In 1953, Josef von Sternberg, one of the legendary Hollywood directors from the silent and early sound era, completed what was to be his final film. Curiously, the man who while working for Paramount Pictures had made a star of Marlene Dietrich in such lurid melodramas as Morocco and The Scarlet Empress, ended his directorial career by making a movie in Japan: The Saga of Anatahan. The film was a spectacular flop in both Japan and America and was quickly forgotten, as was the incredible story that had inspired it.
Anatahan is a small island of the Northern Mariana group in Micronesia. The Marianas are broadly located to the east of the Philippines and south of the Japanese mainland. The larger and more southerly islands of Guam, Saipan and Tinian became major battlegrounds during the Pacific War and the setting for the infamous ‘Marianas Turkey Shoot’, which decimated the Japanese naval air-arm. Guam was first acquired by the United States as a result of the Spanish-American War. However, the other islands were all purchased from the Spanish by Imperial Germany in 1899 and remained under their nominal administration until 1914, when they were seized by Japan. Japanese ownership was formally recognised by the Versailles Treaty in 1919. [1]
In fact, Japanese businessmen had been working in partnership with the Germans and indigenous Chamorro islanders long before World War One, although activity on Anatahan and the other small northern islands was mainly limited to coconut plantations and the production of copra. The manual labour was mostly carried out by inhabitants from the nearby Caroline Islands; Carolinians. However, even at its height, copra production on Anatahan, which covers only seven square miles, was small-scale. In 1929, the island had less than a dozen documented residents, and the population probably did not exceed fifty over the next decade (Russel, 1998). Even then, living on the island was a lonely and isolated existence, with at best monthly visits paid by the company steamer, and very little in the way of infrastructure.
The Japanese seized Guam, effectively unifying the archipelago, in 1941. Whereas defending the larger islands became strategically important to prevent them being used as airbases for bombing raids on the mainland, the smaller, more mountainous and densely forested northern islands including Anatahan were largely ignored by the Japanese military. A group of 43 Carolinians and two Japanese nationals from Okinawa continued to reside and work on Anatahan right up until US forces invaded the larger southern islands in June 1944. Those now trapped on the island were quickly joined by another group, survivors from a convoy of 19 Japanese supply ships, many of them fishing boats, which had been attacked while abreast of the island. 31 men from three sunken vessels, a mix of imperial navy seamen, army privates and navy-drafted civilians, made it to shore (Peters, 1973). It would be seven years before any of these men would see their homes again. For some, it would be never.
To understand how a group of combatants can be left behind for years on a battlefield, one needs to appreciate the geographic nature of the Pacific and the resultant strategy of the US military. By 1941, the Japanese empire stretched across the entire Philippines to the fringes of Indonesia; encompassing literally thousands of islands. Facing the prospect of having to defeat dozens of heavily fortified bases across this vast Japanese-held territory, the Americans settled on a form of siege warfare called leap-frogging. Having pacified one island in a group, US combined forces could then starve out the enemy on neighbouring islands by blockading the surrounding sea and air.
The greatest example of this leap-frogging policy was Rabaul, in modern day Papua New Guinea, where a garrison of 70,000 Japanese troops were simply left to ‘wither on the vine’, as US forces bypassed it for an easier target. In another notable leap-frogging act, strongholds in the eastern Marshall Islands were left cut off by a direct advance on the central island of Kwajalein. 25,000 troops effectively sat out the war in Chi-Chi-Jima, an island to the northeast of Iwo Jima, as did more than 2,000 troops on Pagan, about 200km north of Anatahan (Russel, 1998).
Even on islands that were directly assaulted by US marines, pockets of Japanese troops would often withdraw to the dense jungles, unwilling to accept defeat or the humiliation of surrender. These men became known as ‘holdouts’. Such behavior was underpinned by the feudal mentality of ‘Bushido’:
‘Bushido, the code of the Samurai warrior, extolled the offensive, created a lust for battle and condemned weakness. It demanded bravery, loyalty, allegiance to orders, and forbade surrender.’ (Taylan)
While some troops did surrender, many others chose to fight to the death to conform to this martial doctrine. Although most emerged from hiding in the late 40s, several remarkable individuals escaped detection for decades, the most famous being Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, who held out on Guam until 1972, and Lieutenant Hiroo Onada on Lubang Island in The Philippines, finally repatriated in 1974. In both cases, the men only surrendered when directly commanded to do so by their superior officers. The Anatahan ‘holdout’ is significant in being the last group surrender of Japanese military personnel.
The Americans first became aware of a Japanese presence on Anatahan in February 1945. In January, a B29 Super-Fortress had crashed on the island while returning from a bombing raid on the Japanese mainland, killing all the crew. Although the crash apparently went unnoticed by the Japanese, the Americans swiftly organized a landing party to retrieve the airmen’s bodies. In addition to this grisly task, the Americans also took off the stranded group of Carolinians, from whom they first learned about the existence of ‘armed’ Japanese troops. The Japanese were aware of the American landings but chose to avoid a confrontation. Having learned of their presence, however, the Americans took to intermittently strafing and bombing the island until the end of the war.
Then in September 1945, another American ship appeared off Anatahan, this time broadcasting that the war was over. News of Japan’s surrender was also conveyed through the dropping of leaflets and placing of Japanese newspapers and magazines on the beach. In all cases, the castaways refused to come out of hiding, convinced they were being deceived by enemy propaganda. The periodic demolition of stockpiles of surplus ammunition on Saipan after the war – ‘the unmistakable sound of combat’ – may have reinforced this belief (Peters, 1973).
In the immediate post-war period, the US authorities lost interest in the fate of Anatahan’s castaways, more preoccupied with the repatriation of their own servicemen. It wasn’t until 1949 that the new Deputy Civil Administrator of Saipan, Lieutenant Commander James B. Johnson, renewed efforts to contact the group.
In June 1950, Johnson was sailing close to the shore in a navy cutter, the Miss Susie, when a figure was sighted waving from the beach. A four-man landing party was dispatched the next morning to investigate. When the party returned, Johnson was astonished to discover the fifth member was a woman; an Okinawan national named Kazuko Higa. With the woman’s help, Johnson was able to trace relatives of some of the remaining holdouts back in Japan. The letters they subsequently wrote provided the proof the men needed that the war was indeed over. On 30th June 1951, almost six years after the end of the war, the remaining 18 men formally surrendered to Johnson, an interpreter and a handful of news reporters, ceremoniously presenting the commander with two old rifles. The men were taken aboard the navy tug USS Cocopa, where they were clothed and fed in preparation for their eventual repatriation to Japan.
The story could have ended there, but it didn’t. It quickly emerged through the international press that in the midst of the Pacific conflict, a mini-drama had been playing out amid the steep gorges and lush foliage of Anatahan, one that had cost the lives of a dozen men; ‘a sometimes heroic, sometimes ludicrous epic of misguided patriotism and a more understandable – to Western minds – melodrama of hunger, sex, jealousy and violence.’ (Kalischer, 1952)
Bow Creek to Anatahan 