Makaha said:
As we're coming up on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, here's something that most people here probably didn't know about...
There were these Japanese soldier holdouts who refused to surrender after WW2 ended and continued fighting, some for a very long time.
Check out this article about these crazy holdouts who refused to surrender:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout
Some of them didn’t believe that the war was over, so they continued fighting for 10, 20 years and even longer, in remote parts of Pacific islands. They ended up fighting local police long after the U.S. military left.
And then there was this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
You think that’s normal behavior for a soldier?
I mean there was a lot of indoctrination in the Japanese army, but how in the world could a soldier think that the war is still going on after over 30 years? Has any war in modern history lasted that long? What was he thinking?
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Japanese holdouts (残留日本兵 Zanryū nipponhei?, "remaining Japanese soldiers") or stragglers were Japanese soldiers in the Pacific Theatre who, after the August 1945 surrender of Japan ending World War II, either adamantly doubted the veracity of the formal surrender due to strong dogmatic or militaristic principles, or simply were not aware of it because communications had been cut off by the United States island hopping campaign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_holdout
