Disturbing History - Iwo Jima

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

On January 6, 1949, two starving Japanese machine gunners walked out of the caves on Iwo Jima and surrendered to American airmen who had no idea they were there. The war had been over for more than three years. They're where this episode ends, and they're the reason it exists. Before them came the battle. This one goes deep into the fight for a stinking scrap of volcanic ash 650 miles south of Tokyo, and the general who turned it into one of the worst killing grounds of the Pacific war. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew Japan couldn't win, so he buried his garrison 16 miles deep in the rock and ordered his men to make the island cost more than it was worth. It worked. American casualties came out higher than the entire Japanese force defending the place, the only major Pacific battle where that ever happened. We walk through the ash-trap landing, the flag on Mount Suribachi and what the famous photograph left out, the blowtorch-and-corkscrew cave fighting up north, and the roughly 3,000 Japanese soldiers still alive inside the island the day it was declared secure.Then the episode follows the men who never stopped. Two Navy machine gunners held out in the tunnels until 1949. A captain named Sakae Oba ran a guerrilla campaign on Saipan until his own chain of command ordered him to quit. A group of stranded sailors on the island of Anatahan came apart into something far darker over six years cut off from the world. Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi hid in the jungle on Guam for 28 years, suspecting the war was over and staying hidden anyway.Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda fought his own private war on Lubang in the Philippines until 1974 and killed around 30 local people who had nothing to do with it. And Teruo Nakamura, the last holdout of all, walked out the same year and got almost none of the welcome Onoda did, for reasons that say a lot about the empire he'd served. It comes down to what an institution can put inside a young man's head, and how long that programming keeps running after everything that built it is gone. There are still more than 10,000 Japanese soldiers sealed inside Iwo Jima. Most of them are never coming home.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

My name is Mackenzie, and I started to GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within a go-fundme. just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.

GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofund me.com. This podcast is supported by Gofund me. My entire life, I've been fascinated by mysteries. Mostly true crime, but in general, stories that have no ending. In 2015, armed with nothing more than a years of experience working in libraries and a $10 microphone, I launched my podcast Unresolved. Join me, Michael Whelan, as I dive deep into some of the most interesting, unique, horrifying,

tragic, and oftentimes obscure rabbit holes, some of which you've heard of, many of which you probably haven't. or subscribe to Unresolved on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive.

From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact. This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads others leave alone you're in the right place history isn't just written by the victors sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed on the morning of january 6th 1949 two men walked out of the rock on iwojima with their hands empty and their uniforms rotted off their backs they were starving you could have counted their ribs their boots were long gone and their skin had the gray look of men who hadn't seen the sun in a while they'd been living in the caves and tunnels under that island for almost four years. And the war they were still fighting had been over for three.

The men who took their surrender weren't even combat troops. They were United States Air Force personnel from a support wing, stationed there to keep an airfield running on a chunk of volcanic ash in the middle of the Pacific. By 1949, the island was a refueling stop, a place you flew over. The men on the base had been losing supplies for a while. food, small stuff, things that went missing in the night. They figured somebody was pilfering, the way somebody's always pilfering around a base.

They had no idea the thieves were two Imperial Japanese Navy machine gunners who'd watched the American flag go up over Mount Surabachi, back when these airmen were kids. Their names were Yamakagi Kofuku and Matsudo Linsoki. That's the whole episode right there in two men. Two soldiers, underground, in the dark. on an island built out of the dead from one of the worst battles of the 20th century. The fighting had stopped years before. The empire they served was gone. The emperor they'd have died for

had gone on the radio and told the whole country to put down its weapons. And these two kept their machine guns oiled and waited. I spent 16 years as a cop before I did this for a living. And one thing you learn is that people will hold on to a story long after the facts have stopped backing it up. They'll do it under questioning. They'll do it to themselves. There's a kind of stubbornness in people that's stronger than fear and stronger than hunger, and sometimes stronger than what's sitting right in front of their face. On the island, that stubbornness got poured into concrete and buried 16 miles deep. The men who stayed behind, on that island and on a dozen others scattered across the Pacific, are what you get when you take a young man. Fill him up with the idea that dying is better than

surrendering and then leave him alone in the jungle for 30 years. This is the story of the battle that turned that island into a graveyard, the man who designed the trap, the boys who walked into it, what people did to each other in the black sand and the tunnels under it, and the men who never got the word or wouldn't take it, and went on fighting a dead war for decades. A few of them killed people who hadn't even been born when the war ended. There are still more than 10,000 Japanese soldiers inside that island, not in graveyards, inside it, sealed in the tunnels where they died, where the recovery teams still can't reach all of them. So let's go down there. Start with the rock. There's a string of little volcanic islands south of Japan, and one of them runs about

four and a half miles long and maybe two and a half across at the widest point. It's shaped like a pork chop, or a teardrop, depending on who's drawing it. At the south end, there's a dead volcano, Mount Suribachi, about 550 feet tall. Suribachi is the Japanese word for a grinding bowl, the kind you'd mash spices in. The island's modern name is Iwoto. Many of the Americans who fought there called it sulfur island, and that name pretty much sets the scene. The place stank. The whole island smelled like rotten eggs, because the ground was venting sulfur gas. The volcano wasn't all the way dead, so in spots the sand ran hot enough to fry on, and steam came up out of cracks in the earth.

There was no fresh water. Both sides had to catch rain or ship water in, because what came out of that ground would make you sick. The dirt was loose black ash and gravel that wouldn't pack down. You couldn't dig a foxhole in it. Scoop out a hole and the sides slid right back in. Try to picture taking cover from machine gunfire on a beach made of dry car, coffee grounds that's also smoldering and smells like a sewer. That's the ground these men fought over.

People did live there before the war, oddly enough. A small civilian population, around a thousand of them, mining sulfur and growing a little sugar cane, scraping by on a rock most of the world had never heard of. By the middle of 1944, the Japanese military had moved all of them off. The island wasn't going to be anybody's home anymore. It was going to be a fortress, and then a battlefield. So why fight over it? Why would two industrial countries bleed each other white over a stinking pile of ash a thousand miles from anywhere? Geography. By late 1944, American B-29 Super Fortress bombers were flying out of the Mariana Islands to hit Japan itself, and this scrap of rock sat almost dead on the flight path, about 650 miles south of Tokyo. For the Japanese,

the island was an early warning post. Radar there could pick up the bombers coming and call ahead to the home islands so the air defenses had time to scramble. Fighters based on the island could jump the bombers on the way in and the way out. For the Americans taking the island would shut all that down, give their own fighters a base close enough to escort the bombers the whole way to Japan, and give crippled B-29 somewhere to land instead of going into the ocean. A B-29 was worth a fortune. and carried 11 men. An island where a shot-up bomber could set down was worth a lot to the people running the numbers. Not everybody bought it, even then. After the war, a retired chief of naval operations named William Pratt said flat out that the island was useless to the army as a staging base and

useless to the Navy as a fleet base. People have argued ever since about whether the place was worth almost 7,000 American dead. They're still arguing. The case for the island, Island is usually the B-29s. After the battle, more than 2,200 of those bombers made emergency landings there. And the official tally is that those landings saved something like 24,000 airmen who'd otherwise have gone into the ocean. That's the number carved on the memorials. But not everybody trusts it. A Marine historian named Robert Burrell went back through the records and argued that the figure was inflated and misleading.

That a lot of those landings weren't life or death at all, just routine stops, and that the fighter-escort mission the island was supposed to make possible never amounted to much. His point wasn't to insult the men who died. It was that the country told itself a tidy story afterward to justify a bill that came in a lot higher than anybody had planned on. But the men who fought there didn't get a say in the strategy. They got handed the strategy, and then they got handed the beach. The strategy on the other side came down to one man. If you want to understand why the fight there became a slaughterhouse instead of just another island battle, you start with him. His name was Tadamichi Kourabayashi. He was a lieutenant general in the

Imperial Japanese army, and in June of 1944, the prime minister, General Hideki Tojo, called him in and told him he'd been picked to defend the island to the last man. The eyes of the whole nation were on it, Tojo said. Kribeashi knew what that meant. He was being sent there to die. The only open question was how many Americans he'd take with him. He was a cavalry officer, well-read, a man who wrote long, warm letters, home to his wife and kids. And he'd spent real time in the United States in the late 1920s as a deputy military attache in Washington and a student. He drove across the country in a car and American officer had taught him to handle. He studied at Harvard for a while. He saw the factories around Detroit. He came home convinced of something

most Japanese officers wouldn't accept, which was that Japan could not outbuild the United States and could not win a long war against it. He wrote to his wife once that America was the last country in the world Japan should ever fight. So look at the spot he was in. A general who knows the war is lost, knows the island will fall, knows he himself is going to die on it, and gets ordered to defend it anyway. He couldn't tell himself he was going to win. He had to find some other reason to do the job, and the reason he landed on was math. If he couldn't hold the place, he could at least make it cost so much that the Americans would dread the thought of invading Japan itself. Every Marine who died in that ash was an argument against the invasion. He wasn't

fighting to win. He was fighting to make the next win look unbearable. That's the thinking that produced one of the nastiest pieces of military engineering of the whole war. The usual Japanese defense in the Pacific, the one the Americans had. had come to expect island after island was to fight at the water line. Put your strength on the beach, try to throw the invaders back into the sea before they get a foothold. And when that fails, charge. The bonsai attack. A mass of screaming men running straight into machine guns, trying to win by sheer shock.

The Americans dreaded it and in a cold way welcomed it. Because a bonsai charge brought the enemy out into the open where American firepower could chew him up in an hour. It was terrifying, and it was also, tactically, a gift. Karibeashi banned it. He'd studied the earlier fights, especially Palleliu, where Japanese troops gave up the beach and fought from caves and ridges and made the Americans pay for every foot. He took that idea and built a whole doctrine on it.

His men would not defend the island. They'd defend from inside it. In the rock, not on it. For eight months starting in the summer of 1944, his garrison dug. Naval construction troops, engineers, ordinary soldiers, all of them carving tunnels through the volcanic rock. Counting the connecting passages, the network ran somewhere between 11 and 18 miles, with more

than 1,500 underground rooms. Command posts dug deep enough to shrug off a direct hit. Hospitals, barracks, ammunition stores. All of it linked, all of it underground, so a man could cross from one end of the island to the other, without ever stepping into the open. The sulfur made the work hell. Down in the deeper chambers, the temperature ran past 100 degrees, and the air filled with gas, and men could only dig in short shifts before they had to come up or pass out. They dug anyway. On the surface, he laid out hundreds of concrete pillboxes and bunkers and gun positions,

set so their fields of fire crossed over the landing beaches, and set so that a position the Americans thought they'd knocked out could be reoccupied from below an hour later. He buried artillery and anti-tank guns and big naval guns in the rock with only the muzzle showing, camouflaged, already ranged on the exact strips of beach where the Americans would have to land. He had a battalion of tanks under a genuinely famous officer, Baron Takechi Nishi, who'd won an Olympic gold medal in show-jumping at the 1932 Los Angeles Games and rubbed elbows with movie stars out in Hollywood. Nishi dug his tanks into the rock and used them as fixed guns,

and he gave his men their orders, which had nothing to do with winning. Each man was to kill ten Americans before he died himself. He handed out a set of vows, the courageous battle vows, that the garrison was supposed to recite and live by. Hold your position to the death. Take ten of the enemy for your one life. Don't expect to rescue. He was telling 21,000 men they were already dead, and the only thing left to settle was the price.

When the Americans came, there were roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders dug into the island, give or take, split between Army and Navy ground troops. Against them, the United States threw three Marine divisions, the third, the fourth, and the fifth, under the Fifth Amphibious Corps. Around 70,000 Marines in the assault, backed by more than 500 ships, and tens of thousands more men across the other branches. On paper, it looked like a quick, ugly win for the Americans. Three to one in numbers, total control of the sea and air, more equipment than any army had ever brought to a fight. On paper. Before the Marines went in, the Navy pounded the island from the

sea, and the planes bombed it from the air, for days. The Marine generals had asked for 10 days of naval bombardment to soften the place up. The Navy gave them three, citing limited time and ammunition and other operations waiting in line. Whether the island got shelled long enough is one more argument that never really ended. Here's the cruel part, though. It barely mattered. You can't shell a man who's 100 feet down in a chamber cut out a solid rock. The bombardment tore up the surface, knocked out a few positions, threw up a lot of smoke and noise.

Karibayashi's man rode it out underground, in the dark, waiting. When the shelling lifted and the landing craft started, in, the defenders came back up, took their places at the guns that had been ranged on those beaches for months, and watched the Americans come. The landing came on the morning of February 19th, 1945. The first waves hit the southeastern beaches, and for a little while, almost nothing happened. Some scattered fire, but not the wall of death the Marines had been bracing for. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. A few of them started to think the bombardment had done the job, that the island was already beaten, that maybe this wouldn't be as bad as the stories they'd heard on the ships. More men came in behind them, wave after wave, piling up on the sand, and then they hit the ash.

The beaches rose in steep terraces of that loose volcanic sand, and a man trying to climb sank to his shins and slid back. Vehicles bogged down and quit. Marines couldn't dig in, because the holes filled themselves. They couldn't move forward fast and they couldn't get down out of the way, and the beach behind them kept filling up, because the timetable said the men had to land. Thousands of Marines stacked up on a strip of soft black sand with nowhere to go

and nothing to hide behind. That was the moment Kuri-Bayashi had spent eight months waiting for. Every gun on the island opened up at once. Artillery and mortars already ranged on those beaches, walked back and forth through the packed-in Marines. machine guns and concrete pillboxes cut into them from positions they couldn't even see. Big mortars dropped shells the size of trash cans into the crowd. Men who lived through it described a beach coming apart, sand and steel and bodies in the air,

a noise they didn't have words for. There was no front line. The fire came from everywhere, from holes in the ground, from up the slope of Surabachi, from positions the bombardment had supposedly destroyed and that were somehow shoot. shooting again. A Marine on that beach had a few choices and all of them were bad. Go forward into the guns. Lie still in the open and hope the next shell hit somebody else. He couldn't go back, because back was the ocean and more men coming in. The casualties in those first hours were horrific. The beach filled with the dead and pieces of the dead and the wounded screaming for

corpsmen, and the corpsmen went out into that fire to drag them back, and a lot of the corpsmen died doing it. Around 30,000 Marines came ashore that first day. The plan had the 28th Marines driving straight across the narrowest part of the island, a neck only about half a mile wide, to cut Mount Surabachi off from the rest of the Japanese force. They did it, at a price, and then they had to turn around and take the volcano itself. The first day there ranks as one of the costliest single days the Marine Corps has ever had, and at the end of it they had a toehold and not much else. Out at sea, it wasn't safe either.

On February 21st, Japanese kamikaze planes came in on the American fleet off the island. Sank an escort carrier called the Bismarck Sea and tore up other ships. More than 300 men went down with the Bismarck Sea. The island was killing men who never even set foot on it. Men who'd already survived Tarawa and Saipan, men who figured they'd seen the worst the Pacific had, came off that island calling it something. something else entirely. And it wasn't only the amount of fire. It was that there was nothing

to shoot back at. You could empty everything you had into a hillside, and the hillside just kept killing you, because the men killing you were inside it, behind a foot of concrete and a hundred feet of rock. They could see you, but you couldn't see them. The Marines started saying it felt like fighting the island itself, like the ground wanted them dead, but they kept coming. Knowing exactly what the beach was, knowing what was waiting, the next wave climbed down the nets and went in. They got off the beach. It cost more men in a few days than some whole campaigns had cost, but they pushed inland, and they turned and looked back south at the volcano that had been raining fire on the whole landing, and they started up it. Mount Surabachi gave America the most

famous photograph of the whole war. The photo got so big, it nearly erased the men in it. By February 23rd, four days after the landing, Marines of the 5th Division had fought their way up the volcano position by position, killing the defenders in the caves and pillboxes on the slopes. A patrol reached the top, and a small American flag went up on a length of pipe. Down below, and out on the ships, men saw it, and a roar went up across the island and the fleet. Horns, cheers, men who'd been living in hell for four days, seeing their flag on top of the thing that had been killing them. That first flag was small. A while later, somebody sent up a second, bigger flag so more troops could see it.

And as a handful of Marines wrestled that one, and its heavy pipe upright in the wind. An associated press photographer named Joe Rosenthal lifted his camera and got a single frame, almost without aiming. That frame became one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Six men leaning into it, the flag snapping out over their heads. The whole thing balanced like somebody had posed it, except nobody had. It won the Pulitzer. It went onto a war bond poster, onto stamps, and eventually into the giant bronze Marine Corps War Memorial outside Washington.

It came to stand for victory and sacrifice and the whole idea of the thing. The poster left a few things out. Suribachi got taken four days after the landing. The battle had another month left in it, and it got worse after the flag went up, not better. And of the six men in that photo, three never left the island alive. They got killed in the fighting that followed, up in the north, ground up with everybody else while the folks back home were already turning their picture into a monument. There's another twist that took the Marine Corps 70 years to straighten out. They had some of the names wrong.

For decades, the official list of the six flag raisers included men who, after careful study of the photographs in recent years, turned out not to be in the picture. at all, while men who were in it got left off. The Corps formally corrected the names twice in the 2010s. The most famous image of American courage ever taken, and the Corps couldn't even keep the name straight, because in the middle of that battle, the individual men kept disappearing into the bigger thing they'd become. And then there's what happened to the survivors they shipped home to sell war bonds. The most famous was a Pima man named Ira Hayes. He came back to a country that wanted to march him around as a hero and didn't know what else to do with him. He'd watched his friends die on that island.

He couldn't square the parades with the men he'd left in the sand. And he drank, and he kept telling people he was no hero, that the heroes were the ones who didn't come home. He died about 10 years after the photo, 32 years old, alone, out in the cold. The image stayed perfect. Hayes didn't get to. I'm not bringing this up to take anything away from what those men. men did. Climbing that volcano into that fire was about as brave as people get. I'm bringing it up

because this is disturbing history, and the disturbing thing about it is partly the distance between the clean bronze statue and the actual island, which was about as far from clean as a place can be. The flag went up early. Now we go north into the part nobody built a statue for. The northern two-thirds of the island was the heart of Kurabayashi's fortress, and it's where the battle stopped being terrible landing and turned into something more like a month of factory work, except the product was dead men. The Marines named the worst stretches, because you have to call a place something when it's trying to kill you. There was a run of high ground and ridges and a busted rocky bowl they started calling the meat grinder. It centered on a hill the maps called 382, a rock formation called

Turkey Knob and a low spot called the amphitheater. All of it stitched together with Kura Bayashi's pillboxes and tunnels and dug in guns covering each other. The Marines went at it, got cut up, fell back, went at it again, day after day. Close to 850 Marines died taking that one position. The meat grinder earned the name. The fighting up north was cave warfare, and cave warfare is a nightmare all its own. Because Kourabayashi's men fought from underground and could move back into a position from below, The Americans figured out they couldn't just take a piece of ground.

They had to seal it. They worked out a method, and the men who did it had a name for it. Blow torch screw. The blowtorch was the flamethrower. The corkscrew was the demolition charge. This is how it actually worked. A pillbox or a cave mouth is killing Marines from up a slope. Tanks and artillery can't reach inside it,

so a team crawls up close under covering fire. A man with a flamethrower on his back. lugging tanks of jellied gasoline that make him the first thing everybody on that hill wants to shoot, gets in range of the opening and let's go. The flame doesn't only burn. It eats the oxygen out of the space and it rolls around corners. Then the demolition men come up with satchel charges and blow the entrance shut. Collapse it.

The men inside who didn't burn got buried, sealed into the rock alive in the dark, to suffocate or bleed out in a tunnel they dug themselves eight months before. The Marines had flame tanks for some of this too. Sherman's rigged with flamethrowers where the main gun used to be, and those were about the most useful thing they owned against the pillboxes. But a lot of it still came down to one man on foot with a flamethrower on his back. The most famous of them was a young Marine named Herschel Williams, a demolition man with the third division.

On February 23rd, the same day the flag went up on Surabachi, Williams went after a row of reinforced concrete pillboxes, that had the whole advance pinned down. The kind of positions nothing dropped from the air could crack. Covered by four riflemen, he worked that ground for about four hours, going forward with the flamethrower, coming back to his own lines to refuel and grab fresh charges,

then going back in, taking out one position after another at point-blank range. He lived through it. He got the Medal of Honor, and for the rest of a long life, he kept insisting he hadn't done it alone. He died in 2022. 98 years old, the last living American who held a Medal of Honor from the Second World War.

The Marines did this hundreds of times. It was the only way to get the job done. And it was monstrous. And they knew it was monstrous. And they did it anyway. Because the other choice was leaving an armed enemy underneath them to come up in the night and cut their throats. There wasn't a humane version on the menu. A 19-year-old from Ohio or Texas spent his days pouring fire into holes full of men, he never saw, then dropping the rock on top of them, then getting up the next morning and doing it again. The ones who lived carried it the rest of their lives. On the Japanese side, the tunnels were their own kind of hell. As the fight dragged on, the defenders ran short of water, food, ammunition. The heat in the deep chambers was punishing. Wounded men died slow in the dark because there

was nowhere to take them and not much to treat them with. The Americans started pumping gasoline into the tunnels and lighting it, or just sealing them and waiting. Some Japanese soldiers, cornered, killed themselves rather than burn or surrender. Kribeiyashi had told them to expect no rescue and never to give up, and most of them did exactly that. Out of roughly 21,000 defenders, only 216 were taken prisoner during the main battle, and plenty of those got captured only because they'd been knocked out or were too torn up to fight. 21,000 men and nearly every one of them died in that rock rather than walk out with his hands up. That wasn't chance. That was the training doing exactly what it was built to do. And it wasn't clean on the American side either,

because a month of close-up fighting to the death never is. Both sides took few prisoners. Some Japanese soldiers faked surrender or played dead and then opened fire, so Marines learned to shoot bodies that might be faking and to distrust any enemy walking toward them. In that kind of fight, Men on both sides did things the word atrocity gets used for. Things most of them never talked about again. The war underground stripped the manners off everybody. I won't pretend it didn't. By the third week of March, organized Japanese resistance was breaking into pockets.

Karibiyashi had been pushed up into the far north, into a brutal slot of broken ground the Americans called Bloody Gorge, his last stand. On March 16th, a Japanese general radioed Tokyo that the battle was near its end. and reported that when the Americans called on them to surrender over a loudspeaker, his officers and men laughed it off. Around March 25th or 26th in the last hours, somewhere near 300 Japanese mounted one final attack near the airfields. The Americans took losses and put it down.

Some accounts have Kurabayashi leading or dying in that last push. His body was never found. The man who designed the whole machine disappeared into the island he'd built, and to this day nobody knows where in it he lies. He turned the rock into a tomb for 20,000 men, and then he became part of it, unmarked, down in the dark, with the rest. Baron Nishi, the Olympic gold medalist who'd buried his tanks in the rock, died somewhere on the island in those last days too.

Exactly when and how got lost, the way nearly everything up there got lost. The American landing force lost around 6,800. 21 men killed and roughly 19,200 wounded. Total American casualties came to about 26,000. That gives the battle a grim distinction. It was the only major battle of the Pacific War where total American casualties, dead and wounded together, came out higher than the entire Japanese defending force. The attacking side, with three to one numbers and total command of the sea and air, ended up with more men down than the defender even started with.

Kribeashi's math worked. He made the island cost more than it ever should have. On the Japanese side of those roughly 21,000 defenders, somewhere around 18,000 died in the battle, with only those 216 taken prisoner. The rest were killed in the open, in the pillboxes, in the tunnels, sealed in the rock. The United States handed out 27 medals of honor for the battle, 22 to Marines and 5 to Navy men. Most of them, Corman who ran into fire to drag the wounded out. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

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He meant it as the highest praise and it is. It's also grim if you turn it over, because what it really says is that the island demanded the kind of courage that's supposed to be rare, demanded it from thousands of ordinary men, every day, just to stay alive. This is where most tellings of the battle stop. The flag goes up, the island gets declared secure on March 26th, the surviving Marines ship out. The bombers start landing. The end. Except it wasn't the end. And what came next is what brought us here in the first.

place. When the island was officially declared secure, there were still something like 3,000 Japanese soldiers alive inside it. Not stragglers, not a few lost men. Three thousand armed soldiers scattered through that tunnel network, in the chambers and the caves. A lot of them still in organized groups, still following Kura Bayashi standing order to kill Americans and never surrender. The battle got called over because the resistance on the surface had ended. Underneath, the war kept going. Cleaning them out fell to the United States Army. A regiment called the 147th infantry took over the garrison and what the military politely calls mopping up, which is a tidy phrase for a filthy job. These men turned into cave hunters. For months after the famous battle ended,

after the cameras had gone home and the country had moved on, the 147th went down into the tunnels and the rough ground with flamethrowers and demolition charges and did the same blow-torchage and corkscrew work the Marines had done, clearing caves one at a time, killing or flushing out the men still hiding in them. Dozens of Americans died in this stretch that the history books barely mentioned, killed by an enemy everybody back home thought was already beaten. They sealed thousands more Japanese soldiers into the rock, and even that didn't get all of them. The tunnels were too big, the island too full of holes to hide in. Some men went so deep or hid so well that they the Americans never found them. They lived down there and came up at night, stealing from the

trash and the supply dumps of the same Americans who'd taken the island, drinking rainwater, waiting on an order to attack that was never coming, and a relief fleet that didn't exist anymore. Which brings us back to where we started, Yamakagi Kufuku and Matsuda Linsoki, the two machine gunners, were the last of them. The two of them held out in the caves there for three years and 130 days after Japan formally surrendered. Nearly four years after the battle that supposedly ended. They stayed alive by stealing from the American air base, slipping out in the dark, taking food and supplies, living underground in a country that had no idea they were there. The Americans on the base thought they were dealing with petty thieves. They didn't know two

enemy soldiers, leftovers from the bloodiest month in Marine Corps history, were living in the rock under their feet, still technically at war. When Kufuku and Linsoki finally walked out and gave up on January 6th, 1949, they made the point that runs through this whole episode. The war didn't end when the papers got signed. For some men, it didn't end for years, and on some islands it didn't end for decades. A surrender is a political act. It happens in a room, on paper, between officials.

It doesn't automatically reach a man in a hole on an island who's been told. that surrender is worse than death, and that his country is counting on him to die where he stands. The order to keep fighting had been driven into these men so hard that no signed document could pull it back out. Somebody had to physically go find each one and talk him out, one man at a time. Some of them took a very long time to convince. To understand the holdouts, the men who kept the war going for years and decades after everybody else quit, you have to understand what got put into their heads. It didn't get there by accident. Somebody put it there on purpose.

Soldiers in the Imperial Japanese military were trained on a code that took an idealized, militarized version of the old samurai ethic and sharpened it into a weapon, courtesy of the government and army of the 1930s and 40s. The heart of it, as the ordinary conscript got taught, was that surrender was the worst disgrace there was. A captured soldier shamed himself, his family, his unit, his estate. emperor. Dying in battle was clean. Taking your own life was honorable. Getting captured was a stain that never washed out. The field instructions told soldiers plainly never to suffer the dishonor of being taken alive. That's a big part of why. All across the Pacific, Japanese units fought to almost the last man over and over, why the bonsai charges happened, why so few prisoners ever got taken. It wasn't that these men didn't fear death. They'd been taught to fear something worse than

death, and it got wired in while they were young, reinforced constantly, until for a lot of them it ran underneath conscious choice. Now put the holdout's own situation on top of that. A man's unit is wiped out. He's been ordered to keep fighting. He's cut off. No radio. No officers. No news he trusts. Allied planes drop leaflets telling him the war is over and he should come out. But everything in his training tells him the enemy lies, that surrender is a trap, that a real soldier doesn't fall for enemy propaganda. So the proof that the war ended shows up from the one source he's been taught never to believe.

The leaflet announcing peace looks like enemy trickery. He keeps fighting, and the longer he fights, the more he's got riding on it, because quitting now would mean admitting that all the suffering and all the suffering and all the killing he's done since the war ended was for nothing. So he doesn't quit. The longer it goes, the tighter it holds him. For close to 30 years after Japan's official surrender on September 2nd, 1945, men kept walking out of the jungles of Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific,

dozens of them, in ones and twos and little groups. Some came out peacefully. Some had to be hunted down. Some had been killing people the whole time. The record on this is strange and it's dark, and the men worth telling you about each show a different side of the same wound. Start with a captain named Sakai Oba on Saipan in the Mariana's. Saipan fell in the summer of 1944, months before the battle we've been walking through,

and it fell the way these fights fell, in mass death, including a terrible number of Japanese civilians who killed themselves as the island went down. Oba didn't die and didn't surrender. He took a group of soldiers and civilians up into the interior and ran a real guerrilla operation against the American garrison. He raided. He kept discipline. He kept his people alive and organized up in the hills while the Americans chased him.

They nicknamed him the fox because they couldn't catch him. He didn't quit when the island fell and he didn't quit when Japan surrendered in September of 1945 because he didn't believe it. He held out with his men until December 1st of 1945. three months after the surrender. And he only laid down his arms when the Americans brought in his former commanding general to hand him a written order to stand down.

Remember that, because it comes back. Oba wouldn't stop for the enemy, wouldn't stop for a leaflet, wouldn't stop for the radio. He stopped for a direct order from his own chain of command, and not a second sooner. Now go to a little island called Anadahan, also in the Marianas,

for maybe the strangest and darkest holdings. out story of all. A group of Japanese sailors and a few other people ended up stranded on a Nautahan after their ship went down nearby, and they stayed there for years after the war ended, refusing to believe it was over. A handful of civilians were already living on the island, including one woman. And over those years, the men, isolated, armed with weapons they pulled out of crashed American planes, cut off from any authority, came apart. There were power struggles. there was killing. Several of the men died over the years under violent or suspicious circumstances with the woman at the center of a lot of the rivalry. By the time the United States Navy got wind,

around 1950 and 51, that there were still men on a Nathaghan who thought the war was on. The place had turned genuinely dangerous. The report said the men were well armed and that some of them had threatened to kill anybody who tried to give up because the leaders insisted the fighting was still going. The Navy moved carefully. The woman came off first. The rest were eventually talked off the island, the last of them around June of 1951, almost six years after the war ended. Back in Japan, the whole thing became a dark little parable about what happens to men left alone with their weapons and their code, and no news, and no authority on a rock in the ocean. Somebody even made a movie out of it. The takeaway is simple enough. The holdout story wasn't always noble.

and it wasn't always tragic in a tidy way. Sometimes it was men going feral. These were the years of the war that wouldn't die. The petty officer who came off of Natahan said there were 18 other men still out there who believed the fighting hadn't stopped, and a Navy plane flew over and counted 18 figures on the beach. The reports kept coming, year after year, island after island. And the longer it ran, the longer a man had been out there,

the stranger and harder his story got. until you get to the ones who held out not for months, not for a few years, but for almost three decades. They kept turning up in between, too. On Pellellew, where some of the ugliest fighting of the whole war had happened, a Japanese lieutenant named A. Yamaguchi was still leading a pack of holdouts in 1947, two full years after the surrender, and his men actually attacked American Marines before a Japanese admiral had to be brought in to talk the group into giving up. A soldier named Masashi Ito stayed out in the jungle on Guam until 1960,

and for a while people figured he was the last one left out there. He wasn't, not by a long way. In January of 1972, on Guam, two local men were checking shrimp traps along a river when they spotted what they first took for an animal moving in the brush. It was a man, small, gaunt, terrified. Dressed in clothes, he'd woven himself out of plant fiber, and he fought them when they grabbed him, because he was sure they were going to kill him.

His name was Shoichi Yokoy, a sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army who'd been hiding in the jungle on Guam since the Americans retook the island in 1944. 28 years. Yokoi had dug himself an underground cave, a hidden room you got to through a camouflage tunnel, and he lived down there and came out at night to forage. He ate rats, frogs, snails, eels, whatever the other. the jungle gave him. He made his own clothes and tools out of what grew around him. For the first years, he'd hidden with a couple of other holdouts, but they died, and for the last stretch,

he was completely alone. Not a word to another human being, for years. And here's the part that sticks with me. Yokoi admitted later that somewhere along the line he'd figured out the war was probably over. He wasn't fooled the whole time. He suspected the truth, and he stayed hidden anyway. years after he suspected, because he couldn't face going home as a man who'd surrendered, a man who'd failed to die for his country. When they finally brought him back to Japan, he stood up in front of the whole nation and said he was ashamed to be coming home alive, that he hadn't been able to serve well enough. He'd swallowed the code so completely that just surviving felt like something he owed the country, an apology for.

Yochoi turned into a celebrity in Japan, a living piece of the lost war. He married, settled in Nagoya, even ran for office once, and lost. He lived until 1997. Near the end, after a Parkinson's diagnosis, there were reports he stopped eating, and some people believed he'd chosen to starve himself rather than be a burden. If that's true, then the man who spent 28 years staying alive on rats and frogs went out, at the end, by the same hard logic he'd lived by the whole time. But Yokoi, for all his endurance, didn't hurt anybody out there.

He hid. He survived. He suffered. By himself. The next man didn't just hide. The next man kept fighting. And people died for it. People who had nothing to do with the war he wouldn't let go of. His name was Hiro Onoda. Onoda was an intelligence officer, trained for guerrilla warfare. Late in the war in 1944, the army sent him to a small island in the Philippines called Lubong, west of Luzon, to run guerrilla operations, gather intelligence, and harass any Americans in the area.

And here's the order that ran the rest of his life. His commanding officer told him to hold out, keep fighting, never surrender, and never take his own life. It might take years, the officer said. But no matter what happened, the army would come back for him. For Onoda, that wasn't propaganda off an enemy loudspeaker. That was a direct order from his own officer. The one voice his training said to obey over everything else. And he obeyed it, down to the letter, for almost 30 years.

When the Americans took Lubong, most of the Japanese on the island were killed or surrendered. Onoda took to the mountains with three other soldiers, and the four of them kept fighting. They ran a guerrilla campaign on a tiny island against an enemy that, As far as the rest of the world knew, was gone. They raided. They burned rice that local farmers had harvested.

Sure it was being stockpiled for enemy troops. They traded fire with police and with islanders. In their own minds, they were soldiers behind enemy lines doing their job. To the people of Lubong, they were armed men in the hills who would not stop killing. Over the roughly 30 years, Onoda spent fighting his private war on Lubong. He and his men killed something like 30. local people. Filipino farmers and villagers. People living their lives on their own island, decades after the World War ended, shot by a Japanese soldier who thought he was still under

orders and thought everyone telling him otherwise was part of an elaborate enemy trick to get him to drop his guard. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Hey Ontario, come on down to bedmgm casino and check out our newest exclusive. The price is right, fortune pick. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games. on the iconic game show. Only at BetMGM. Access to the Price is right fortune pick is only available at BedMGMGM Casino. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2,600 to speak to an

advisor free of charge. Bed-MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. A farmer in 1965 in a country that had been independent for years, a man who only knew the war as something his parents talked about, goes out to his field and gets shot dead by a soldier of an empire that doesn't exist anymore, over a war that ended before that farmer could walk. That's the real cost of these holdouts. Real people, on their own land, shot by a soldier fighting a war that had been over for decades. Most of their names never even made it into a record. The other three with Onoda dropped away over the years. One of them, Akatsu, split off and walked out and surrendered to Philippine forces in 1950.

Onoda rode him off as a deserter, a security risk, maybe even a man the enemy had turned. Another Shimada was shot and killed in a firefight in the 1950s that left Onoda and one last loyal man, Kinshichi Kazuka. The two of them held out together for years more, two men against an island, burning crops and trading shots with the police. Certain the relief force was on its way. The outside world kept trying to reach them. People knew after a while that there were holdouts on Lubong.

Search parties went in. Onoda's own family got flown out to broadcast appeals over loudspeakers, their voices going out into the jungle, telling him the war was over, telling him to come home. Planes dropped leaflets with the news of the surrender, with photographs, with letters. Onoda saw and heard plenty of it, and every time he found a reason it was

fake. A leaflet had a small error in it, so it had to be a forgery. The voices could be impersonators. The whole thing looked to him exactly like the kind of slick trick a clever enemy would run to flush a stubborn intelligence officer out of the brush. The harder the world tried to convince him, the more the effort itself looked like proof of how badly the enemy wanted him to lower his guard. His training had built a sealed loop in his head, where every piece of evidence that the war was over turned into evidence of how desperate the enemy was to fool him. In October of 1972, Kazuka, the last of his comrades, was shot and killed by Philippine police while the two of them were burning rice. After almost 27 years out there, Onoda was completely alone, and he kept going. One man,

on a small island, still fighting the Second World War in 1973. Kazuka getting killed after 27 years told the world that the other holdout the one people had heard rumors about for years was almost certainly still alive. Onoda had actually been declared legally dead back in 1959. Now everyone knew he wasn't. Search parties went back in and failed again. The jungle was thick, the island was rough, and Onoda was a trained intelligence officer who'd spent nearly three decades getting good at not being found. What finally cracked it wasn't an army. It was a young Japanese man, a wanderer and an adventurer named Norio Suzuki, who set off in 1974 to find, in his own words, Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the abominable snowman in about that order.

Suzuki went to Lubong, walked into the jungle alone and unarmed, and somehow, where soldiers and police had struck out for decades, he found Onoda. The two of them talked. Suzuki wasn't an enemy soldier or a cop. He was a friendly kid from home who'd come looking, and Onoda, who wouldn't surrender to any force on earth, would talk to him. But even then, even with a fellow Japanese sitting there telling him the war had been over for almost 30 years, Onoda wouldn't lay down his rifle. He told Suzuki he was a soldier under orders and that he'd only stopped when he got a direct order to stop from the officer who'd given him his original command.

Nearly 30 years on, he was still waiting on his chain of command. So they went and got the officer. Onoda's old commanding officer, Yoshimi Taniguchi, who by 1974 was an elderly man working in a bookshop, got tracked down and flown out to Lubong. And in March of 1974, Taniguchi stood in the jungle in front of his old subordinate and formally relieved him of duty. He gave Onoda the order, straight from the chain of command, to put down his arms. The war was over. The mission was finished. He could stand down. And only then, only with the order finally coming from the one source his code let him obey, did Heru Onoda stop.

He came out of the jungle in his army cap and the rags of his uniform, carrying his rifle, his ammunition, hand grenades, and his officer's sword. Almost 30 years on, the rifle still worked and the sword was still sharp, because a soldier keeps his equipment up. He handed over the two days later. Anoda was 52. He'd gone into that jungle a man in his 20s and walked out in his 50s, having spent the whole middle of his life fighting a war the rest of the planet had finished, buried and mostly forgotten. The way this story usually gets told, especially the version Japan took to heart. It's about loyalty and endurance and the unbreakable will of a man who kept his word. And there's something to that. Thirty years of discipline and survival in a jungle is a

staggering thing for a human being to do. When Onoda came home, he got a hero's welcome, crowds, cameras. He'd kept faith with his orders when every easier road was wide open to him, but hold the other version right next to that one. While Japan was welcoming Onoda home as a hero, Lubang was not celebrating. They'd buried around 30 of their own over the years Onoda spent being loyal. To them, he wasn't a symbol of anything. He was the man who'd been shooting their farmers and burning their crops for a generation over a war that had nothing to do with them and had ended before some of his victims were born. There was real anger on Lubong and real demands that somebody answered for it when the man Japan was calling a hero turned out to be the same

man who'd been terrorizing their island. The Philippine president at the time pardoned Onoda for the killings on the grounds that he truly believed he was still at war, which is a fair enough legal call. But a pardon doesn't bring back 30 farmers. The loyalty everyone admired and the killings nobody wanted to discuss were the same thing. You don't get one without the other. What made Onoda a hero in Tokyo is exactly what made him a killer on Lubong. I can't clean that up, and I don't think anybody should try. Onoda never really fit back into modern Japan, a country that had changed completely while he was gone. He found it soft and materialistic and unrued recognizable. He moved to Brazil, ran a cattle ranch, and later came back to Japan and ran a nature

school for kids, teaching them survival and self-reliance. He lived a long time and died in 2014, at 91. He never really gave up the worldview that had kept him in that jungle. To the end, he carried himself like a man who'd done his duty. There's one more man, and he matters because hardly anybody remembers him. A few months after Onoda walked out into the flashbul, and the headlines, in December of 1974, the last verified holdout of the whole war was found on an island called Moratai, in what's now Indonesia. His name was Teruo Nakamura, and he'd been hiding, mostly alone growing his own food on a small hidden plot for about 29 years, the same as Onoda. When they found him and arrested him, he was painfully thin and scared, and like the others,

he seems to have half believed the war might still be on. But Nakamura, got almost none of what Onoda got. No heroes welcome, no national embrace, no run of best-selling books, no adoring crowds. The reason is a piece of history Japan wasn't eager to embrace. Taruo Nakamura wasn't ethnically Japanese. He was an indigenous Amos man from Taiwan, which had been a Japanese colony, and he'd served in a unit of Taiwanese indigenous troops, recruited, and in a lot of cases pressured into the Japanese war from the colonies. So here's a man who gave 29 years of his one life to an empire that had colonized his homeland, taking him from Taiwan to fight, and then left him on a jungle island.

And when he finally came out, that empire was gone, and the country it had turned into didn't know what to do with him. He wasn't the kind of citizen who made a clean national hero. They sent him not to Japan, but to Taiwan, where he died a few years later. He spent the last decades of the war fighting for a country that wasn't his. Then came out the far end and got handed back to a homeland he'd been taken from, having missed nearly everything in between. He was the last soldier of that war to give up, and he's the one the world remembers least.

That one takes the romance out of it for good. The holdout story is easy to tell as a tale of honor and toughness, and there's honor in it, and a lot of toughness. But underneath, it's a story about what big institutions do to the individual men they get their hands on. An empire built a code that told its young men dying beat surrendering, sent them off to die on rocks they'd never heard of, then collapsed and left some of them out there to keep paying on a debt the empire itself had already walked away from. Nakamura paid for 29 years and got handed the bill anyway. So back to the island, because that's where this started and where it has to end.

The island isn't officially called by its wartime name anymore. Japan put the older local name back, and it's Iwoto now, or Ioto. Nobody lives there. Japan's self-defense forces use it, and access is locked down tight, mostly to official memorial ceremonies, where American and Japanese veterans and their families have come over the years to stand on the black sand and the slopes of Surabachi. And here's the fact I want to leave you with, the same one I opened with.

There are still more than 10,000 Japanese soldiers inside the United States. that island. Their bodies were never recovered. They're sealed in the tunnels where they died. In the chambers the Americans collapsed with charges and fire. In the deep spots, the recovery teams still can't reach after all these decades. Japan runs ongoing operations to find its war dead and bring them home. And there they're still at it, still pulling bones out of the rock year after year, because the island swallowed a whole garrison and has never given most of it back. stand on that ground and you're standing on top of men who were never brought home. There's one survivor I want to name, a Japanese veteran named Takeo Abe, who lived through the

battle when almost none of his comrades did, and who spent the rest of his long life trying to bring those men home to recover the remains, to keep them from staying lost in the rock. Most of them are still there. He couldn't finish the job, because the job may not be finishable. The men who designed and fought that battle have been dead for 80 years, and the work of cleaning up after what they did to that island still isn't done. The battle ended in 1945. The holdouts walked out in 49 and 51 and 72 and 74. And the recovery of the dead is still going on, right now, today, while you're listening to this. I started with two men walking out of the rock in 1949, hands empty, four years late.

still loyal to a war that was already over. I think the reason that picture stays with people isn't only how strange it is. It's that those two were the breathing version of what the whole island stands for. It's a place where thousands of men were told their lives were worth less than the days their deaths could buy, and they believed it, and they paid. The holdouts are the ones who kept paying after the war stopped collecting. Kufuku and Linsoki in the caves until 49. Yo-Koi in his hole on Guam until 72.

Onoda in the hills of Lubong until 74, still killing. Nakamura on Moratai, the last and the least remembered, and the 10,000 under the rock who never came out at all, who never got to be holdouts, because they never got to be anything but the dead. The war was over. Somebody just had to go tell every last one of them, one at a time, for 30 years. a taste for you. Hey Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive.

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