The Unending Struggle: My 30-Year Battle for Survival

Link: Incredible story, One wonders how it can happen until you read the details and events that all came together.

Canada on Dec 27, 2023

David Cotton: Fantastic true story and the detailed accounts of their daily lives was shocking. It’s hard to understand how they felt everything was total lies and propaganda even so many decades later but they were all but delirious about the war and were obsessed beyond belief!

United States on Aug 26, 2023

A. Martin: 4 stars only because this was more a diary than a book. How could it not be if one is to condense 50 years into a few hundred pages. An incredible story from a devotion that simply has no equal in modern man.

United States on Jul 04, 2023

Amazon Customer: Bought as a present but read it myself later. What a story … all the more astonishing because it’s true! Read this book.

United Kingdom on Nov 01, 2021

Carlos: Ele passou 29 anos numa ilha acreditando que a guerra não terminou. Incrível.

Brazil on Jul 07, 2021

SOLISZT: Arrivé en temps, en heure et en bon état. Pour le contenu, l'intéressé me donnera un avis quand il l'aura terminé.

France on Jan 11, 2021

Iram Gómez: Shows us a lot from Japan's first steps in to guerrilla warfare in late WWII. Hiro Onoda show to us that the Bushido values are timeless.

Mexico on Jun 14, 2018

Salt1907: The author was a Japanese soldier in World War II that was abandoned on an island in the Philippines near the end of the war. He was told not to surrender until the rest of the Japanese army came back for him. He and a handful of others held out for years. Gradually, all of his comrades were killed. He survived in the mountains of his populated island by killing nearby livestock, hiding such food and ammunition as he had, stealing supplies from nearby houses, etc. He held out until 1974, despite attempts by his own government and family to retrieve him. Amazingly, he was still engaged in shootouts with police and others decades after the war ended. This book is his own account.

He provides as near a how-to manual for survival in the wilderness as is possible under the circumstances. He also provides an explanation as to how he could believe that the war continued into the 1970's (despite stealing and listening to a radio at certain times). He describes how it was that he finally came to accept the end of the war and the end of his mission in the jungle.

The book is of interest far beyond those who study war and jungle survival. This book...

United States on Sep 23, 2017

James Denny: A fine work and a testimony to the dedication, loyalty and supreme sense of duty in a model Japanese soldier.

Coming from a humble background and resigned to military service as a junior enlisted man, Hiroo Onoda unexpectedly found himself in guerilla-warfare training school as an officer-candidate. Because of the exigencies of the war deeply in progress by 1944, Onoda and his classmates graduated early on a expedited training schedule to be able to be put into combat quickly.

Onoda and a handful of other officers, along with about forty enlisted men were put on Lubang Island in the Philippines, an Island strategically-located near the entrance to Manila Harbor. While Lubang remained under Japanese control, it was necessary for Japan to guard, fortify and keep it under Japanese control since the Americans were clearly intent on returning. The Americans had started to gain the upper hand in their quest to get back the Philippines. It was unclear if the natives on the Island would continue to reluctantly cooperate with the Japanese occupiers, switch their loyalty over to the Americans or perhaps, pursue a path to independence by playing off one...

United States on Apr 08, 2016

Bob Jarvis: There is no doubting the veracity of this account. The circumstances are well documented & I even remember seeing the old newsreels of Onoda's return from the jungle. What is beyond belief to me is the manner in which Onoda & his colleagues constantly contrived to disbelieve the news that the war was over. They also managed to re-invent this subterfuge, for another 30 years, as new intelligence became available to them. For goodness sake, he even finished up with a transister radio & tuned in to Japanese radio stations. Daaarrr! The man was treated as a hero & his efforts, & wasted life, seen as devotion to duty. Not so in my opinion! Poor Hiroo was simply reacting to stimuli as part of a blind obedience to a lifetime of Government brain-washing. The actual story is OK, but told with little excitement. Indeed, his contacts with the Philippine population were few & brief, considering the 30 year time-scale. Apart from the death of his two long time colleagues, not much really happens & the story reads rather like a boy scout, outward bound, guide. My efforts to get into the tale were constantly thwarted when reading of the...

United States on Jul 20, 2001