Hiroo Onoda surrenders 29 years late
A Japanese officer fights on 29 years after the war
Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda dismissed leaflets and family letters saying the war was over and fought on in the jungles of Lubang. He agreed to surrender only in March 1974, when his former commander, by then a bookseller, flew in from Japan to give the order in person: 10,416 days after Japan's surrender.
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In one month of 1974 a soldier who had ignored the end of the war for 29 years gave up, and an army that had waited 2,200 years was found: Onoda surrendered on 10 March, the Terracotta Army turned up on 29 March. Share →
Hiroo Onoda was not the last soldier of World War II. Private Teruo Nakamura held out even longer and was arrested in Indonesia on 18 December 1974. Japan's government had declared Onoda dead back in 1959. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 25 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 6 years later
- 1981 AIDS first described — 7 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 21 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 13 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 6 years earlier
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 15 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 15 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 17 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 13 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 11 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 15 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 17 years later
Middle East
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 4 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 5 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 6 years later
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 16 years later
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 19 years later
Africa
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 11 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 7 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 7 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — same year
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 9 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 5 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 4 years earlier
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 1 year earlier
- 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens — 6 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 9 years later
Oceania
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 20 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 15 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 18 years later
Alive at the time
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 85)
- Mao Zedong (aged 81)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 56)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 44)
- Haile Selassie (aged 82)
- Golda Meir (aged 76)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 75)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 73)
- Dmitri Shostakovich (aged 68)
- Leonid Brezhnev (aged 68)