Japan's Imperial Army

by Edward J Drea

  Force Structure (Navy)

  First-line

  8 battleships

  8 armored cruisers

  First-line

  16 battleships

  8 armored cruisers

  First-line

  12 capital ships (includes 3 aircraft carriers); 40 cruisers

  Operational

  Against Russia; offensive in Manchuria and Ussuri River regions

  Against others; first destroy enemy sea power, then move to next stage (planning pending)

  Against Russia; occupy strategic points east of Lake Baikal

  Against USA; occupy Luzon;

  Against China; protect Japanese interests and citizens by deploying force

  Preemptive offensive operations; seize Guam and Luzon

  Against Russia and China, same as 1918

  Source: Kuwada Etsu and Maebara Toshio, eds., Nihon no sensō zukai to dēta [Japan’s wars—maps and data] (Tokyo: Hara shobō, 1982), part 2 (appendix), table 1.

  When Tanaka Giichi returned briefly as war minister in September 1923, he sought to implement his ideas on army reorganization by forming the Institutional Research Committee with his deputy Ugaki as chairman. For working purposes, the committee assumed that even when planning for a short, decisive war, Japan had to prepare for a protracted conflict. Military power became a single element that had to be integrated into national industrial, economic, and personnel mobilization for total war.22

  Table 8.2. Competing Visions of a Future Army

  Traditionalists

  Revisionists

  Large army

  Small army

  Low-tech

  High-tech

  Morale

  Material

  Short war

  Long war

  Bayonet

  Firepower

  Infantry

  Combined arms

  Win first battle

  Endure protracted war

  Military mobilization

  National mobilization

  Limited war

  Total war

  Square division

  Triangular division

  Ugaki became war minister in December 1923 but still kept a hand in the committee. A short war, he believed, might be possible against China, but a conflict with the Americans in the Pacific, the Soviets in the Far East, or the British and French in southwest Asia would necessarily be a drawn-out total affair. Ugaki reasoned that no matter how much planning went into a short war scenario against a single opponent the chances were good that Japan would have to fight a protracted war against a coalition. This led to the conclusion that the army had to prepare for industrial and national mobilization during peacetime by incorporating the latest advances in weapons technology and scientific applications to warfare.23 The committee would accomplish these goals by eliminating four active divisions and the restructuring of other units. The army would invest the savings realized by the force structure and personnel reductions into modern weaponry—aircraft, tanks, antiaircraft artillery—as well as research and development.

  Ugaki presented his army reorganization plan to the nine-member Military Board of Councilors in March 1925. Uehara and three others were opposed, and Gen. Fukuda raised the expected objections that Japan’s industrial limitations should give added emphasis to fighting spirit and hand-to-hand combat. Ugaki, however, had previously stacked the committee by appointing five of his supporters, and they outvoted the Uehara faction five to four.24 In May 1925 Ugaki eliminated four divisions, the Taiwan Garrison Headquarters, and two military preparatory schools (about 40,000 personnel) while he increased the numbers of radios and vehicles and established new schools to train personnel in their use. At the tactical level, he augmented the infantry battalion with more heavy machine guns and equipped platoons with a new light machine gun suitable for fast-paced mobile warfare.

  Most of the savings, however, went to fund two tank units, new antiaircraft units, research and development expenses, and ten new aircraft squadrons (sixteen total), which were paired with the existing six to form eight air regiments.25 The technical board deemed bombers less effective than artillery for ground support and only approved one light bomber regiment. The others were aerial reconnaissance and fighter units. The army turned to civilian industry to produce its aircraft and promoted competition for their design and manufacture. The Nakajima, Kawasaki, and Mitsubishi corporations, however, soon monopolized the fledgling aircraft industry.26

  Ugaki’s reforms reduced the term of conscription from three to two years in order to save more money but simultaneously build a larger reserve pool available for mobilization because conscripts would cycle through the active force quicker and then enter the reserves sooner. He placed officers from inactivated units into positions as military instructors in elementary and middle schools as drill instructors, extending the army’s influence in the educational system in anticipation that the nation’s schools would indoctrinate youth with accepted military values and patriotism to facilitate their transition as conscripts into the army barracks.27

  Within two months Ugaki also forced three conservative members of the research committee to retire because of age or physical disability.28 Uehara reacted by exposing a secret Diet slush fund established by Ugaki’s patron Tanaka Giichi, but Ugaki managed to sidestep any scandal. He quickly appointed his supporters (among them Minami Jirō, Sugiyama Hajime, Koiso Kuniaki, and Tatekawa Yoshitsugu) to important posts in the war ministry and general staff but failed to eradicate Uehara’s influence completely. The aging marshal rebuilt his power base around officers like Maj. Gen. Araki Sadao, operations division chief, general staff; Maj. Gen. Mazaki Jinsaburō, commandant of the military academy; and Maj. Gen. Hayashi Senjūrō, commander of the Tokyo Bay coastal defenses.

  Finally, in 1926 Ugaki established the Young Men’s Military Training Corps, a voluntary organization that offered civics education and military training conducted under the auspices of members of the Reservists Association to youths age 16 to 20 who had completed their formal education. Local communities organized and paid for these centers that offered 200 hours of annual instruction, half of it devoted to military drill. Regimental area commanders conducted yearly evaluations to measure military proficiency. The chief benefit of the programs was that qualified graduates who were subsequently conscripted could reduce their term of active service by six months. In exchange the army inculcated military values and virtues into large numbers of impressionistic youngsters.29

  The Army’s New Generation

  During the Meiji era (1868–1912) eleven of the thirty-one officers who achieved the rank of full general came from the former Chōshū domain and nine others were from Satsuma. Blatant pro-Chōshū bias and favoritism characterized Terauchi’s nine-year tenure as war minister (1902–1911) and embedded Chōshū men in important war ministry and general staff posts. After World War I, ambitious non-Chōshū affiliated officers were determined to break the clique’s stranglehold on senior army positions by reforming the army’s personnel system and modernizing the force. Yamagata’s death in 1922 weakened the Chōshū faction, but its adherents were well entrenched, and their senior colonels and general officers regrouped themselves around War Minister Ugaki.30

  In October 1921, Majors Nagata Tetsuzan, OkamuraYasuji, and Obata Toshishirō, three military attachés serving in Europe met at Baden-Baden, Germany, where they proposed to eliminate army cliques by reforming the personnel system as part of a larger army reorganization. Inspired by German Gen. Eric von Ludendorff ’s theories of total war and national mobilization, they envisaged a revitalized Japanese army presiding over a nation mobilized for total war.31 After returning to Japan in 1923, the three, along with Maj. Tōjō Hideki, organized an informal study group of about twenty like-minded field grade officers (colonels and majors) who were alumni of the fifteenth and sixteenth military academy classes. Academy graduates were destined to lead the army, and they competed fiercely for choice assignments and promo
tions. By the early 1920s, many mid-career officers were dissatisfied with the army’s personnel policies, which they believed perpetuated Chōshū’s institutional domination.

  The informal discussions about army reform were held at a French restaurant in Tokyo called the Futaba, and members called themselves the Futaba Club. A separate group, members of the twenty-first through twenty-fourth academy classes, started the Thursday Club in 1927, and its officers were soon debating Japan’s future role in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. The two amalgamated as the One Evening Society in May 1929, with membership restricted to officers from the fifteenth through twenty-fifth classes who were currently assigned to the war ministry or general staff.32

  Nagata’s group used the army’s educational system to advance its agenda by positioning members to block the admittance of Chōshū-affiliated officers to the staff college. Only a handful of applicants passed the rigorous annual competitive written and oral entrance examinations for admission to the staff college. During peacetime those not selected served their careers in line units, usually retiring as lieutenant colonels. At best they might lead battalions, but they were ineligible for general staff assignments or large unit (regiment and higher) command. Of course, army expansion during wartime opened promotions and command assignments to nongraduates, but staff college graduates were destined for future high command, colonel or general rank, or high-level staff assignments in either case. In short, selection to the staff college determined an officer’s future.33

  Several Futaba Club members became instructors at the staff college during the 1920s and 1930s, including Nagata (1923–1924) and Obata (1923–1926). Coincidentally or not, between 1922 and 1925 not a single Chōshū man qualified for admission, allegedly because the anti-Chōshū instructors failed Chōshū-affiliated candidates during the oral examinations. An exact correlation remains tentative because thirty Chōshū men did enter the staff college between 1927 and 1935, second only to the thirty-three candidates from far more populous Tokyo. Recent research suggests that Nagata played on the perception of Chōshū’s domination of the army to divert careful scrutiny of his more radical ideas on army reform.34 In any event, Nagata and other reformers also looked to younger general officers not affiliated with Chōshū for leadership and guidance and had high regard for Araki, an up-and-coming star, whom they expected to lead the army’s renovation.

  Large-Unit Doctrine

  To remedy command and control problems exposed during the Russo-Japanese War, in 1914 the army issued Principles of Command. This translation of the 1910 German field manual for the command and control of large units became the doctrinal bible for corps and army-level commanders.35 The general staff studied evolving large-unit doctrine during World War I as it related to technological advances in warfare, command and control improvements, battlefield mechanization, aircraft development, and total-war requirements. An ensuing wholesale revision of the army’s field manuals formulated strategic, operational, and tactical doctrine for the first time in a comprehensive and integrated set of mutually supporting principles.

  The revised 1921 Principles of Command acknowledged the implications of “the recent great advances in material warfare” but maintained that victory in battle ultimately still depended on intangibles like devotion to duty, patriotism, and willingness to sacrifice oneself to achieve objectives. Staff officers assumed that the next war would be short and culminate in the traditional decisive battle, but they did concede that fighting a protracted war of endurance would also require indomitable spirit. The resulting mishmash combined the contradictory strategies of rapid concentration of forces to open the war (an operational strategy designed to force a battle of annihilation) with preparations to fight a protracted war of endurance.36

  During the postwar decade, the Japanese officers, like those in other major armies, pondered the role of firepower, mobility, and dispersion in future conflict. In the mid-1920s, the operations divisions, under Maj. Gen. Araki’s guidance (May 1925–August 1927), produced the most far-reaching and influential revision of Principles of Command. An ideologue who believed in the intangibles of battle and a fervent anti-Communist, Araki selected like-minded younger officers as the principal authors to rewrite the manual. Lt. Col. Obata Toshishirō, one of the Baden-Baden threesome, was a Soviet expert and admirer of German Gen. Alfred von Schiefflen’s classic theories of wars of annihilation. He had previously served with Araki in the Guard Division and during World War I as a military observer in Russia, where the two had witnessed the 1917 Russian Revolution and were appalled at the chaos of the new Communist ideology that threatened Japan’s imperial system. Maj. Suzuki Yorimichi, the top graduate of the thirtieth staff college class, who had served in France as an observer during the war, shared Araki’s philosophy that spiritual or intangible values conferred special advantages in warfare.

  Brilliant but arrogant, aloof, and impervious to dissenting opinions, Obata and Suzuki worked in secrecy to devise a doctrine termed by one historian as “intense spiritual training” and bayonet-led breakthroughs to compensate for inferior numbers and resources. Research on World War I campaigns, for instance, emphasized mobile warfare exemplified by the German’s double envelopment of Russian armies at Tannenburg in 1914 more than the positional warfare of attrition on the Somme or at Verdun in 1916.37

  Unsurprisingly, the 1928 Principles of Command described fighting mobile battles of annihilation whose operational concept was a fast-moving, highly mobile offensive forcing a decisive battle early in the campaign. It embedded the dogma that élan and morale were the “primary causes of victory or defeat,” a condition unchanged “from time immemorial,” and made intangible qualities the linchpin of the army’s modern doctrine.38

  Araki’s and Obata’s influence also shaped the army’s new combined arms handbook for the conduct of division-echelon operations designed specifically for northeast Asia operations. During the first postwar decade, the general staff sent more than 350 officers to Europe to study modern warfare. Their numerous reports covered topics ranging from squad tactics to large-unit operations and were the basis for the operations division’s development of the combined arms manual.39

  Araki chaired the committee that produced the original 1926 draft, and his strong feelings about the role of morale, élan, and the power of intangibles in battle pervaded the finalized 1929 manual. The fundamental premise was that an army possessing offensive spirit would defeat one relying on material. Modern weapons and equipment were important, but nothing could be allowed to disparage the fighting spirit that gave soldiers total confidence in victory no matter what their material shortcomings. Commanders at every echelon would capitalize on fighting spirit to press home attacks that exploited enemy weaknesses without waiting for approval from higher headquarters.40

  Division and regimental commanders were expected to display initiative as they maneuvered to encircle the enemy to make possible the climactic assault with cold steel. To keep pace with a fast-moving infantry advance, the army designed light and mobile artillery. At the operational level, encirclement and night attacks were the ingredients of victory, and even outnumbered units were expected to envelop enemy flanks aggressively. Against fixed positions, units would advance under cover of darkness to avoid enemy artillery fire and position themselves for a dawn attack that combined firepower and shock action to overrun enemy positions. During a meeting engagement, commanders would maneuver to turn the opponent’s flanks, surround the enemy units, and then destroy them. If temporarily forced on the defensive, commanders had to counterattack to regain the initiative. Tactical withdrawals to gain overall advantage, though not prohibited, did create a dilemma for Japanese army tacticians who could not even use the word “retreat.”41

  The ideas and concepts behind the higher-echelon doctrines were distilled into tactical form in the 1928 Infantry Manual. Certain World War I lessons were incorporated, especially the German infiltration tactics that appeared late in the war, but the revisions perp
etuated bedrock principles of a Japanese style of warfare that exaggerated infantry tactics at the expense of combined-arms warfare. Victory, according to the manual, resulted from the combination of tangible and intangible factors found in “the magnificent tradition of Japanese arms.”

  Overpowering and destroying the enemy with cold steel—the soul of the offensive—would ensure a rapid victory. Attackers relied on surprise, shock, night attacks, and determination to press home assaults. Individual combat initiative was discouraged because success depended on concentrating firepower and manpower on narrow frontages to overwhelm defenders. Commanders had the responsibility to inculcate troops with a “belief in certain victory,” the first appearance of that concept in any manual.42

  Assault parties had to hold ground taken from the enemy, making a tactical withdrawal problematical. Even when the main attack faltered, soldiers had to fight to the last man, implying that surrender was impermissible. This philosophy in part accounted for Japan’s refusal to ratify the 1929 Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners of war.43 Nothing was allowed to impede the advance. Only officers could authorize soldiers to help wounded comrades, but after evacuating casualties to a clearing station they had to return immediately to the fighting or be branded cowards.44

  The revised and new field manuals dovetailed their various components to distinguish a Japanese way of warfare characterized by the display of intangible assets inherent in national culture and tradition. By the end of the decade these concepts were embedded in the staff college curriculum and complemented an ingrained ideology of uniqueness that permeated the ranks from the highest echelon to the lowest rifle squad.

  Training reinforced the certainty that intangibles would carry the day. During field exercises, unsupported infantry units routinely penetrated the first line of Soviet defenses to depths of 1,700–2,200 yards. Maneuvers invariably revealed deficiencies in combined-arms cooperation (that was their purpose), but they always ended with an infantry breakthrough. In other words, exercises relied more on memorization of predictable tactical solutions than on imagination. Official army journals did criticize such predetermined results, and one officer reminded readers that the French army maneuvers before the Great War had likewise ignored the effects of firepower on the infantry advance and later paid a tremendous price in casualties during the real war.45 They were dismissed as naysayers and swept away by Araki’s passion for the intangibles of combat and Obata’s contempt for the new Soviet Red Army as an inherently stupid military organization. These powerfully voiced opinions swayed the operations department to denigrate the Red Army’s material superiority because of the Russians’ supposed cultural inferiority. Obata’s 1930 handbook for fighting the Soviets, for example, recommended a daredevil infantry frontal assault to break through enemy defenses. Of course not all officers were so sanguine about an offensive a outrance. An exchange officer with the Red Army alerted his superiors to the dangers of underestimating the Soviet military. He was in the minority. Obata dismissed the report as Soviet-phobic, and the mainstream officer corps enthusiastically adopted the unique Japanese way of war with all its intangible features.46