Since Japan was having such difficulties in China, the reasoning went, its armed forces would be no match for the British. This gross underestimation can in part be explained by the fact that Japan had become interminably bogged down by its undeclared war against China since 1931. In early 1941, General Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Far East, reported that one of his battalion commanders had lamented, 'Don't you think (our men) are worthy of some better enemy than the Japanese?' But the most extraordinary story belongs to Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who continued fighting on the Philippine island of Lubang until 9 March 1974 - nearly 29 years after the end of the war.īefore hostilities with the Allies broke out, most British and American military experts held a completely different view, regarding the Japanese army with deep contempt. Other, smaller groups continued fighting on Guadalcanal, Peleliu and in various parts of the Philippines right up to 1948. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers remained in China, either caught in no-man's land between the Communists and Nationalists or fighting for one side or the other.
Yet not everybody was to lay down their arms. To most Japanese - not to mention those who had suffered at their hands during the war - the end of hostilities came as blessed relief. Nearly three million Japanese were dead, many more wounded or seriously ill, and the country lay in ruins.
It was a classic piece of understatement.
He never spoke explicitly about 'surrender' or 'defeat', but simply remarked that the war 'did not turn in Japan's favour'. When Emperor Hirohito made his first ever broadcast to the Japanese people on 15 August 1945, and enjoined his subjects 'to endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable', he brought to an end a state of war - both declared and undeclared - that had wracked his country for 14 years.