Hiroo Onoda was the Japanese soldier who surrendered on Lubang Island in 1974, decades after World War II ended. He formally handed over his sword to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos on March 11, 1974.
Onoda had been a second lieutenant in Japanese military intelligence and was sent to Lubang in the Philippines in 1944. He was ordered to conduct guerrilla operations and not surrender. After Japan’s 1945 capitulation, he and several comrades continued hiding in the island’s forests because they believed wartime messages were enemy propaganda.
Onoda’s former commanding officer, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, traveled to Lubang to release him from his orders. Onoda then left the island in uniform and surrendered. He was not the last Japanese wartime holdout overall: Teruo Nakamura surrendered later in 1974, while Shoichi Yokoi had been found in Guam in 1972. Those cases are often mixed together in popular accounts.