20. The Holdouts Who Lasted For Years on Barren Iwo Jima
Yamakage Kufuku and Matsudo Linsoki were two Japanese machine gunners assigned to defend Iwo Jima, when the island was invaded by American forces in February, 1945. Some of the fiercest and bloodiest combat of the 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. Kufuku and Linsoki were among the few Japanese who neither died fighting, nor committed suicide. Believing their government’s propaganda that Americans tortured and killed prisoners, they were too afraid to surrender. So they went to the ground – literally.
The former machine gunners hid during the day in the warren of tunnels that honeycombed the rocky island, and emerged at night to steal food and other necessaries from the American garrison’s supply and trash dumps. Through such means, Kufuku and Linoski 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’s hard landscape enabled the Japanese duo to go unnoticed for years.