No Surrender by Hiroo Onoda Page A

woodcutters had been here only a day earlier, the stump was still damp, and there were usually green leaves lying about. If the stump was dry and the leaves had withered, we knew that more time had elapsed.
    Footprints were an important aid, because we could often see that a set of footprints had been smeared by last night’s shower or the heavy rain we had had three days ago, and we would know that the woodcutters had been here before that. If they left food, it meant that they were coming back. The question was how soon. Whenever we took the rice, we had to move to a new location. Since that took time, even if we were half-starved, we had to decide whether we would have enough time to make a getaway before they came back.

    The northern part of Lubang was a gentle plain, but on the southern side, other than three or four small sandy beaches, there were only rugged, sea-torn cliffs.
    The population of the island was about twelve thousand, most of whom were farmers living on the north side. Only a few fishermen lived in the south. Largely because of Akatsu’s physical weakness, we centered our movements on the less populated, and therefore safer, mountains toward the south. We had a number of more or less fixed campsites, to which we gave names like “Twin Mountains” and “Two House Point,” but we were afraid to stay in any of them very long.
    Gradually, we developed a circuit of sorts, around which we moved from point to point, staying nowhere very long. This circuit was a rough ellipse coursing around the mountains in the central sector of the island ( see endpaper ). Starting at Gontin and moving counterclockwise, the next stop was Two House Point (or Kainan Point), then Wakayama Point, then Twin Mountains (or Kozuka Hill), then Shiokara Valley (or Shingu Point), then Snake Mountain Abutment (Kumano Point), then Five Hundred (later the radar base), then Binacas, then Six Hundred Peak and finally Gontin again. Sometimes when we reached Binacas we turned around and started back the other way.
    We usually stayed in one place from three to five days. When we went fast, we covered the whole circuit in as little as a month, but usually it took about two months, so that in the eight-month dry season, we did about four circuits.
    The amount of time we spent in one place depended to some extent on the availability of food. When there turned out to be more food somewhere than we had expected and little danger of being discovered by the islanders, naturally we lengthened our stay.
    We carried all our belongings with us, dividing up the load equally. When we moved, we tried always to take along enough food for the next day, but sometimes we ran out and had to count on finding food at the next stop. The average load that each man had to carry was about forty-five pounds.
    Although I had a pencil that I had found, I kept all the reports I intended to make in my head. I firmly believed that when friendly troops eventually established contact with us, they would need my reports in planning a counterattack. Their first objective would be to recapture the airfield, and I made mental notes about that area, as well as about the central part of the island where we were now living.
    Since I returned to Japan, there has been some speculationin the press as to whether I was left by the Japanese army as a spy, but I do not consider that I was a spy. I was sent to conduct guerrilla warfare, which is not the same thing. Cut off from the Japanese forces and reduced to the circumstances our group was in, there was no way for us to engage in guerrilla warfare in the ordinary sense. I could only perform those functions of guerrilla warfare that resemble the work of a spy.
    The techniques I had been taught at Futamata were of little use to me. I had learned to tap telephone lines, open letters surreptitiously and undo handcuffs, but these all involved there being a lot of other people around. Here in these mountains, it was far