For some soldiers the Second World War could not end too soon while for others it could not go on long enough.

So while most soldiers looked forward to casting off their Khaki and enjoying emotional reunions with their sweethearts and families there were some diehards for whom the victory parades of 1945 were a bitter pill to swallow.

And when it came to diehards none took the end as badly as intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese imperial soldier to come out of hiding and surrender 29 years after the end of World War II.

He has recently died aged 91 so his bizarre story has been given a new lease of life to a disbelieving generation for whom this war is now a very distant event indeed.

It is an extraordinary tale of a man who refused to surrender, only coming out of hiding when his former commander flew to the Lubang Island in the Philippines in March 1974 to reverse his 1945 orders to stay behind and spy on American troops.

March 1974!

When Onoda finally came out of the jungle the world must have seemed a completely different place to the one he had been used to.

The previous month, after a record 84 days in orbit, the crew of Skylab 4 had returned to Earth.

While March itself saw Edward Heath waving goodbye to 10 Downing Street as Harold Wilson moved in and the game-changing 1973 oil crisis ended.

The Rolling Stones and the Beatles were driving teenage girls crazy while Saturday Night Fever was just a few years away.

All a far cry from slaughtering cattle in the jungle and living off nuts, beans, stolen rice and bananas.

Of course the story was so incredible that his emergence from the jungle received huge media coverage – imagine the Spice Girls releasing a new single, that kind of thing.

And the most bizarre aspect of all was that if it had not been for the determination of an adventurer, Norio Suzuki, he might very well have died there.

To recap, most Japanese soldiers surrendered when US troops landed on Lubang in February 1945.

But Onoda refused to give up, despite at least four searches, during which family members appealed to him over loudspeakers and flights dropped leaflets urging him to surrender.

He thought it was an American plot.

But while governments got nowhere, Suzuki, was made of sterner stuff. Despite having a gun pointed at him by Onoda on their first meeting in February, he returned to Japan, contacted the government, which located Onoda’s superior, Maj. Yoshimi Taniguchi, and flew him to his hideout in Lubang to deliver his surrender order in person.

Formally surrendering to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Onoda wore his 30-year-old imperial army uniform. Unsurprisingly, for such a determined warrior, his cap and sword were still in good condition.

Wisely, he waited until all the fuss had died down and bought a ranch in Brazil. He later was head of a children’s nature school in northern Japan.

“I don’t consider those 30 years a waste of time,” Onoda said in an interview in 1995.

 “Without that experience, I wouldn’t have my life today.”