Around the same time, the North China Area Army tried to broker regional truces by bribing warlords with weapons and money to support the Wang Jing-wei government. The First Army also sought to buy off warlord armies and had some success attracting collaborators. Overall, however, the initiative failed, because the demands of the Pacific theater on Japan’s resources left the armies in China without enough weapons, equipment, and money to live up to their promises.12 In central China planning for the Chongqing operation to deliver the knockout punch to Chinese field armies and destroy the enemy logistic base areas gained momentum in the spring and summer of 1942. Japan was near its military apex, and the China Expeditionary Army assembled sixteen divisions for a five-month offensive to seize Chongqing.
In the Southwest Pacific, the F-S Operation started badly when American carrier aircraft repulsed the imperial navy’s approach to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, in early May 1942 at the Battle of the Coral Sea. About one month later, U.S. navy aircraft sank four Japanese aircraft carriers during the Battle of Midway, shifting the strategic balance in the Pacific to the Americans. After that strategic disaster, the IGHQ cancelled the F-S Operation in favor of an overland attack on Moresby. The South Seas Detachment (the 144th Infantry Regiment), veterans of Guam and Rabaul, landed at Buna on Papua New Guinea’s north coast on July 21 and moved into the mountain ranges towering between Buna and the lights of Moresby. Around the same time, the navy unilaterally dispatched an airfield construction unit to Guadalcanal in the Solomons to build a forward airstrip to support future operations.
The naval general staff’s communications intelligence section intercepted radio signals on July 2 that revealed a large American convoy was departing from San Francisco. Subsequent radio traffic in early August indicated that the ships were bound for the east coast of Australia or perhaps Port Moresby. Consequently, on August 4 the navy issued a warning to all units in the area, but low-lying tropical clouds and rainsqualls hampered reconnaissance aircraft searching for the convoy. The U.S. Marine landing on Guadalcanal on August 7 was a complete surprise to the handful of Japanese construction troops on the island, who at first mistook the invasion fleet for a Japanese convoy. It was just as baffling in Tokyo, where army intelligence officers laid out maps on the floor and on their hands and knees searched for Guadalcanal. Only one or two of them even knew that a small navy unit was on the island.
The high command took the American landing lightly, owing partly to its assumption that a major Allied counteroffensive would not begin until late 1943 and partly to faulty intelligence. After the battle of Savo Island, fought during the early-morning hours of August 9, naval reconnaissance pilots reported that the American fleet had vanished and the island seemed deserted. A few days later, the Soviet naval attaché in Tokyo reportedly told informants that the U.S. objective was a reconnaissance-in-force to destroy the airfield and that he expected an imminent withdrawal.13 Adm. Nagano Osami, naval chief of staff, assured the emperor, who was vacationing at an imperial villa, that there was no need to return to Tokyo over such a trifling affair.
Three days later Col. Ichiki Kiyonao’s 600-man detachment landed on Guadalcanal to eject the marines. Believing that he faced a small enemy reconnaissance unit, Ichiki boldly ordered a nighttime frontal assault against what turned out to be a U.S. Marine division. His detachment was almost annihilated and Ichiki killed, yet no responsible army officer or anyone at IGHQ questioned his tactics—and the certainty that cold steel was decisive in battle went unchallenged. Ichiki’s disaster was the first in a series of setbacks on Guadalcanal and in eastern New Guinea, whose ramifications rippled throughout the army.
Japanese efforts to defend Guadalcanal diverted priority and resources from New Guinea to that island, halting the drive on Port Moresby and then ordering a withdrawal to Buna-Gona. Likewise, in China the army general staff had approved the CEA’s offensive in September, but the need for reinforcements on Guadalcanal drew off units intended for China to the island and forced Anami to abandon his Chongqing campaign. Instead of military force, a December 21, 1942, imperial conference authorized strengthening the Wang Jingwei regime and suspending peace feelers to Chiang’s government.
Despite the tough fighting and heavy losses suffered on Guadalcanal, in mid-November the army still believed that it could recapture the island because it would take the United States at least three years to bring its full power to bear. If the army retook Guadalcanal, constructed a series of air bases, and prepared strong defenses in the Solomon Islands, it could offset the future disparity in material strength.14
After reverses on Guadalcanal and at Buna-Gona in December, the general staff demanded that the majority of available shipping be given to the army to support current and future operations in the South and Southwest Pacific. The staff’s stubborn insistence touched off an emotional confrontation about the allocation of scarce shipping resources, with the war ministry and cabinet on one side and the general staff on the other.
In November 1941 Japan had 6.7 million tons of available shipping, and the Cabinet Economic Planning Board estimated that a minimum of three million tons were needed to sustain the civilian economy. The services, however, required almost four million tons for their initial operations, which would leave the civilian sector short by 10 percent even before any losses. To keep the national economy going, the army promised that it would gradually return 1.1 million tons of shipping to the civilian sector beginning in April 1942 (the expected end of initial operations) and complete the transfer by August. Projected losses of between 800,000 and one million tons of shipping the first year of the war would thereafter decline, and strategic plans envisaged the construction of 1.8 million tons of shipping over the next three years (600,000 tons being the annual maximum capacity for Japan’s shipyards).
Although shipping losses were initially lower than expected, the government and war ministry still rejected the general staff’s November 1942 demands to divert civilian merchant shipping, insisting that it was needed to move raw materials to Japan for wartime production and finished goods. The chief of the first (operations) department, the volatile Maj. Gen. Tanaka Shin’ichi, who dismissed war ministry adversaries as “courtiers adorned with cherry blossoms,” vehemently argued the general staff’s position at a December 5 cabinet meeting. When the equally hotheaded Maj. Gen. Satō Kenryō, the war ministry’s military affairs bureau chief, angrily rebuffed Tanaka’s contentions, the shouting escalated to a fistfight. The next day Tanaka and Tōjō, who was concurrently prime and war minister, engaged in a screaming match that ended abruptly when Tanaka called Tōjō an imbecile. Tanaka was immediately reassigned to the staff of Southern Army Headquarters in Singapore and in March 1943 placed in command of the 18th Division on the faraway Burma front.15
Regardless of the emotional fireworks, the fact remained that without additional shipping the army could not recapture Guadalcanal. On December 28 IGHQ alerted the Eighth Area Army on Rabaul, New Britain, to evacuate the island. Learning of this directive, Hirohito requested more information on the army’s plans to defeat the Americans and questioned what effect an evacuation might have on military morale. Three days later at an IGHQ imperial conference, the service chiefs acknowledged that shipping shortages made it impossible to move the two divisions required to retake the island. They agreed to abandon Guadalcanal, strengthen defenses in the Central Pacific, and reinforce bases in New Guinea. After reconstitution, the army would launch a counteroffensive to regain any lost territory. IGHQ ordered the evacuation of Guadalcanal on January 4, 1943, but in deference to the field service regulations announced that it was advancing in a different direction!16
The army’s revised Pacific strategy made eastern New Guinea the primary theater and the defense of the northern Solomons secondary. Units would protect strategic points along the New Guinea coast, such as the air and naval bases at Lae and Salamua, and then capture Port Moresby.17 Attempts to reinforce eastern New Guinea failed when Allied aircraft des
troyed much of the 51st Division in transit during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea in early March 1943.
After the attrition of the navy’s carrier force at Midway, the joint losses suffered in the Solomons, and the army’s Bismarck Sea catastrophe, the March 25, 1943, outline for third stage operations abandoned the concept of aggressively seeking a decisive surface fleet engagement, the navy’s traditional doctrine since the late Meiji period, in favor of an active defense organized around an interconnected web of island airbases that in combination with fleet action would destroy the enemy fleet. The war ministry wanted to abandon the overextended South Pacific front and reinforce rear areas, but the operations department of the general staff claimed that a wholesale withdrawal conferred no advantages and would interfere with current operations. The general staff instead offered to withdraw to the northern Solomons, where the army could reconstitute its forces and still defend the resources of the southern region. The navy, however, insisted on holding its gains in the Central Pacific.18 In short, regardless of losses and shipping shortages, the army remained forward-deployed on an overextended perimeter.
The Allied Counteroffensive
In May 1943 U.S. Army forces invaded Attu Island in the Aleutian chain. IGHQ ordered an evacuation, but the commander of the Northern Army in Hokkaidō decided that the order applied only to the western Aleutians and ignored the beleaguered 2,600-man army garrison on Attu.19 The badly outnumbered Japanese, isolated from reinforcements and resupply, fought doggedly, but when all hope of rescue was gone the remaining soldiers launched a suicidal attack on May 29. Only twenty-seven survived. Just before leading the final charge, the garrison commander, Col. Yamasaki Yasuyo, radioed IGHQ that he had ordered the able-bodied and wounded alike to fight to the death to avoid the humiliation of capture. An army medical officer executed patients too sick or too seriously wounded to join the final attack in order to preclude any stain on the warrior spirit. The Attu defense force became the first army unit completely destroyed during the war, which earned Yamasaki a posthumous promotion to lieutenant general.
The next day, IGHQ announced the Attu gyokusai, a phrase derived from the Chinese classics that conveyed “the transcendent moral quality of such sacrifice.” The concept electrified the nation, became a powerful, if ephemeral, propaganda tool, and made fighting to the death acceptable and accepted in the popular consciousness. Retired Maj. Gen. Sakurai, the author of Human Bullets, commented in the press that Yamasaki’s act had rekindled the army’s traditional fighting spirit, which he believed had been weakened by western influences. Interestingly, by early 1944 the army had dropped gyokusai in favor of the clumsy phrase “all achieved a heroic death in battle” because touting successive reverses on Tarawa and Makin islands in late 1943 as models of gyokusai left the public with the impression that the services were powerless to prevent inevitable defeats.20
In June 1943 Tōjō called for increased aircraft production to strengthen the army’s military capability and to increase industrial output for the war effort. The services hoped to triple aircraft production to 55,000 planes during 1944, but the Cabinet Planning Board reduced that number to 40,000. The army opened special air cadet schools to train the pilots needed for the anticipated air armadas. Recruits from universities entered the air academy, and primary school graduates enrolled in the youth flying schools. Industrial resources were diverted from equipping newly activated infantry divisions to manufacturing aircraft. Army aircraft production almost doubled, to more than 10,000 aircraft, during 1943 and rose until mid-1944, when shortages of raw materials and labor hampered production. The tradeoff was obvious; the number of tanks manufactured annually dropped from about 1,200 in 1942 to 791 in 1943 and 478 in 1944 as production was sacrificed for aircraft.21
By the summer of 1943 the war ministry cited the difficulty of resupplying advance units so distant from Japan as reason to withdraw to the Marianas, where it could concentrate forces to defend a smaller perimeter organized around a network of air bases. The general staff refused to abandon New Guinea, and the navy was unwilling to leave Rabaul because that would imperil Truk, whose loss would endanger the Marshall Islands. This domino effect would spoil plans for a decisive fleet engagement near the Marshalls, expose the homeland to enemy attack, and cut off Japan from natural resources.22
A September 30, 1943, imperial conference approved IGHQ’s new strategy to create the absolute defense zone, stretching from the Kurile Islands to the Ogasawaras and on to the Central Pacific, Western New Guinea, Sumatra, and Burma. Behind this lengthy defensive perimeter, Japan would marshal its airpower to smash the Allied counteroffensive. IGHQ had finally abandoned the strategic offensive, and there was no more talk of counteroffensive operations to regain lost territory.
It would take about a year to complete the new strategy’s defensive belt and reinforce the perimeter and another year to deploy sufficient aircraft to implement the strategy. The key to success was whether the absolute defense zone could hold out that long.23 It was painfully clear that Japan could expect no help from its German ally, then engaged in a death struggle with the Soviet Union and facing the likelihood of a second front in Western Europe in the spring or summer of 1944. Finally, despite the new strategy, the navy insisted on holding advance bases and outposts in the Gilberts, Bismarcks, and Marshalls, which lay outside the zone.24 Likewise, the army approved offensive operations in eastern New Guinea and deployed troops to defend the Marshalls.
More divisions were needed for the latest strategic shift, and in December 1943 the army lowered the draft age from 20 to 19 years of age, made Koreans eligible for conscription, extended the military obligation five years to age 45, and ended student deferments (see Table 11.1). About 170,000 Koreans were conscripted, but almost all were assigned to labor battalions or rear area service units.25 Many of the conscripted Japanese students entered pilot training courses and would account for 45 percent of officer pilots assigned to special attack (suicide) units and 71 percent of those killed in special attacks. The army also relied on higher draft calls achieved by lowering induction standards and recalled more men from the first and second reserves to active duty. The percentage of regulars fell from just over 50 percent in 1941 to 42 percent by 1945 (see Table 11.2).26
Map 7
To meet the need for additional small-unit leaders the army created a special officer cadet system in 1944 that selected graduates of high school, trained them for one year in one of five newly established reserve officers schools, and commissioned them reserve officers. The system ultimately produced 20,000 junior officers, but the vast increase of personnel diluted quality. Grizzled veterans and regular officers derided the newly minted younger reserve officers as “dummy rounds.” With weapons and equipment in short supply, many new conscripts were set to work digging fortifications, but even there shortages of cement hindered construction of shoreline fortifications.27
In November 1943, U.S. Marines overran Tarawa and several other Gilbert Islands. The defending Japanese naval infantry detachments fought to the death. Of the nearly 4,700-man Japanese garrison, only 17 were taken prisoner (129 Korean laborers were also captured). Although the army’s confidential war diary dismissed the battle as having little significance, it was the opening step in the U.S. Navy’s offensive across the Central Pacific. The speed and fury of the U.S. Navy’s leap to the Marshall Islands in February 1944 caught the Japanese unprepared. Firepower from surface warships and carrier aircraft stunned the defenders, and coordinated amphibious landings capitalized on Japanese confusion. U.S. carrier aircraft devastated the Truk bastion on February 17, 1944, with reverberations that were felt all the way back to Tokyo.
Table 11.1. Source of Japan’s Military Manpower, 1937–1945 (figures rounded in thousands)
Note: Until 1943, 20-year-old cohort; 1944 includes the 19-year-old cohort.
Source: Rikusen gakkai, ed., Kindai sensōshi gaisetsu Shiryō hen, 35, table 2–1-8.
Four days after the Truk disaster, T
ōjō proposed to Hirohito that he assume the concurrent position of chief of staff while Navy Minister Adm. Shimada Shigetarō would take the chief of naval operations portfolio as a means to unify command and control and operational planning. The emperor agreed, describing the consolidation of power as an emergency measure necessary at this critical period of the war. Incumbent Chief of Staff Sugiyama furiously objected to this violation of the army’s traditional ironclad rule separating administrative and operational affairs. After a heated argument among the army’s big three (Sugiyama, War Minister Tōjō, and the Inspector-General of Military Education, Gen. Yamada Otozō), Tōjō carried the day by stating that he had already explained the change to the emperor. The other two grudgingly agreed with his dual position, but only as a temporary wartime measure. To assist Tōjō and Shimada, two vice chiefs of staff were appointed for each, a senior vice chief and a deputy vice chief. The awkward command arrangements harkened back to the 1880s structure of deputy chief of staffs under Prince Arisugawa and were just as unworkable. Tōjō had added another layer of bureaucracy to a sclerotic decision-making process already encrusted with too many deputies and dependent on cumbersome liaison conferences to coordinate the simplest details of civil-military relationships.
Tōjō’s first big decision as army chief of staff under the new system concerned India, which had no place in Japan’s coprosperity sphere but posed a threat as a British base for a counteroffensive against Burma and as a supply point for U.S. and Chinese forces operating in China. In August 1942, IGHQ had approved the Fifteenth Army’s plans to invade northern Assam and foment an anti-British independence movement. At the time, field commanders, including 18th Division commander Lt. Gen. Mutaguchi Renya, estimated that large ground forces could not penetrate the Arakan mountain range. Tokyo also mistakenly believed that the British had successfully suppressed the India-first nationalist movement and suspended further attempts to destabilize India. After attention shifted to Guadalcanal and the situation in New Guinea worsened, IGHQ postponed the operation indefinitely.
Japan's Imperial Army Page 34