No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War by Hiroo Onoda

 

9781557506634

Bluejacket Books/Naval Institute Press, 1999

originally published 1974

translated by Charles S. Terry

paperback

219 pp

I bought this book last year when I read that Werner Herzog had written a novel based on the strange story of Hiroo Onoda, author of this memoir and a soldier in the Japanese Army during World War II.   I've now read both books -- this one and Herzog's The Twilight World, and I've watched the film Onoda: 10,000 Nights in The Jungle which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021.  Evidently I couldn't get enough of this man's story -- it seems that indeed, sometimes truth is even stranger than fiction.

It was 1942 when Onodo was called up for his army physical; in December of that year he reported to the Two Hundred Eighteenth Infantry Regiment.  After a brief time  in Nanchang, he took and passed his officer examination, eventually ending up at the Futumata branch of the Nakano Military school where he was taught how to engage in secret warfare.   In October 1944, American forces landed on Leyte; Onoda and forty-two other trainees were told they would be going to the Philippines.  First, though, he would have a bit of leave, which he spent at his family home; ironically, as it happens, on leaving to report back to the army he told his mother that if she is informed that he had been killed, 

"don't think too much about it, because I may well show up again after a few years."

 Given what happened with this man, that turned out to be an understatement.  Onoda was assigned to Lubang Island, to "lead the Lubang Garrison in guerrilla warfare."    The objective: "to hamper the enemy attack on Luzon." Onoda was directed to destroy both the airfield and the pier at the island's harbor; he was further tasked with destroying enemy planes and killing the crews "should the enemy land" there.   His final orders, however, were that he was "forbidden" to kill himself:  

" It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens we'll come back for you.  Until then, so long as you have one soldier, you are to continue to lead him.  You may have to live on coconuts. If that's the case, live on coconuts! Under no circumstances are you to give up your life voluntarily."

 

from Semantic Scholar

The situation on the island, for many reasons, started to go south almost immediately.  By December of 1944 when Onoda arrived at Lubang, the tide of war had already started to turn in favor of the Allies and it was so grim that people back home in Japan were already bracing for enemy forces to land in their country.   The "best outfit in the whole Japanese army" on Lubang weren't really up to fighting; they just "wanted to get off Lubang" and Onoda was hampered by the officers who refused to listen to him or to allow their soldiers to help him in his mission because they were "too busy."  In one garrison, only half of the men were actually fit for work, the others sick and plagued by fatigue; newly-arriving soldiers failed to bring food with them and had to share in what little resources were available. As he notes, the five-month supply of rice would likely last for two months at best.   He wrote that the troops he was supposed to be leading were "a bunch of good-for-nothings, concerned with only their immediate wants," and he had no authority to set them straight.  With all of this (and much more) going on, Onoda couldn't convince anyone of the need for guerrilla warfare; even worse, when the Americans came to Lubang, they captured the airfield Onoda had been ordered to destroy.  

Fast forward to October of 1945, when Onoda received word via a piece of paper on which, written in Japanese, was a statement that "The war ended on August 15," and that the Japanese soldiers should "come down from the mountains."  Onoda believed none of it, thinking it was an enemy ploy, and later at  the end of the year, leaflets dropped from a B-17 offered copies of the surrender order from General Yamashita as well as a directive from the chief of staff.  Once again he refused to believe what he was reading, deciding that these were "phony."  These messages continued, and in every instance Onoda decided that it was the work of the enemy, that they were being tricked via propaganda into surrendering.  By 1946 he was down to just four men, all of whom vowed that they would "keep on fighting."  It wouldn't be until 1974 that he stepped out of the jungle, once he had word from his commanding officer that Japan had indeed surrendered and that he was ordered to return home. 

In the meantime, his little group of four became just one, with Onoda the only one left standing.  His story reveals how he tried to do his best to continue his original mission while trying to survive in the jungle of Lubang Island, not an easy feat by any stretch.  By the time his band of soldiers came down to just his comrade Kozuka  and himself,  Onoda says that they had "developed so many fixed ideas" that they were "unable to understand anything that did not conform to them."   He stood firm in his tenacity and his commitment, not just to his mission but also to his firm belief that there was absolutely no way that Japan could have lost the war, let alone that his country's government had surrendered.    It would only be after he was on board the helicopter that would take him home in 1974 that he would finally question his time in Lubang, asking "Who had I been fighting for? What was the cause?" 

Onoda leaving the jungle with former commanding officer Tanaguchi after he'd officially relieved him of duty. From Rare Historical Photos

At the same time, it is important to remember that this is Onoda's story as told to a ghostwriter  and it is likely incomplete.  As so many readers have been quick to point out, it says nothing about the crimes the Japanese on Lubang perpetrated against the people who lived there.  At a website called Rare Historical Photos, the writer discussing the photos of Onoda notes that "he and his companions had killed some 30 people in their long war" (pardoned by President Marcos), and there is also a trailer on Vimeo for a new documentary by Mia Stewart called "Searching for Onoda" in which she turns to her family on Lubang to express how Onoda's war affected the island's people.   I can't find any information about when this documentary will be available to the viewing public, but I definitely plan to watch when it is released.   And there's this: according to an article I read at the BBC's Culture page,  the ghostwriter of this book, Ikeda Shin, published his own account, Fantasy Hero, in which he felt "it was his responsibility to inform the public that he believed Onoda was not a hero, nor a soldier, nor even a brave man."  

 I had a lot of  trouble putting it down once started and every time a new announcement would come for Onoda about the war being over, I was just floored by his logic as to why he refused to give up.   I would also definitely recommend reading No Surrender if you are planning to read Herzog's book or if you're thinking about watching the film based on his book just so you have some background.  However you choose to view Onoda in light of the criticisms against him, the book still makes for great reading, and it's one I definitely recommend if you're looking for something well out of the ordinary. 

 

 

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country, by Edward Parnell

 

9780008271992

William Collins, 2020

468 pp

paperback

Given that I have an intense passion for old ghost stories and weird fiction, it's surprising that I hadn't heard of Ghostland  until I started seeing a number of reader reviews of it on Goodreads.   It was so highly regarded that I knew I had to read it, and once picked up it was not put down.  That's how very good it is.  It is all at once a book of psychogeography, a  chronicle of family, memories, travel, and nature;  and at its very heart, a beautiful, moving memoir of  grief.  And if that isn't enough to whet anyone's appetite, in Ghostland  Parnell also treads the ground walked by some of Britain's most famous writers of ghost stories and the weird.  

In an interview at Folk Horror Revival, the author explains how he had gone to the childhood home of M.R.  James, Great Livemere, and wrote about it on his website, after which he was contacted by a managing editor from Harper Collins.  He was asked if he'd ever considered writing a book about James and "other writers of the weird and eerie."  The idea appealed, especially a book that would be "concerned with ghost stories and films and the places around Britain that fed into them."  In Ghostland , as he notes, since childhood he'd been "obsessed" with the supernatural and horror; as a four year-old, as his story goes, while on holiday in Wales at Caernarfon Castle, he'd asked the tour guide if there might be a chance they would see "the Spectral lady."  He was also, as he puts it "part of what The Fortean Times has come to term the 'haunted generation'." More to the point though, he says that he "only wanted to write about the subject if I could bring something of myself to the narrative," and after doing 

"some proper thinking and research into who and where I'd want to explore, I realised that the locations I was considering were connected to my own family -- a story which itself could be said to be somewhat haunted." 

Leaving Livemere, as he says in the book, "the final words of James' last published story, 'A Vignette' resonate: 

Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once upon a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them?" 

 And in finding these "sequestered places," as he notes in the interview, 

"the writing of the book became a way of reclaiming something that had been lost to me. A way of trying to give form to those half-glimpsed figures that otherwise languish in shadow on my father's old Kodachrome slides."

As he makes his way around to explore the locations from the books, movies, television shows and short stories that he enjoyed so much, he discusses these works and writes about the authors themselves, recalls childhood memories, and slowly reveals the story of his "phantom family -- a host of lives lived, then unlived" in an attempt to help him "reconcile the real and the half-remembered."  

While I won't go into very much here, one of the key ideas that runs through Ghostland is the link between landscape and the work of the writers he's chosen to explore here -- and how awareness of their environment seemed to have been embedded within themselves as much as it has been embedded in their writing.    There are more than mere traces  to be found in, as the back-cover blurb notes, "the ancient stones, stark shores and folkloric woodlands of Britain's spectered isle," as well as the inland waterways (and I'm so happy he mentioned Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Three Miles Up" which is one of the most frightening stories I've ever read -- and beware, the film version is not quite the same), graveyards, and more, including the stone rings, hills, and other features found in Arthur Machen's work, or Ithell Colquhoun's Cornwall, to mention only a few of the many places he visits. But landscape, nature and place  also have personal connections for Mr. Parnell -- they evoke memories of family, which he can now remember not in terms of "disquiet" but rather as  "reassuring." His journey is related here much along the same lines as W.G. Sebald's  Suffolk journey chronicled in The Rings of Saturn (another recent, excellent read) down to the photos embedded within the text. 

It is one of the most beautiful books I've read, a poignant way in which the author finds a way to try to express "what is haunting him," as well as a way in which to try to "lay to rest the ghosts" of his "own sequestered past."  I cannot recommend this one highly enough ... I'm sure I will go through it again many times.  An absolute no-miss for readers (like me) who thoroughly enjoy old ghost stories, and especially for readers who (also like me) are lovers of weird fiction.  

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of Fitzcarraldo, by Werner Herzog

"I looked around, and there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference and scornful condescension, ignoring everything:  the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time."

                                                                                                                         -- 299

A couple of months ago I found great joy in reading Ned Beauman's strange but wonderful novel Madness is Better Than Defeat, set mainly in the Honduran jungle which among other things, features a character whose task is to direct a film called "Hearts in Darkness" against the backdrop of an old Mayan temple. What he and his crew of actors and others do not know before they leave is that this same temple is also the destination for another group sent into the jungle, whose job is to dismantle the ruin piece by piece and ship it back to the US.  Eventually both groups come together and a standoff ensues.  One of the things that struck me while reading this book was the director's obsession with finishing this film and getting it just right in spite of the ensuing calamities, and it was impossible to read it without thinking about the making of Apocalypse Now and all of the huge setbacks encountered by Francis Ford Coppola.  After reading the book I looked through several interviews with Ned Beauman, and somewhere (and with apologies, I was dumb and didn't bookmark it), he made mention of Werner Herzog, another obsessive director who made Fitzcarraldo.  I'd seen the movie eons ago but I decided I'd watch it again, which then led me to Burden of Dreams,  the story behind that film.  Both were fascinating, but I wasn't quite finished yet -- I had to buy a copy of Herzog's Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo because at that time I was hooked on this story.  And I had to know what made this man tick.

9780061575549
Ecco, 2010
originally published as Eroberung des Nutzlosen, 2004
translated by Krishna Winston
306 pp -- paperback

As Herzog tells us in his preface, the book is not a collection of "reports on the actual filming," and it is not a journal, "except in a very general sense."  He refers to it as "inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle," but then says that he's not sure if that's really it either.   The book covers the period from June 1979 through November 1981, and while it is filled with some of the struggles he endured while trying to get his movie off the ground, it is also a deeply personal account, suffused with his observations about the Amazon jungle, its people, the rivers, and his relationship with nature,  trying to find some insight into it all while trying to maintain a sense of calm as the leader of the enterprise.   

For anyone unfamiliar with the movie Fitzcarraldo, it is very loosely based on the story of a Peruvian rubber baron, Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald. As Herzog explains in Burden of Dreams, the director only cared about one part of Fitzcarrald's story, in which he dismantles a ship and moves it across an isthmus onto another part of the river. In Conquest of the Useless he reveals how he sees it:

"It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape,, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong."

In Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo buys a ship and uses the native people who have joined him and his crew to move the ship up a steep slope to another part of the river where he can access his newly-bought rubber holdings, the profits of which he will use to realize his dream of building an opera house in Iquitos (a la the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus).   I won't go into any great detail here, but what I discovered in reading this book is that there are a number of similarities between Herzog and his character Fitzcarraldo, who is more than once referred to in the film as "the conquistador of the useless."  Both are dreamers, and both in their own way are lunatics, compelled by their visions.    As just one example, Herzog's backers assumed he'd use a model steamship, but no -- as he says here, he had to have a real one "being hauled over a real mountain" because it was stylistically characteristic of "grand opera."   In another entry from February 18, 1981, he goes so far to note the idea of playing Fitzcarraldo himself,  "because my project and character have become identical."  There is no greater truth in this book to be sure.  

One more thing I'll mention is the writing.  As I noted earlier, Conquest of the Useless is not simply a reconstruction of his time in the Amazon jungle while making the film, and Herzog's personal observations are beautifully conveyed through his prose. I noted one that I'll share here, made while he is in Belén near Christmas 1980:

"...Outside I looked down at the river for a long time, trying to regain some composure. Chatas, flat barges, are chugging along, carrying pipes for distant oil-drilling operations. Belén is partially under water. Today at daybreak the birds were pleading for the continued existence of the Creation. For them, anything but the continuation of the status quo is deadly. My watch has stopped now once and for all but for a long time I have been thinking in Amazonian terms anyway: before dinner, after the storm, toward evening. A blind, barefoot beggar was groping his way along the wall of a house. A woman was drinking water from an aluminum pot in which slimy fish from the river, with big eyes, were floating. One of them was dead, its underside white, belly up. Then a child drank from the pot."

 Having seen Fitzcarraldo before reading this book,  I wasn't surprised here at his ability to pick up on such detail, but I came away from Conquest of the Useless  with the conviction that his artistry went well beyond his directing skills. 

Of course, if you're interested in such details as his frustration with Klaus Kinski, or what it was like to work with Mick Jagger and Claudia Cardinale, that's here too, but this book reaches much deeper than a simple tell-all sort of thing.

highly recommended, even for people who haven't seen the movie, but you'll get much more from it if you do.

A veritable tryptich and a double mystery: She Said, She Said, He Said

Floreana Island, Galapagos (from destination360.com

read in April 2016

One early April night  I was going through one of my periodic bouts of insomnia,  tossing and turning and turning and tossing until I'd had enough. I decided to go downstairs to watch something on TV, figuring I'd bore myself back to sleep watching C-span or something. All that was on were infomercials and some really bad movies, and since by this time I was wide awake,  I moved over to Netflix and started skimming through documentaries (my favorite part of tv), and that's when I stumbled on one called "Satan Came to Eden."  It was based on one of the strangest stories I'd never heard, and so I wanted to know more. The result: a purchase of a veritable tryptich of books, two separate memoirs written by two women who'd been present at the time and an account by a writer in the 1980s who had "set out to follow the clues and solve the mystery."   The action took place back in the 1930s, when a strange woman who called herself the Baroness made her way to this lovely island, and after antagonizing everyone there, mysteriously disappeared off of the face of the earth along with her lover, never to be heard from again.

Starting with the book for which the documentary was named, Satan Came to Eden was written by Dore Strauch, who along with her lover and mentor Dr. Friedrich Ritter, decided to chuck life in German civilization and attempt to live in complete harmony with nature, hoping  to "fight their way to inner freedom."  Ritter, whose philosophy "moved between two poles, with Nietzsche at the one end and the other Laotse," kept a little black book in which he recorded the "remotest archipelagos and single islands."  Ultimately Ritter chose the small island of Floreana (aka Charles Island) in the Galapagos, based on reading William Beebe's 1924 book Galapagos: World's End.  (By the way, I get absolutely nada if anyone clicks through to Amazon so feel free.)  By the end of June, 1929, Ritter had given up his practice, the two of them had said their last farewells, and made their way to Floreana where they set about the business of living.  While Dore's book has a LOT of information about the Baroness, her entourage and her disappearance, much of Satan Came to Eden involves, of course, the hardships they went through in getting started, one of which was the arrival of a second German family on the island.  The new guys, the  Wittmers,  had read some of the newspaper accounts which had filtered back to Germany about the modern Robinson Crusoes, and in need of a healthy environment to raise their young but ill son, had also decided to make Floreana their home.  Margret Wittmer's story  is documented in book two, Floreana: A Woman's Pilgrimage to the Galapagos, which also gives a firsthand view of adjusting to life on a "wild, untamed 

desert island in the heart of the Galapagos archipelago."  The Wittmers arrived in 1932; at the time, Margret was five months pregnant.  Obviously, the story of the Wittmers adjustment to life there is different than that of Dr. Ritter and Dore Strauch, but they overlap with the arrival of another person and her entourage, the Baroness Wagner de Bosquet.  By all accounts, the Baroness (self-styled, of course) was a bizarre woman, coming in tow with her two lovers, Phillippson and Lorenz,  and a hired hand who couldn't wait until his contract was up to get away from her.   The Wittmers and the Ritter/Strauch party got only an inkling of what they would be in for once the Baroness arrived; over time she would proclaim herself the owner of the island, set up a hotel, and involve the other islanders into her sordid affairs including a near-deadly rivalry between the two men who loved her.  The Baroness certainly made life on Floreana difficult for her neighbors -- stealing supplies destined for the others and charging them exorbitant rates to get them back, prowling around, spying, and trying to cause tension between the Wittmers and the Ritter/Strauches.   After some time of having to put up with this whacked-out, crazy woman (who would sometimes meet island guests in her panties) and the strange goings on between her two men, Margret hears the Baroness announce that she'll be leaving Floreana to go to the South Seas, and that was pretty much the last time anyone ever saw her.  She disappeared with Phillippson, leaving a very sick Lorenz behind, but afterwards, she was never heard from again. That was 1934; no one has ever found any traces, including bodies. 

These two women's accounts offer varying takes on what may have happened to the Baroness and Phillippson.  Wittmer notes that the Baroness must have kept with her plan to go off to the South Seas via a visiting yacht;  Dore Strauch, who got the dates of the disappearance completely wrong, was adamant that murder had been done, and offered some clues (screams in the night, gunshots, etc.,) to bolster her claim along with some accusations.  But for me, the most interesting story in these books centers around the death of Friedrich Ritter -- was his death truly an accident, or was there more to it? 

In 1983, John Traherne offered his ideas in his The Galapagos Affair, in which he not only looks at the memoirs of the two women but at outside sources as well. He goes over the story, putting all of the players in place as these strange events occur, leading up to the disappearance of the Baroness and Phillippson; he then posits his opinion as to what may have happened.  Moreover, he examines the conflicting "she said she said" accounts of Ritter's death and comes up with various scenarios and then an entirely plausible solution, which actually accords with what I thought after I'd read the two women's accounts.  I won't say what that was, but I will say that of those two books, one of them is entirely suspicious, since the writer contradicts herself more than just once. It's also very obvious that she has something to prove, but I won't say any more.  I love playing armchair detective, and these books offered a great opportunity to do so. 

If nothing else, check out the documentary -- the bizareness of the whole thing, especially in the case of the Baroness,  leaps out at you while you're watching, and in my case, I couldn't turn away.  I was so fascinated with it all that until my books arrived, I read every single thing I could find on these cases -- that's how deeply these mysteries got under my skin.  The books (all three) and the documentary I recommend for people into historical true crime; if you want to skip the two memoirs and go right to Treherne's book, he does a great job in bringing forth material from both accounts, summarizing them, adding in other, outside accounts,  and then offering his own viewpoint.   I'm left wondering though just  how many of these odd, unsolved mysteries there are that may be worth reading about which,  as was the case with this story, I had no clue even existed.  Now my appetite is whetted -- I'll be looking for them.