2005: 60th anniversary of the end of W W II
A Look Back At World War II Island History
And Castaways, Stragglers & Survivors
There are many little known facts surrounding the conflict in the Pacific and one in particular concerns an effort in July 1945 involving the greatest man hunt in history as conducted by the U. S. Navy for Allied survivors and war dead. A painstaking, island by island search throughout Micronesia and elsewhere in the South Pacific which had been undertaken did not reveal one living military person and only a few island graves.
The Japanese, being the vanquished adversary, did not have General MacArthur’s “permission” or the resources to conduct a similar search for their war survivors. Their Army had either been by-passed to “wither on the vine” and starve or it had been largely ground into dust on countless islands their navy drowned. The bollards on the docks of Japanese naval bases had nothing moored to them except cobwebs since the Imperial Navy was for the most part at the bottom of the ocean. The same was true of the Japanese merchant fleet consisting of thousands of non-combatant merchant ships known as Marus. It has been said that the word “Maru” refers to a circle. The Japanese believe that ships complete a circle departing from port and hopefully will return safely home to loved ones thus completing a voyage. The warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were not referred to as Marus since they hazard not completing a circular voyage. More than 2,300 merchant vessels and virtually the entire Japanese Imperial Navy was sunk during the conflict. The few officers and crew not otherwise rescued and still lucky enough to survive did so in a very few instances by reaching near-by islands.
After the war and by December, 1946 all known surviving aliens and Japanese military personnel had been repatriated and the evacuation of the Marianas was completed. For many years there-after no Japanese would be allowed to return to any island south of 30 degrees north latitude (i. e., a line north of Okinawa and the Bonin Islands).
During my tenure with the old Trust Territory Government I often wondered if there might be Japanese survivors stranded, abandoned and forgotten on the more remote, isolated islands of Micronesia of which there are more than two thousand just within the western Pacific alone, many hundreds of which are uninhabited and rarely, if ever visited. This thought was precipitated in 1972 when Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese Imperial Army straggler was found living in a cave on Guam.
It was there that a Japanese soldier who did not know that World War II had ended more that a quarter of a century earlier was discovered living in the jungle. His army uniform had long ago worn away and he clothed himself with materials found in the jungle.
I always found it remarkable that he professed being unaware the war had ended. He must had wondered about those strange aircraft flying overhead without propellers in their landing pattern for Guam International Airport or looked up and saw the great waves of low flying B-52’s headed for Andersen Air Force Base on their return from bombing raids on Vietnam. Surely he must have seen the jet aircraft of the day, Pan Am, TWA, Braniff and Continental, all familiar sights in the skies over Guam in those days.
Yokoi lived in a tunnel-like, underground cave in a bamboo grove until Jan 24, 1972, when he was discovered near the Talofofo River by hunters. Since he had been a tailor's apprentice before being drafted in 1941, he made clothing from the fibers of wild hibiscus plants and survived on a diet of coconuts, breadfruit, papayas, snails, eels and rats. "We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive,” Yokoi said in 1972 before being returned to Japan. "The only thing that gave me the strength and will to survive was my faith in myself and that as a soldier of Japan, it was not a disgrace to continue on living,” Yokoi later said in 1986. No one except stragglers later discovered in Philippines and Indonesia has equaled his record. Few have struggled with such appalling loneliness, extreme deprivation and oppressive fear for so many years.
After the American landings on Guam on the night of July 21, 1944 the Japanese troops made a night attack on the Americans at Nimitz Bay, but having managed to bring U. S. tanks on shore, the Americans were on the offense. At this time Yokoi's unit already faced a situation in which they would soon be forced to fight until the last man had been killed. Some of them, managed to escape to the west shore of the Bay and ultimately rejoined the main force in Agana. But Yokoi journeyed to the Talofofo area where he said: "I hid in the mountains. “
After his discovery Yokoi was flown to Japan and In November 1972, he married and returned to Guam for his honeymoon. He would later return to the island several times. He died of a heart attack at age 82 on September 23, 1997.
Many years later a friend of mine who had been stationed on Guam during the war told me how they coped with Japanese stragglers in 1944 -’45.
Former Saipan resident, and golf pro, Bob Loughrey who was a Navy Corpsman assigned to the Marines and stationed on the island during the war recalled that after the island was presumed secure late in the summer of 1944 there was still a large number of Japanese holdouts in the mountains. As his story was recounted to me, he and a group of buddies would check their weapons out and at night go into the jungle on what they called “Japanese hunts. “They would stalk Japanese stragglers in the same cautious manner as one would hunt an injured and desperate lion and it was very dangerous as their quarry could be equally armed.
One morning in particular they were late arriving back for muster, and when they explained their tardiness to their commanding officer they were put on report and assigned to mop the floors in the hospital as punishment. They were busy pushing mops when the commanding general made an unannounced inspection visit to the hospital accompanied by an officer of the base. “What are these men doing here?”, General Larsen bawled. “They are being punished sir“, was the reply from the base officer. “What did they do?”, the general asked. “Sir, these men sneak out of the base camp at night without permission and go into the jungle to hunt Japanese. They are not authorized to leave camp after sundown. “
The general was stunned and roared, “G*!*~&*, man why do you think we have troops here? To kill Japanese, that’s why. Release them immediately”, ordered the general.
The camp was infested with rats and since Bob liked to hunt he volunteered for a rat extermination project. As it happened, an officer who was once associated with the Smithsonian Institution as a collector of birds, bugs and rats among other creatures had been working on a formula for rat poison which had first been developed by the British to poison water wells in North Africa when retreating from General Rommel’s army. This officer wanted to test what he believed was a very efficient and inexpensive method of extermination, the techniques of which he shared with Bob. “Take empty K ration containers and fill them with coconut meat and mix in some ‘left overs’ from the evening chow and place the containers around the camp’s perimeter every night for three nights”, was the instruction from the former Smithsonian curator. “Once the rats are trained to come to the food, on the fourth night add this poisonous mixture”, he told Bob.
The instructions were followed religiously. For three nights in a row the mix of coconut meat and scraps from the mess hall were placed around the camp’s perimeter and each morning when inspected the containers were empty. On the fourth night the poison was added to the mix. The next morning when Bob inspected the container locations he was astonished to find four dead Japanese lying on the ground. Japanese soldiers had been sneaking into camp to steal food.
In 1944 after the fighting had subsided on Tinian several American officers found a unique way to convince Japanese stragglers and holdouts on the island to surrender. They reformed a Japanese prisoner of war and put him to work selling surrender to other solders. After the capture of this enemy soldier the conversion process began when he was placed in a hospital as a result of minor injuries. The prisoner was fitted out with new clothing then taken for a shower, shave and haircut. He was then treated to beer, cheese, apples, cigarettes, peanuts and sandwiches. Over the next several days this Japanese prisoner convinced 500 hundred Japanese to surrender without a shot being fired.
In another incident a group of Japanese were discovered in February 1945, when several Chamorros from Saipan were sent to the island of Anatahan to recover the bodies of a Saipan based B-29 (tail designation T Square 42, from the 498th Bomb Group). The aircraft had crashed on the island after returning from a bombing raid on Japan. The Chamorros reported that there were Japanese survivors from three Japanese ships sunk in June 1944, one of which was an Okinawan woman.
After the war officials of the Japanese government became interested in the situation on Anatahan and asked the Navy for information "concerning the doomed and living Robinson Crusoes who were living a primitive life on an uninhabited island", and offered to send a ship to rescue them.
The families of the Japanese holdouts on the island of Anatahan, were contacted in Japan and requested by the U. S. Navy to write letters advising them that the war was over and that they should surrender. In January 1951, a message from the Governor of Kanagawa Prefecture was delivered to them which read: I am very proud to learn that all of you are in good health and still residing on a small island in the Pacific six years after the war is over.
I will not blame you for saying that our country lost this war. That was six years ago in 1945. It was the 15th of August 1945 when the peace treaty was signed (sic*).
Our country lost this war, but we are not unfortunate, as the United States is giving us the best of opportunities to recover and I am sure that we are the best of friends in the present world.
During the war it was said that the American soldiers were killing all prisoners of war, but that was not true. The United States treated our prisoners the best until 1947 when all of them were released and sent home. Now there are no other Japanese military men in the Pacific except you gentlemen.
Previously, in our country, a prisoner of war lost face so that even after the war if he came home he had to live in a dark world. That is not so now. The Emperor ordered all our people, wherever they were, to surrender peacefully. All of those returned will never be separated from their home people again. Those who have returned to Japan give the Americans thanks that the long period of their suffering is over . .
I believe you have read letters from your family which said not to worry which will give you confidence to give yourself up to the Americans. In the box of new letters sent to you we are enclosing a piece of white cloth with which you can signal the Navy boat. You do not have to worry. The Americans will give you their best attention and kindness until you are returned to our country .
Finally on June 30, 1951, 18 Japanese castaways, all survivors of a convoy sunk on June 12, 1944, surrendered to Lt. Commander James B. Johnson U. S. N. five years and 8 months after the conclusion of hostilities.
Still another instance involving a Japanese straggler concerned one Onoda Hiro, a Japanese soldier who was finally urged out of the jungle of Lubang in the Philippines in March 1974, where he had spent 29 years since the end of the war. He believed he was securing the island for the eventual return of the Japanese army and in the process terrorized the population. After many unsuccessful rescue attempts led by the Japanese government, Onoda showed himself to a young Japanese who was searching for him and gave himself up.
In September 1974 Nakamura Teruo, another Japanese straggler, was spotted by an Indonesian Air Force pilot in an isolated clearing on Morotai. It took two months for the information to reach the Japanese embassy in Jakarta, and for steps to be taken to coax him out of the jungle. He had spent thirty years in isolation and did not know the war was over and was convinced he would be killed if he was found.
Today, it’s highly unlikely, but not entirely impossible, that any W W II Japanese military survivors are still on any of the islands. If so, they would be around 77 to 80 years old and completely unaware of the great changes that have occurred over the past sixty years.
Source: Richard, Dorothy E., United States Naval Administration of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands,Vol. I, 1957, U. S. Government Printing Office (*) Allied forces were ordered to cease offensive operations against Japan on August 15. The surrender document was signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.