The story of the soldier who fought for 30 years without knowing World War Two had ended
The Second World War and its destruction that happened around all four corners of the globe have long since finished. However, for whatever reason, on a faraway island, a soldier refused to back down, for him peace had not yet been declared. From burnt fields to ransacked airports, to gunshots coming out of the forests to culprits that could never be captured. As the number of victims surged, one question remained : who was this soldier still convinced the war was raging on?
Dreaming big
At first glance, Hiroo Onoda seems like your ordinary 17 year old Japanese citizen in 1939. Wanting to be independent from his parents, young Hiroo sets off for China which he states in his autobiography No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War “China was so big that it automatically offered a lot of opportunities, I was 17 and no longer wanted to be ruled by my parents.” For a year Hiroo was living his best life in China as a Japanese citizen, he was no longer dependent on his parents. But his career goals would be cut short due to the Japanese Empries’s attack on the american naval base Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941. A few days after this attack, Japan declared war on the United-States. Talks of war were inevitable, but eventually they died down. Until May 1942, when Hiroo would receive a mysterious letter in the post.