The prolonged fighting also pinned the U.S. fleet and supply transports to Okinawan waters, where they were targets of repeated large-scale suicide attacks by army and navy kamikaze flyers. Between April 1 and June 30, 1945, about 2,500 special attack aircraft sank 36 American ships and damaged more than ten times that number. Almost 5,000 U.S. sailors perished, and another 5,000 were wounded. American casualties of this magnitude were, as one historian put it, “an extremely ominous indicator amid preparations for an invasion of Japan.”62
What made Okinawa even more frightening was the Thirty-second Army’s belief that the terrible suffering of the island’s civilian population was worthwhile because each day that Okinawa held out was another day to prepare for the decisive battle of the homeland. Though the deeply rooted main island prejudice against Okinawans likely contributed to the army’s harsh treatment of civilians, it is unlikely that the army would have been more considerate of civilians on Kyūshū. After all, as early as February 1945 the war diary noted that civilians would have to subsist on minimum rations as determined by the army.63 Transformed from a backwater to the scene of the bloodiest Pacific campaign, Okinawa bore the trademarks of an army that was not defending Japanese citizens or protecting their lives but was buying time for the defense of the mainland against Allied invasion. Okinawa and its inhabitants were sacrificed to prepare homeland defenses and to make the point that a similar determination to die was expected of Japanese in the home islands.
Finale
The day after the American landings on Okinawa, the operations department chief informed Prime Minister Koiso (who would resign within a week) that the occupation of Okinawa made an invasion of the home islands inevitable.64 Preparations for that eventuality had been under way since January 1945, when the army began large-scale mobilizations of new divisions. At that time, IGHQ anticipated an American-led invasion occurring in June or July, continuing British pressure on the Burma front and landings in Malaya in the spring, the reopened Burma Road strengthening Chiang’s forces, and the Soviets likely to give the required one-year’s notice to abrogate the neutrality pact when it came due for renewal in April 1946. If Moscow judged the Japanese weak, the Soviets might enter the war regardless of the pact. Nevertheless, the joint service appreciation concluded that the military was determined to fight to the bitter end to achieve victory. According to army authorities, there was “an urgency to the German and Japanese war situation,” but they were convinced that Japan’s enemies were also suffering and that the global war had reached the stage of an endurance contest.
On April 8 IGHQ unveiled its homeland defense plans, which relied heavily on suicide attacks to destroy enemy transports at the main landing beaches. A handful of senior Japanese leaders simultaneously sought the Soviet Union’s mediation to end the war before the decisive battle. To preserve secrecy, the so-called Big Six—the prime, foreign, war, and navy ministers along with the two service chiefs of staff—agreed on May 11 to float a Soviet peace feeler. Their goal was twofold; to prevent the Soviets from entering the current war by engaging them in diplomacy, and to have the Soviets mediate an end to war. But it was not until June 3 that the foreign minister approached the Soviet ambassador to Japan with the offer.65
By that time the approaching fall of Okinawa caused IGHQ to present a revised strategy at the June 8 imperial conference. Documents prepared for the meeting noted the tremendous American losses suffered on Okinawa (half the U.S. aircraft carriers were believed lost to special air attacks), and IGHQ concluded that the Okinawa fighting had delayed the forecast enemy invasion of Kyūshū until late August. At that time the Americans’ objective would be to capture air bases in Kyūshū to support a follow-on invasion of the Tokyo plain in the early fall. The accompanying army analysis was bleak. Japan’s line of communication had been disrupted by Allied air and submarine attacks that endangered the nation’s food supply. Heavy bomber raids by B-29s flying from the Marianas had significantly reduced industrial output, and the firebombing of some sixty Japanese cities coupled with the loss of Okinawa had shaken public morale. People were losing confidence in their leaders, and inflation added to their discontent. Shortages in all areas—shipbuilding, steel, food—were compounded by incessant air and naval attacks on rolling stock that had disrupted domestic railroad lines, the implication being that even if one could produce war materiel, there was no way to move it.66
War Minister Gen. Anami Korechika still insisted that if Japan could hold out through 1945, the toll taken on the Americans during the Kyūshū invasion would break U.S. morale and will to continue the war. After all, a 5.2 million-man army still controlled large areas of China. Between April and early August 1945 the army had reinforced Kyūshū with twelve divisions and 450,000 personnel, who were deployed along the major landing beaches. Planning for the decisive battle of the homeland was well advanced, and though army leaders understood that they could not defeat the American invasion, they intended to inflict such painful losses that the United States would agree to a negotiated settlement along Japan’s terms. Consequently, the army would commit everything it had and fight to the bitter end to preserve kokutai (defined as the national structure of Japan under the unbroken imperial line) and defend the home islands. The generals acknowledged that widespread starvation was likely during the winter of 1945–1946 and that by the spring of 1946 Japan would be incapable of further military action.67 Emperor Hirohito reconvened an imperial conference on June 22 to address the contradictions. He told the Big Six to cooperate to end the war; despite the sovereign’s instructions, Anami urged caution, for to appear overanxious to end the war at any price would only expose weakness and encourage the Soviets to enter the war. Hirohito insisted that the negotiations go forward.
After IGHQ approved the Ichigō offensive in January 1944, the army had stopped sending divisions from China to the Pacific fronts. Instead, the Kwantung Army in Manchuria became the source of reinforcements for the Pacific, and by January 1945 IGHQ had pulled out eleven of its first-line divisions. Concurrent with the loss of Okinawa, on June 4 Chief of Staff Gen. Umezu Yoshijirō notified the Kwantung Army and the China Expeditionary Army commanders that homeland defense had top priority, so they could expect neither reinforcements nor support from Japan. Since May the Kwantung Army had been mobilizing reservists throughout Manchuria to reconstitute its forces, and by July it had assembled about 700,000 troops, most poorly armed and equipped. Its new strategy called for a series of phased withdrawals to a redoubt on the Manchurian-Korean border, where it would make a final stand. Throughout the spring and early summer months of 1945 army intelligence reported that an extensive military buildup in the Soviet Far East was underway but concluded that the Soviets would wait until the spring of 1946 to invade Manchuria.68
After the Atomic Bombs
The atomic destruction of Hiroshima on August 6, the Soviet entry into the war three days later, and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki the same morning brought the war to an abrupt and unexpectedly sudden end. The atomic weapons were of course unprecedented, but the Soviet offensive in Manchuria, despite the army’s monitoring of the Russian military buildup, achieved operational surprise. Unprepared, poorly trained, and ill-equipped Japanese units were outgunned and outmaneuvered by fast-moving Soviet tank and mechanized columns. They quickly fell apart, and the phased withdrawal turned into a rout, as evidenced by the Soviets’ capturing more than 600,000 Japanese. Within eight days the Soviets had overrun most of Manchuria and landed forces in northern Korea. About 26,000 Japanese troops were killed along with as many as 170,000 of the 1.5 million Japanese residents in Manchuria. An estimated 130,000 prisoners died in Soviet captivity, and between 300,000 and 500,000 Japanese remain unaccounted for.69
The popular military historian Handō Kazutoshi observed that the Soviet entry into the war ended the possibility of a negotiated settlement for civilian leaders and diplomats because there was no one left to serve as a mediator in truce discussions. For the army leaders, t
he atomic bomb was the greater shock because, lacking a military countermeasure, they could no longer continue to fight in expectation of gaining more advantageous conditions to end the war.70
News of the second atomic bomb that destroyed the city of Nagasaki, with threats of more to follow, arrived during an August 9 emergency imperial conference. Even after these unprecedented disasters, Anami insisted that the army deserved to fight its last battle and still demanded conditions as its price for negotiations. Kokutai must be preserved; the Japanese, not the Allies, would try alleged war criminals; the military would repatriate its overseas forces; and there would be no occupation. Everyone else at the meeting knew it was over. Six days of indecision, attempted compromises, and dashed hopes ended on August 14 when Hirohito broke a deadlocked conference by declaring that Japan would accept the American terms.
IGHQ, the general staff, and the war ministry transmitted orders to the far-flung armies to lay down their arms. Although some units questioned the order and threatened resistance, army authorities quelled large-scale disobedience by invoking imperial authority. The same appeal to the throne that seventy-seven years earlier had established the modern army was now used to disband it.
Japan’s Pacific War went through five easily discernable stages. First was the offensive from December 1941 until the reverses at Coral Sea and particularly Midway in June 1942. Next came a period of attrition as Japan tried to hold or regain territory. By November 1943 Japan was on the strategic defensive and suffered a series of heavy defeats through August 1944. In an effort to reverse the Allied momentum, in the fall of 1944 Tokyo sought a decisive battle, but the crushing air, ground, and naval losses in the Philippines left no alternative except to endure. This final stage lasted from January 1945 until the atomic destruction of two Japanese cities. On the battlefields of Iwo Jima and Okinawa the army inflicted heavy losses on the advancing Americans, but the United States retaliated by inflicting untold suffering on Japanese civilians through a strategy of indiscriminate aerial bombardment, unrestricted submarine warfare, naval blockade and mining, and ultimately atomic bombs. Perhaps the ghastliness of it all made the Pacific phase of the war so clear-cut—Japan lost, the United States won.
But throughout the rest of Asia conditions were far more clouded. Manchuria and northern Korea fell under Soviet control temporarily, but the massive Japanese army in China, although officially ordered to lay down their weapons, remained armed, kept local order, and allied with the Guomindang Central Army to fight the Chinese Communists.71 Japanese troops controlled Indochina, Malaya, and Singapore. They controlled the Netherlands East Indies, where they sponsored independence movements. This is not to say the indigenous peoples liked their brutal Japanese occupiers—quite the opposite; but it does help explain the volatility on the Asian continent during the immediate postwar period. Japan did not just destroy and discredit the western colonial forms imposed on Asians. Tokyo’s own brand of tyranny had left wide swaths of the continent more or less ungovernable, susceptible to rebellion and revolution. Japanese occupation policies only convinced fellow Asians that the way to independence would never be led by Japan. Instead, resistance leaders across the continent took command and fashioned a decade of anticolonial wars.72
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Epilogue
On August 16, 1945, Maj. Sugi Shigeru led about 100 young soldiers from the army’s air signal training school in Ibaraki prefecture to Tokyo in order to protect the emperor from the imminent allied occupation. The Guard Division, which was responsible for defending the palace, shooed them away, but the group congregated at Ueno Park, eventually occupying the art museum. More arrivals from the school swelled their numbers to around 400 armed and emotional young men. Sugi ignored senior officers’ orders to disband, and the next day Maj. Ishihara Sadakichi, a Guard Division officer and friend of Sugi’s, was sent to convince him to leave. While the two were talking, a second lieutenant assigned to the training school walked up and shot Ishihara to death. Sugi in turn shot and killed the lieutenant. The murders broke the spell of an imperial rescue mission, and the disillusioned troops drifted away. That night Sugi and three other junior officers committed suicide.1 The scene of the army’s decisive victory in 1868 over supporters of the Tokugawa shogunate became the backdrop for the imperial army’s violent curtain call in 1945.
Radical young reformers had created the new army of 1868 and forged intensely personal relationships as young men at war bonded by danger. Their personal ties created a web of informal connections that transcended the emerging political, military, and bureaucratic institutions. The first generation of leaders not only held the various levers of state power but also knew how to use them. They also possessed a self-assertiveness that attracted adherents and repelled opponents.
The army’s formative experiences left it riven with competing internal factions dominated by strong contending personalities who held diametrically opposing visions of a future army. Reaction to the Chōshū-Satsuma domination of senior military ranks produced anti-Yamagata stalwarts like Miura and Soga who simultaneously represented a French faction that opposed Yamagata’s and Katsura’s Prussian clique. Arguments about the merits of differing force structures and the functions of a general staff consumed most of the 1880s. Though the army successfully adapted division formations and staff organizations, it failed to institutionalize the highest decision-making process and formalize command and control arrangements.
Lacking that apparatus, army leaders had to rely on the emperor to resolve disagreements and authorize policy. From beginning to end, the army depended on its relationship with the throne for authority as well as legitimacy and enshrined its unique connection to the emperor in the Meiji Constitution. Although the army steadily increased its power, it still remained one of many government institutions (which were simultaneously expanding their influence) competing for imperial certification. Initially, army leaders used the symbols of the throne to promote nationalism or a sense of nationhood, but by the early 1900s they were manipulating the imperial institution to secure larger force structures and budgets. By the 1930s they used appeals to the throne to justify illegal acts at home and aggression overseas.
The formative period realized its immediate goal, which was the preservation of domestic order. Had Japan fallen into civil chaos during the 1870s or 1880s, the nation might have shared a fate similar to China’s. By quelling civil disturbances and crushing armed insurrections, the army guaranteed domestic order and became the bedrock of the oligarchic government. Thereafter a series of midrange objectives carried Japan through two limited regional wars. In each the army initially sought to protect previously acquired gains on the Asian continent, and successive victories brought in new acquisitions that in turn required protection and ever-larger military forces.
Between 1868 and 1905 the army played a significant role in achieving the nebulous but shared national strategic goal of creating “a rich country and a strong army.” At the least, the slogan suggested a general approach to modernize Japan in order to fend off potential enemies. The well-ordered colonial world of nineteenth-century western imperialism fit the conservative approach of Japan’s oligarchs and military leaders, who were often the same individuals. Working in a well-defined international system, men like Yamagata cautiously developed the army’s strategy in reaction to events.
Successors built on Yamagata’s foundation, modified the army’s institutions to meet new requirements, and institutionalized doctrine, training, and professional military education. The steadily expanding conscription system indoctrinated youths, who in turn transmitted military values to their communities, as the army became an accepted part of the larger society. But the second generation of leadership faced the problem of perpetuating the oligarch consensus, an impossible task because of the emergence of other strong competing elites—the bureaucracy, political parties, big business—whose demands for their shares of power and influence inevitably shifted national priorities and international p
olicies.
Furthermore, once the nation had achieved the goals of the Meiji Restoration, a new strategic consensus was required. It never materialized. The army responded with strategic plans that reflected narrow service interests, not national ones. Army culture increasingly protected the military institution at the expense of the nation. One might say the army had always put itself first, but after 1905 the tendency was exacerbated by the absence of an agreed-upon common opponent, a strategic axis of advance, and force structure requirements.
Until the Russo-Japanese War fierce debates raged within the army about Japan’s future. Should the government be satisfied to be a minor power defended by a small territorial army, or should Japan, undergirded by an expanded army and navy, aspire to a dominant role in Asia?2 Imperial sanction for the 1907 imperial defense policy set Japan on the latter course because of fears of a Russian war of revenge, rising anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States, and an obsession to preserve continental interests acquired at great cost in blood and treasure. International pressures helped to shape the army, but perhaps the internal debate, division, and dissension were decisive in its overall evolution. In other words, the formulation of strategy, doctrine, and internal army policy decided the army’s and the nation’s fate.
Japan’s post-1905 aspirations for regional security enlarged the army’s responsibilities to encompass garrison and pacification duties in Korea and the railroad zone in Manchuria. The army’s emphasis in the 1907 imperial defense policy aimed to protect those newly acquired interests by conducting offensive operations against a resurgent Russia. The navy, intent on expanding south, identified the United States as its potential opponent. Military objectives were not focused, and the formulation of long-term military strategy foundered as the army compromised internally on force structure issues and externally with the navy over budget shares and the strategic axis of advance.
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