Sublime

Hiroo Onoda returned to Japan in 1974 and became a kind of celebrity in his home country.

While Eisenhower wrestled with the bookkeeping, MacArthur settled in. He’d met his second wife, Jean, on the trip over. His only son, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in Manila, with Manuel Quezon as the godfather. MacArthur took up residence in the penthouse of the Parsons-designed Manila Hotel. He became a fixture of Manila society, even receiving a

It was as if the “world was standing on its head,” wrote a Filipina who watched this. “The Americans, rulers and idols for as long as we could remember, were turned overnight into unshaven, shambling wretches.” Yet in mainlanders’ eyes, the whites who had faced Japan were heroes, MacArthur most of all. While the generals in charge of Hawai‘i on Dec

It was sometimes asserted that Yamashita’s postwar execution for war crimes was unjustified, but the general was never even indicted for the systematic massacres of Chinese which took place at Singapore under his command. Yamashita once delivered a speech in which he asserted that, while his own people were descended from gods, Europeans were desce

Piotr Tarczynkski, a twenty-six-year-old factory clerk, had been ill for some weeks before he was mobilised. But when he informed the commanding officer of his artillery battery that he was ailing, the colonel responded with a brisk patriotic speech, “and told me he was sure that once I found myself in the saddle I would feel much better.” Equipmen