Hitchhikers Picked up in Iwo Jima Turn out to be Japanese Soldiers in Hiding for 4 Years
By 1945, the tide of WWII had turned decisively against Japan, as the American advance across the Pacific drew ever closer to the Japanese home islands. American planners set their sights on Iwo Jima, a small volcanic island about 750 miles south of Tokyo, as a suitable staging area for an eventual invasion of Japan. The Japanese, aware of the threat posed by an Iwo Jima in American hands, set out to garrison it.
Ymakage Kufuku and Matsudo Linsoki were two Japanese machine gunners assigned to the island’s garrison. Iwo Jima was invaded in February of 1945, and some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the entire Pacific War ensued. The defenders fought fanatically, almost to the last man: out of a garrison of 21,000 Japanese, nearly 20,000 died before the island was declared secured.
Linsoki and Kufuku were among the few Japanese survivors who neither died fighting, nor committed suicide. Believing their government’s propaganda that Americans tortured and killed prisoners, they were too afraid to surrender, and so they went to ground. They hid during the day in the warren of tunnels that honeycombed the rocky island, and emerged at night to pilfer food and other necessaries from the American garrison’s supply and trash dumps. Via such means, Linsoki and Kufuku managed to survive for a long time in a barren and inhospitable island bereft of vegetation and game. The American garrison’s lack of interest in scouring Iwo Jima hard landscape enabled the Japanese duo to go unnoticed for years.
That lasted until January 6th, 1949, when a pair of US Air Force corporals in a Jeep spotted two pedestrians in uniforms a few sizes too big, walking alongside a road. They took them for Chinese laborers, and although they spoke no English and were uncommunicative, the American airmen assumed they were hitch hiking to the island’s main base. So they kindly gave them a lift, and dropped them off in front of the garrison’s headquarters building.
From there, Linsoki and Kufuku wandered around the American base for hours, until a passing American sergeant realized that they were Japanese and took them in. After the initial interrogation, the duo took their captors to their hideout. There, the Americans found a cave richly stocked with canned foods, flashlights, batteries, uniforms, boots and shoes and socks, and sundry goods that the pair had been pilfering over the years.