms, and that's probably what would have happened. The United States never wanted to land invade Japan - the second option to bombings was a blockade to starve the army out. Do the Japanese still unconditionally surrender if they go that route? Could the Imperial Japanese Army be enough of a menace that the U.S. leadership takes less than unconditional surrender for terms? Maybe.
The most interesting question is what happens if Japan doesn't unconditionally surrender, become occupied, and have the MacArthur transition government put into place. It was hell at the time for Japan, but then Japan became an American protectorate and was able to run their government with one of the lowest military expenditures in the Western world. They were also well-protected from the various brutal Communist regimes in the area. Could Japan have been invaded by Red China or the Soviet Union if the Empire had kept more sovereignty and wasn't an American protectorate?
Interesting questions. After the Battle of Midway, the Japanese had already lost to the American forces and it was just a matter of time. The war was going to end, nuclear bombings or not. The question is when and on what terms. Japan got the worst possible terms - unconditional surrender, full disarmament, dissolution and loss of all colonies, and foreign military occupation - but then it works out that it becomes the most prosperous place in Asia. Funny world.
The Americans also showed the Japanese how to build cars and motorbikes, and now Toyota is the biggest car manufacturer in the world, and Japanese manufacturers are leading innovators in automobile manufacturing. The Japanese focus was small, incremental improvements over time, whereas for decades the Western attitude was 'big-bang' progress, i.e. trying to do a lot of innovation all at once. James Dyson speaks a lot about this in his autobiography.
Japanese manufacturing concepts of kaizen (continuous improvement) and muda (waste), among others, were copied by the rest of the world. The Japanese got the concepts in the first place from American manufacturing processes during WWII, used to rush Sherman tanks and other mass produced military hardware into production.
Sticking with the Axis powers post-WWII, Germany now produces it cars like it produced it's WWII tanks - big, powerful and expensive. The Tiger tank, for example, was a fearsome machine for it's time - one German tank ace in a Tiger laid waste to over two dozen vehicles in a single afternoon. It's 88mm main cannon could easily kill inferior American Shermans at over a mile away.
It's interesting to note how well Germany's economy fared after WWII also. To this day, the German economy is managed by keeping inflation under 2-3% (if I remember correctly). This is as a result of the rampant inflation in the Weimar Republic - conditions that lead to Hitler's rise to power. Germany today dominates the ECB (European Central Bank) so that mindset is at the forefront Europe-wide also, which contrasts with the slightly more laisse-faire economic approach in the US.
Very funny how things work out, indeed. Also it's fascinating for the historical reasons for the way policy, culture and attitudes are today.
Ah man, this was such a great and insightful and correct comment until this part -
> ...which contrasts with the slightly more laisse-faire economic approach in the US.
Nah, the USA hasn't been laissez-faire in money for a long time. Interest rates artificially low, lending based on political regulations, high ranking employees of major banks moving back and forth between government posts and high paying jobs at the major banks... nah, American currency/banks/Federal Reserve are incredibly government-managed and corrupt. Fiat currency + legal tender laws + direct election of Senate leading to short term thinking + deficit spending is legal and tolerated... well, that winds up somewhere, but it doesn't wind up laissez-faire.
Rest of the comment is good - what's interesting to me is that Japan got very little reconstruction money. Europe had the Marshall Plan go into effect, Japan had very little reconstruction money. It's a testament to the will and work ethic of the Japanese people how fast they rebuilt the economy and started prospering.
That said, I'm 100% with the rest of your comment aside from the idea that the American money/currency is run hands-off, very good comment. For anyone more curious, googling any of the terms in your comment would bring back some interesting results. I always thought it was fascinating that Germans were terrified of inflation and Americans were terrified of deflation, largely because of historical experiences in the years between WWI and WWII.
"Nah, the USA hasn't been laissez-faire in money for a long time. " - I only meant more laisse faire in comparison to Europe, and in a historical sense. I should've been more specific. Note I said slightly more laissez-faire ;-) It's moving further and further in the opposite direction now of course, with the crash of 2008 and ensuring economic upheaval, Obama administration's economic approach vs, Bushs' , Greenspan gone, TARP, bank bailouts etc.
Another interesting European policy decision arising out of the ashes of WWII is the European attitude to privacy of the individual, which is quite different to the American model. The European Data Protection Directive is interesting, in that specific protections are laid in place, versus the American approach which "relies on a combination of legislation, regulation, and self-regulation, rather than overarching governmental regulations" - Wikipedia
It goes onto explain that because individual's personal information was used by Nazi Germany to put people on cattle cars and ship them to concentration camps, Europe was always going to be more concerned about personal privacy than America, which had never gone through such a horrific experience. How could they possibly understand such an attitude, having never lived through the Holocaust? Fascinating stuff, in my opinion.
If that policy's really derived from WWII I daresy they've completely missed the point. The Data Protection Directive wouldn't help if you Europe were to fall under Nazi control again.
It's just a law that says the government can't process the data in certain ways, they still have the data though, and could start mining it by changing the law, or ignoring it.
If they actually cared they wouldn't be gathering this data in the first place. The U.S. (officially) keeps a lot less data on its citizens than the average European country, but that's been changing in the recent decades since the FBI, NSA and others were founded.
Relatively speaking. The first census was taken in 1790, the records being kept about US citizens today are a relatively recent thing compared to that.
Germany received less than half what the UK received from the Marshall Plan [1], and of course still had to pay reparations and some plans to dismantle German industry were also carried out.
Also from the same page: "Former U.S. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan gives most credit to Ludwig Erhard for Europe's economic recovery. Greenspan writes in his memoir The Age of Turbulence that Erhard's economic policies were the most important aspect of postwar Western Europe recovery, far outweighing the contributions of the Marshall Plan. He states that it was Erhard's reductions in economic regulations that permitted Germany's miraculous recovery, and that these policies also contributed to the recoveries of many other European countries. Japan's recovery is also used as a counter-example, since it experienced rapid growth without any aid whatsoever. Its recovery is attributed to traditional economic stimuli, such as increases in investment, fueled by a high savings rate and low taxes. Japan saw a large infusion of US investment during the Korean war."
Ludwig Erhard is still known and popular today.
[1] And we know how badly UK industry up until Iron Lady.
> The United States never wanted to land invade Japan - the second option to bombings was a blockade to starve the army out.
I don't think that's correct. I've read that the alternative to the bombs was a huge invasion called Operation Downfall. According to Wikipedia: "The U.S. Navy urged the use of blockade and airpower to bring about Japan's capitulation...The U.S. Army, on the other hand, argued that such a strategy could "prolong the war indefinitely" and expend lives needlessly, and...supported mounting a large-scale thrust directly against the Japanese homeland...Ultimately, the Army's viewpoint won."
Fascinating, thanks for sharing that. I hadn't seen it before.
It doesn't surprise me that different military branches had different proposed plans - that's common. I wonder how much sway the Army had at that point? I'm pretty sure the Navy generally had more authority in Pacific operations since so much of the fighting was naval-based. Also, a lot of infantry in the Pacific campaign was the U.S. Marine Corps, who worked a lot more closely with the Navy than the Army during that era.
That said, the Air Force was actually a branch of the Army at that point - I'm not sure if it was Army or Navy planes that were involved in the raids and bombing of Japan. Edit: The Enola Gay which bombed Hiroshima was an Army plane. Which doesn't entirely answer the question.
Was MacArthur in favor of Operation Downfall? Pretty sure Admiral Nimitz wasn't...
I keep looking up Wikipedia links trying to figure it out, but not really getting great answers:
> A unified command was deemed necessary for an invasion of Japan. Inter-service squabbling over who it should be—the U.S. Navy wanted Nimitz, while the U.S. Army wanted MacArthur—was so serious that it threatened to derail planning. Ultimately, the Navy partially conceded, and MacArthur was to have total command of all forces, if circumstances made it necessary
Just spent about 10 minutes reading through that link and it's not quite clear who drafted the plans for Operation Downfall and who its proponents were vs. the blockade route.
I hadn't seen read about Operation Downfall before - I still wonder how much it was an option vs. a serious a consideration if the Japanese hadn't surrendered. Fascinating stuff - thanks for sharing.
Thanks for your very civil, truth-seeking reply! I don't usually notice or remember usernames on HN but I've noticed that in your comments before.
I don't know much more about Operation Downfall that you won't have already come across, but there is one detail you'll be interested in - from the Wikipedia article on Purple Hearts:
"During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan...In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Heart
Your missing the effects of Russia turning towards the east. The US was a little worried about further expansion past the disputed islands. Plus, the Army did want to invade and the Navy thought a blockade with constant bombing was the way to go.
The atomic bombs were devastating and impressive, but they didn't do much more actual damage than the B-29 fire bomb raids on Tokyo in terms of loss of life and property. When you can drop bombs at all, it doesn't really matter what kind of bombs they are. The atomic bombs were an excellent PR move of sorts, as a tool to convince the japanese to give up more than as a weapon of war.
I think that dropping incendiary bombs on cities made mostly of wood and paper is even worse than dropping an atom bomb. And it wasn't just Tokyo; dozens of japanese cities were burned to the ground.
You're talking about two bombs on relatively unimportant targets, specifically because they wanted relatively untouched cities to erase as a demonstration. That won't kill as many people as years-long bombing campaigns on more populous cities. They were staged demonstrations, not attempts to kill massive amounts of people.
If Japan didn't surrender after the first two atom bombs, the next half dozen would have undoubtedly caused much, much more damage.
Without the shock of the atomic bombings there would almost certainly have been more Japanese civilians dead before the end of the war, even discounting a landed invasion. By late 1945 the allied bombing campaign was sufficiently geared up to destroy entire cities on a recurring basis. It was as effective as the atomic bombings, it was merely a lot less efficient (hundreds of planes and crews instead of just one). Had Japan held off surrendering, and had that conventional bombing campaign continued much longer the destruction would have been far greater.
Had the allies then lacked the courage to mount a landed invasion and been satisfied with a negotiated peace instead of an unconditional surrender, Japan would have become a devastated country with few allies and many enemies, it would not have been rebuilt with foreign assistance and would almost certainly be a 3rd world nation or perhaps even a failed state today.
"Had there been no atomic bombs the world may have been a very different place."
That is true, but for reasons that have nothing to do with Japan. As far as Japan is concerned, the theories about how they would have fought for every house, etc. are false. The Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender even before the first atomic bomb fell.
As far as Japan is concerned, the theories about how they would have fought for every house, etc. are false.
One of the most astonishing facts about the Pacific War was how few Japanese soldiers ever surrendered to the Allies (before the war officially ended). The Japanese sense of honor demanded that they fight till the end and never surrender. I no longer have the exact number, but IIRC, the total number of captives was less than a few thousands. Compare that with the number of German, Italian, Croat, Romanian, etc., prisoners taken.
This was so extreme that on Saipan, Japanese troops murdered ethnic Japanese civilians by forcing them to jump off cliffs to their deaths.
The Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender even before the first atomic bomb fell.
One minority faction was. Bear in mind that, even after the first fission bomb fell on Hiroshima, they still didn't surrender. It took another bomb to force them to quit.
Also, even before Hiroshima, the Japanese has already trained millions of civilians to fight against the Allies. Many were expected to use nothing more than bamboo spears. BTW, as I recall, the Japanese government expected ten million Japanese civilians to die fighting the invasion. The US expected to take up to one million casualties.
The US expected to take up to one million casualties.
I'm not sure this was true. The US might have expected to take such large numbers of casualties IF they insisted on invading very quickly for purely political reasons. But given a bit more time, there need not be so many casualties at all. Japan was literally starving. Everyone was on severely reduced food rations, including soldiers. Within a year or so, no one would have the strength to resist invasion anyway. In addition, the blockade destroyed Japan's ability to produce armaments, so the only way to resist invasion would have been wooden spears and hand to hand combat.
A man who's subsisted on 800 calories a day for the past 2 months won't put up much of a fight. Wait a few months more and he'll be dead, at which point he really won't put up much of a fight.
But don't forget that America was having a hard time funding the war at that point. They had to end it quickly or they would have run out of money and given Japan time to rebuild their war machine.
As Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon, the only Japanese soldiers who understood that banzai charges didn't work had already been killed in banzai charges.
My dad fought in WWII, at Okinawa. His unit had a 120% casualty rate or so--the entire unit, plus 20% of the replacements. According to him, one of the reasons we had so few Japanese prisoners is because the Marines weren't especially interested in taking prisoners. The intelligence officers were quite displeased at that.
I don't know where you read that but it makes no sense. The Russians could not have taken Japan if they wanted to, they had to go through the US navy to do that. The Soviet Navy at the time was not much to speak of and it also happened to be on the other side of the earth.
A big chunk of the Japanese army surrendered to the Russians (as they were stuck in China), and also, if I remember correctly, the Japanese tried to use the Russians as mediators in their negotiations with the Americans, but there was no chance of the Soviet Union taking over Japan. First, they could not get there even if they wanted, and secondly Stalin was not about to openly defy the US at that point.
Although Russia definitely did want Japan's conquered territory in China and the rest of mainland Asia - the main lasting effect of the Atomic Bombs on the geo-political outcomes of the war was giving the Americans the ability to force the surrender before Russia began its invasion of Manchuria.
This is why the Japanese attempts to negotiate a measured surrender through the Soviets were ultimately futile - it was actually in Stalin's interests to not pass on the Japanese proposals to the US, as an early peace deal would kill his opportunity to land grab in Asia.
Yes, as i said they were trying to get the Russians to mediate a peace deal for them. This is why togo said that they were seeking peace through the good offices of Russia.
It was long suspected--no less by the Soviets--that another motive for the atomic bombings was to warn off Stalin. (Of course, there were enough idealistic traitors in the Manhattan Project that Stalin knew all about it and got his very own atomic bombs a few years later, so the joke was on us.)
Considering the fate of the parts of Europe which ended up occupied by the Russians, it's probably good for Japan that they ended up surrendering the way they did.
Ignoring his actions for a moment, I really admire his quotes about children needing to be raised to be more independent (which can be seen at the bottom of the article). I'm a big believer that most of the world's problems today, are caused because someone, somewhere, didn't take responsibility for themselves, and I think he hit the root cause of that on the head. Interesting to hear the opinion of someone who basically skipped 30 years of society's gradual change.
Blind conviction to your country is nationalism. I don't see how he can be seen as a hero for that. Sure what he did was amazing, but I wouldn't encourage such patriotic behavior.
It wasn't just blind conviction though, he was a professional soldier. It was war time, and his commanding officer sent him in to conduct guerrilla warfare in the jungles. He was expected to be there for a long time and operationally independent.
"You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand. It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we’ll come back for you. Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him. You may have to live on coconuts. If that’s the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you [to] give up your life voluntarily."
It was obvious his conviction that his country could not lose was based on faulty reasoning. Japan was inevitably going to lose, nuclear bomb or not. So I think his persistence was fueled by his blind allegiance to his country, most likely because he believed that his country was superior to all other countries because he was born in it. Professional or not, I think the primary motivation was his country, and not his training. Doing something that dedicated requires a firm belief in the purpose (unless you were retarded to some degree). Of course he may have been lied to, or misled into thinking his country was greater than it was. In any case this would be why blind allegiance is bad.
Actually, if his orders included killing civilians, then those were unlawful orders. And if he was obeying them that would make him a war criminal, no?
I don't think he was ever ordered to kill civilians. He figured the proliferation of 'civilians' on the island was a ruse, and they were actually soldiers in disguise.
> Now in the end, we might look at Onoda as a fool and worse, a murder of innocent people. In the end, he was both of those things, there is no denying it.
Funny thing is that at war time being idiot murderer of innocent people is just fine. I think there should be much more footage from war zones. Maybe then people would stop looking at war as sane and sometimes appropriate option.
This is not always true. Almost all wars are started for "defensive" reasons and oftentimes those reasons are just lies told to drum up support for the war.
The Nazi regime convinced ordinary people that they had to fight against an internal Jewish threat. That was a lie. If ordinary Germans had let "the other guy" go to war, nothing would have happened because there was no internal threat. Likewise, if Americans had ignored the terrible threat that Iraq posed to the US in 2003, then nothing would have happened: Iraq wasn't a threat to the US. Claims that it was trying to do destroy the US or had the capability to do so were lies. Ignoring the lies is not surrender.
The first rule of honorable war fighting is to figure out which justifications are true and which are lies. A people that can't or won't do that can never be honorable since sooner or later, they'll end up exterminating lots of innocent people in a war based on lies.
You miss the point. There may be cases where "the other guy" actually starts a war against us. But that doesn't seem very common. What is much more common is "the other guy" doing nothing but our own people making up lies about what "the other guy" is doing; you know, inventing a fictional war. In those cases, you're not going to end up dead or living under anyone's boot heel.
The US started a war in Iraq that has exterminated about a million human beings so far and has produced 3 or 4 million refugees. We started that war because we believed lies. If taking actions that lead to a million corpses because we were insufficiently skeptical doesn't trouble you, well, I'd guess that our value systems are sufficiently incompatible so as to make discussion impossible.
No, it most certainly is not. The number is based on the Lancet 2 study which found about 650,000 excess deaths. Tim Lambert at Deltoid extrapolated the Lancet 2 excess mortality rates to about one million because Lancet 2 ended just as violence in Iraq was increasing enough to make further field work impossible. See http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/11/deaths_in_iraq_1.php for more information.
In general, Iraq Body Count is an obscene underestimate of excess deaths. IBC data comes from two sources (1) english language journalist accounts and (2) Iraqi government data. We know that (1) is absurd because when violence increases, deaths increase and reporters' presence on the ground decreases dramatically. If you read journalists' accounts of their own work in Iraq (for example, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran), you'll note that in many cases reporters simply never left the green zone. How could they possibly write stories about killings when they can't leave the green zone? We know that the data from (2) is highly suspect because much of the conflict in Iraq has been sectarian with government death squads engaged in ethnic cleansing. For example, we have evidence showing that when Shiite religious parties took control of the ministry of health after elections, they fired Sunni medical staff and imposed policies restricting the treatment of wounded Shia. If the Shia run ministry of health won't treat Sunni victims, why on Earth should we trust them to faithfully record statistics about how many Sunnis were executed by government death squads? I mean, are we normally so credulous that we accept death counts made by the government accused of making the killings?
From a scientific perspective, IBC's "analysis" is garbage and should be ignored. At the very least, you have no business citing IBC unless you understand enough about IBC's methodological flaws to explain precisely why it can only be considered a gross underestimate.
Sorry, I only meant to point to reports of concrete data. I didn't know the standard of accuracy here is extrapolations on studies, speculation and politically-charged argument, istead of data reported "on the ground".
One part of me gets it how war can be honorable. Thoughts about protection, bravery, planning, cunning, destruction of evil enemy. On the other hand I think that this thoughts are cultural imprintment reinforcing primal instincts embedded by evolutionary means in times way before industrial age.
Concept of honorable war in our heads is with such contradiction with any serious war fought with modern equipment that I feel that it's one of these things that made sense in early days of humanity, like seeing danger in dark barely visible shapes, but unlike those harmless artifacts when mixed with modern technology our glitch that makes us think that war can be sane misguides us into doing really harmful and dangerous things.
I'm just curious. Do you have any example of country (region?) that had a real option of waging war against its enemy but chose to surrender and got worse then it would get if it choose to wage war? (by any reasonable prediction, of course)
I highly recommend his autobiography (linked in the article)-- No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War. I picked it up on a whim once, having never heard of the story, and was blown away by it.
there was a film with this in, or at least inspired by it. Remember the image in my head of a japanese soldier in dishevelled clothes looking out at the ocean from a bunker.
