This isn’t a thread that gets a lot of traffic.
Which members are interested in Japan’s war, apart from me?
What aspects are you interested in?
I am. And would like to get more into the mind set of the Japanese Imperial Army, one that was so ridiculously unrealistic and devoid of rationale one wonders how these people functioned or ever achieved command positions above the platoon level…
nevertheless they were fighting enough succesfull in first period of war.
I puzzled ,how they had conquered so great territory.
How they have captured Singapoor so soon?
I know they recieved a combat experience in pre-ww2 war with China.However they had so great advantage over European armies in the 1941.
This is still mystery for me.
Hello,
I am quite interested in the Imperial armed forces of Japan in the first half of the century. But the fact remains that in terms of quantity AND quality the Western opposition they faced in SE Asia was mediocre at best. For fighting qualities their navy (IJN) seems to me the most formidable in this period, but it too suffered from much of the same infighting & turf-wars that marred other the services’ performance. Only the weakness & vacillating of their opponents allowed the Japanese to undertake the operations which led them into WWII. It’s worth noting they made no such attempts --or, serious ones–after 1939 against Russia, by whom they were (rightly) intimidated…
I am intrested in nothing BUT the Japanese in WW2. My main focus jumps between Army and Navy (and their corresponding air forces), but its always there. Sadly its a very overlooked part of the war, with their allies Germany getting about 95% of the attention.
Go to a bookstore, if your lucky 1/12 books are pacific. Maybe 1 or 2 of those are actually on Japan. And then usually its mostly a book that isnt JUST on Japanese, but also American or other Allies. Thank god for amazon haha.
I think their is TONS of first hand accounts and untapped info out there in Japan. Just doesn’t get translated (obviously because of the difficulty compared to German to English for example).
Here’s some reasons, in random order, off the top of my head. They all add up to the Japanese being better than their enemy in all the areas that mattered, in the beginning.
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Air power. Numerically superior. Better trained fighter pilots in general. Better fighter planes in general.
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Excellent planning.
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Ability to do more with less, such as cramming a lot more troops into a transport ship than Westerners would and carrying little in the way of rations as they were expected to live off the land after the first few days.
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Greater determination by the troops, backed up by most being battle hardened in China. Nonetheless, the Imperial Guards hadn’t heard a shot fired in anger for more than a generation and weren’t regarded as desirable troops for the Malayan invasion, but they fought about as well as any other Japanese troops.
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Shorter lines of communication. In Singapore it was just from Vietnam. Contrast that with the distance from Britain and America, the Netherlands being irrelevant by that stage as it was occupied by Germany.
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Unified leadership, weaponry, ordnance, and troops. Contrast that with the short lived American British Dutch Australian (ABDA) command, which also had three sets of weaponry and ordnance (British and Australian were the same). Also difficulties in Malaya with the commitment to the British cause of some Indian troops (e.g. Mohan Singh and what became the First Indian National Army) and in the NEI with some Javanese troops not as keen as the Dutch, or even actively opposed to them.
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Clear aims and excellent execution of the plans. Contrast that with the shambles in Malaya when Percival had clear plans but was prevented from responding properly by invading Thailand because of political considerations. Or MacArthur’s disastrous loss of half his bomber force on the ground on the first day in the Philippines which resulted in failure to carry out the clear plan to bomb Formosa, although that by itself probably wouldn’t have altered the course of the war. He also lost half his food supply, and gave the Japanese a huge windfall in rations, because he stupidly stored it in an exposed postion he couldn’t hold.
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Psychological advantage when the Japanese were advancing hard and fast and seemingly invincible.
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Although there was some informal planning between senior military officers, in general there was an absence of pre-war co-ordination and preparation between ABDA nations, so that initially they were all fighting their own little wars on their own turf and by the time they came together several weeks after the war started it was too late. If the Dutch had been able to move forward into Malaya to resist the Malayan invasion, that might have turned the tables and stopped the Japanese advance. But the Dutch, like the British and Americans, were concerned with protecting their own colonial turf. So, for example, 25,000 KNIL troops sat in Java from 7 December 1941 until the Japanese invaded on 1 March 1942. Whether they would have been a help or a hindrance in Malaya is debatable as many of the Indonesian troops weren’t well trained and their presence wouldn’t overcome the lack of air power in Malaya, but it illustrates the problem of having separate nations protecting separate interests against a common enemy. If the NEI had been a British colony, or Malaya a Dutch one, there is obvious scope for utilising other forces in the critical battle for Malaya to stop the Japanes acquiring it as one of the jumping off points for Japanese advances south east. Conversely, it might have made more sense strategically to abandon Malaya and let the Japanese have the rubber and tin but move the forces to the NEI to deny Japan oil, which it desperately needed and couldn’t fight the rest of the war without.
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Ruthlessness, towards their own men and the enemy, which enabled the Japanese to achieve things that Westerners couldn’t.
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Sea power. They had the best navy in the Western Pacific, and plenty of it, with sound tactics for large scale battles and night battles, plus an excellent torpedo, while the Americans had an unreliable torpedo.
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Luck. If Churchill had provided Malaya with proper air resources as recognised by all the British military leaders, the Japanese mightn’t have taken it. They were lucky to find the US fleet neatly berthed and moored at Pearl Harbor instead of being at sea or at dispersed anchorages. They were lucky that MacArthur was paralysed by inaction for the first day of the war. They were lucky that Admiral Tom Phillips didn’t think planes could sink battleships and that the Repulse and Prince of Wales didn’t have air cover, and that those two ships didn’t get in among the troop transports for the Japanese landings. They were lucky that Churchill wanted, needed, America to join the war and didn’t want to alienate American public opinion by being seen as the aggressor, so he wouldn’t allow Percival to initiate action by invading Thailand to deny bases to the Japanese which ensured that the Japanese landed unopposed in Thailand and secured air bases which were critical to their advances. And so on.
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Western arrogance. Too many military people thought the Japanese would be a pushover, although many recognised their real ability.
Well tnak you for such detailed tell.
So i could conclude that the allies make almost the same mistakes ( without the few exceptions) in strategis planning, management of troops and supplieng of wearponry as the Soviet do befor the ww2.
They also have made a lot of simular serious mistakes about the GErmans intentions and plans.
BTW do you seriously think that Japanes famouse Ruthlessness to its own troops was a thing that made the their soldiers stronger:)?
Initially, yes.
They pressed on where Westerners often wouldn’t.
But in the end the idiotic idea that spirit could overcome everything, like no rations and resultant malnutrition, brought them down because they were so obsessed with their own set of beliefs in their superiority that they thought they could overcome the basic laws of human nutrition and survival.
It’s more complex than just that aspect, because it’s bound up in Japanese group think and reverence for the Emperor and a suicidal culture, at some leveles, and so on, but it still made them very formidable foes.
Not unlike current Islamic zealots who aren’t afraid to die makes them difficult for us to handle.
But in the end of war they had nothing except the spirit:)
No food , no ammo, no fuel and no enough wearpon.
So may be they were right?
Not unlike current Islamic zealots who aren’t afraid to die makes them difficult for us to handle.
Just try to use so much drugs as the Islamic zealots befor the action…and you will wonder how easy you will be ready to die:)
They were as wrong about that as they were about just about everything else that mattered for the long war they started but which they planned and fought as a short war to gain territory, in the absurd belief that if they held it long enough the other nations would let them keep it.
Japan was just about unbeatable in the early phases, and their spirit certainly contributed to this, but they didn’t have what was needed for the war they provoked, starting with the ability to see how ill-conceived it was.
Then again, in the second half of 1941 when it looked like Germany was going to defeat the USSR and Britain was on the defensive, the prospects looked pretty good from Tokyo, as long as the Soviets didn’t beat the seemingly invincible Germans and the British didn’t come back.
Why on earth anyone would want to drag America as an enemy into such a promising picture is beyond me, but some of that goes back to Japan long seeing America as its rival for control of the Pacific and thinking it was a good idea to try to impose a decisive defeat on America. There was as much arrogance on the Japanese side in its belief about its superiority as there was on the Western side. Both sides were wrong about the other.
Excellent post. The only thing I can add is that the early combat heavily favored the Japanese ethos of “Third Force” warfare. The first two forces were thought of as man and machine, the third was “spirit” something the Japanese arrogantly often thought that their Western opposition lacked. But the truth is that the early Japanese offensives faced opposition with little serious armor or artillery support, the possible exception to this being the US forces on the Philippines, but most of their armor was no better than the Japanese tanks and their most of their guns were fixed at Corregidor and Bataan. But cut off, and without any sort of air support, these forces fell victim to the aggressive onslaught by the Japanese, who did have artillery and armor support, by way of naval gunfire and and complete air superiority. They also did have some armor assets, of mostly outmoded tanks. But these were enough to press the Americans in the Philippines.
The Japanese Third Force ethos was developed in the late 1920s because of the heavy casualties that the Japanese forces suffered in the Russo-Japanese War in the face of a better armed adversary. Relying heavy on an complete bastardization of the Code of Bushido, this made the Imperial Japanese Army quite formidable when fighting in terrain that did not favor mechanized warfare and limited the numbers of their adversaries. In specific circumstances, the IJA could quickly advance on their enemy and attempt to roll up the flanks and surround and annihilate their foe. The IJA was great in the Jungle and in mountainous island terrain, evolving into a force adept at fortress warfare from underground lairs, forcing the island hopping Marines to fight a sort of what they termed “prairie dog warfare.” Terrain where the Japanese could maximize the effect of their inferior firepower while marginalizing naval gun fire, tank support, air power, etc. However, when caught in the open in Burma, Manchuria, and even on the ill-fated Wake Island, the Japanese were vulnerable to firepower against fortified positions and massed, maneuvering armor alike.
On Wake Island for instance, which at the time was erroneously considered the “second Alamo” by the American press, and Japanese force landed to face a force of Marines assisted by their civilian contractor engineers and laborers, that were cut off and had little hope of relief. The Marines were able to completely wipe out the first wave of Japanese Landing Force (marines/naval infantry) members while suffering few casualties. The only reason they ultimately surrendered was that their commander emerged from his CP to see Japanese ensigns flying all over the island, after the communications to his forward positions had been cut. He believed that the Japanese controlled much of the island and decided to surrender. Unfortunately, he failed to realize that the only Japanese on the island were either dead under the ensigns, or captured…
ow man,. check on my avatar,… His death was consider a great contribution to Allied,… i do love Pacific theatre from the heart,. as the stories inhereted to me by my late father,… he was an IJN auxillary at the age of 15,.
I like the carriers, battleships and heavy cruisers (the fat looking ship and always look as they sit back)
Infact now,. am doing my own reading issues obout the IJN subs doctrines,.
very interested,… but sad,… a great weapon but not proper use…
I don’t know about arrogantly. They were correct.
Their Western opposition did lack the same spirit, and never found it, or wanted it, or suffered for the lack of it.
One of the biggest differences between the Western forces and the Japanese was that the West based its cultures on post-Enlightenment individualism with super-imposed notions of loyalty to the nation or monarch, where the Japanese were much more a family oriented group mentality extending from the immediate family to the squad family to the platoon to the company etc to the national family with the Emperor at its head, with no concept of individualism akin to Western notions and all that flowed from it. It made them bloody fearsome in any military group, but not very original outside one. When their well trained swarm tactics broke down, there tended to be a lack of individual initiative to redress the situation. Westerners tended to be more original as individuals. Not that there weren’t plenty of contradictory examples on both sides.
One curious aspect of WWII Japanese group mentality focused on the Emperor was that the Emperor had been a powerless and at times fearful figurehead under the shogunate which was destroyed after Japan was forced to engage with the West in the mid 19th century, but social and political necessity saw him elevated to a new significance in the later part of the 19th century to provide a unifying force for a nation fragmented by the destruction of the old shogunate and the removal of the samurai and all that went with them as Japan moved to a new industrial and more modern capitalist rather than feudal culture. This produced the zaibatsu, the handful of major corporations which were seen by the 1920s by many in the growing non-samurai officer and other classes of rural and urban background as being closely aligned with the social, economic and political ‘establishment’, and corrupt and due for overthrow and replacement by what they thought would be a better form of rule by the Emperor. Although there were many different and conflicting forms of such beliefs, along with many views completely opposed to them.
One consequence was, however, that the Emperor became much more significant in the thinking of many Japanese officers who were pretenders to the samurai heritage which had actually treated the Emperor with contempt for much of the shogunate’s reign.
As the old samurai class were deposed they became the core of the Japanese officer corps in the 19th century, but by the 1920s they were largely displaced by others of wider backgrounds who, even more curiously, often found inspiration in their understanding of the samurai code. It’s reminiscent of the Nazi search for a warrior code in old Nordic myths which produced SS vigils and so on. All bullshit, but highly inspirational bullshit for believers and, in one form or another, followed by all armies in lesser forms, at least in elite units or units with proud histories which expect the new troops to uphold the unit’s honour.
I have to say that I’ve read a little on these issues and I have a vague general understanding of the evolution of the Japanese military and society to WWII, but my brain hurts whenever I try to understand the detail of the many and varied and vigorous debates and actions of the various groups in the Japanese military, society, commerce and government. I don’t know of anything remotely like it outside Japan, even Germany in the 1920’s which was a hotbed of intellectual debate and political action. The Japanese were deep and serious and very well informed thinkers about a whole range of issues inside and outside Japan and shouldn’t be lumped into any sort of stereotypical groups, although it’s easy to do this after the militarists gained control in the 1930s and suppressed debate and dissent.
In WWII, I think the ultimate problem for and failure of the Japanese military leadership was that they lacked concern for the individual soldier in ways that Western commanders didn’t (not that the Westerners were exactly a bunch of wet nurses). This gave them great advantages in attack, but reduced them to often pointlessly wasteful defences of their scattered island conquests which allowed them to waste their troops where they didn’t matter and waste the remainder where they did matter. A lot of that was due to a failure or, more probably a refusal from pride, to recognise by 1944 that they were going to lose because the USN was going to throttle them regardless of what happened on land.
That was also largely a consequence of the failure of Japanese naval strategy and the triumph of primarily American naval strategy which strangled Japan and its soldiers marooned in island outposts, but that was just another aspect of Japanese inability to plan and fight a large scale and protracted modern war where industrial might and resolution balanced empty spirit.
I forget the exact figures, but Japan had barely enough shipping tonnage to meet its advances to Papua New Guinea and other requirements, and Guadalcanal started to stretch it. By the end of the war it had about half that tonnage, even allowing for new production and captured tonnage, which was supposed to supply its troops around the Pacific as well as ship back the riches from its conquests.
If there had been less arrogance and less pride of conquest, Japan could probably have withdrawn from many of its conquests and kept a few places such as Indo China, because the fighting Allies would have given France’s conquered territories to a rabid dog (which was a bit like colonial France on a bad garlic day but much better than the Belgians on any day :D) if that’s all it took for peace.
But Japan could never withdraw from the oil in the NEI, which was its biggest prize in the war and almost the whole purpose of it, while the Allies could never let it keep those possessions, so things probably had to play out more or less as they did, with lots of silly Japanese boys from the sticks and cities living out some suicidal samurai fantasy while lots of silly American and British and Australian boys from the sticks and the cities lived out their own version of duty and honour derived from the same sort of schooling that imbued the Japanese boys with their desire to fight for their nation.
And all of that so that America and Australia could start importing Toyotas and Japanese transistor radios about fifteen years after the war ended and increasingly afterwards, which shows just how much commerce triumphs over war every time, and how little the spirit of all the men on all sides counted for in the end.
I left Britain out of importing Toyotas etc, because Britain buggered itself fighting the Germans when nobody else was and had a bit of trouble with the Japanese, so it couldn’t afford to participate in Japan’s post-war prosperity as it was still busy cleaning up the mess from German bombing raids while trying to pay off its Lend Lease debt without income from India and a few other useful places it had before the war.
Australia ended the war with a Lend Lease credit and nice profits from sending primary produce to Britain, while America was a few hundred miles above us on that scale, while Britain still had rationing years after the war. And no Toyotas or transistor radios.
To the victor the spoils.
Yeah!
Right!
(I sort of drifted a bit there, but as usual I’m on the piss, so what do you expect? :D)
I’d just add that in the jungle in attack in 1941-42 the Japanese flank attacks were supported by very effective infiltration from all angles to sow alarm among the defenders, assisted by simple tactics like blowing bugles and setting off firecrackers to cause confusion, and cause the defenders to retreat or rout.
At section / squad and platoon level they were unbeatable in many cases, not least because they faced inferior enemy through lack of training by the Allies. If you win most of the time at those basic levels, you win every way up the levels of military units and formations.
The Japanese were also very adept at bringing up and getting mountain guns and heavy MGs into action, often in the thick of infantry action.
It’s instructive that at the end of the Kokoda retreat (which most Australians nowadays who rely on television and the moron press for information seem to think was a series of victories which Australia continually reinforced by surrendering more ground to the Japanese so the Australians could emphasize their military skill and heroism by allowing the Japanese to beat them again 
) it was a sterling effort by Australian gunners, contrary to higher command’s expectations and initial refusals to allow the attempt, getting their howitzers up supposedly impossible ground and bringing them into action which pounded the Japanese backwards in about the worst artillery country imaginable, both for getting the guns up and firing in heavily forested country against unplotted targets.
Probably the most effective and damaging response to Japan’s swarming and infiltration tactics on a large scale was Slim’s at Kohima etc when the British held and the Japanese blunted themselves against the boxes, and lacked tactics to overcome the failure of their long successful tactics.
An earlier example was the Australians at Milne Bay in 1942, luckily aided by virtually impassable country on one flank and the sea on the other, which greatly reduced the use of standard Japanese infiltration and flanking tactics.
The USMC did something similar at the Tenaru River (strictly it wasn’t the Tenaru, but that’s what it’s always called) around the same time as Milne Bay.
What all these instances all showed is that well trained, resolute, well led, and reasonably well supplied Allied troops could respond to Japanese tactics, without the suicidal spirit of the Japanese. If anything, the suicidal spirit of the Japanese just came to the fore in such attacks and got them mauled to no purpose, the Tenaru River being the best example when the Japanese were in the ascendant and still advancing, and the USMC destroyed their attackers.
For some excellent but, unlike much academic writing, readable essays on the strengths and weaknesses of the IJA and its Pacific adventures, Edward Drea’s In the Service of the Emperor is hard to beat.
Here’s the essay titles.
http://www.questia.com/library/book/in-the-service-of-the-emperor-essays-on-the-imperial-japanese-army-by-edward-j-drea.jsp
I’ve been to Bukit Tinggi, Sumatera, for couple of time. Over there, there is a gigantic labirynth built by IJA, It is so complicated, that it is now marked for directions. People could lost there w/out proper direction.
And there is another one near Manado, north Sulawesi. S ome folks say, originally, the tunnel was connecting 2 cities, Menado and Bitung. Due to bombardments, natural causes etc, several sections are down and made it into smaller sections.
These really shows the enginuity of IJA, in such a short period of times able to create those subterranian fortresses.
IJA defensive engineering and defensive tactics at the end of the war when they didn’t matter so much were very good, as at Okinawa, if you don’t mind being a commander who loses his whole force to no purpose in a futile defence in human and strategic terms which should never have got to that stage because what was lacking was a comprehensive strategy which dictated why they should not even build them, or be in many of the places they were from Sumatra eastwards.
New Guinea destroyed the IJA by years of attrition http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/pages/NT00002FAA
after Guadalcanal stopped its advance.
If you read Drea and others who’ve studied the subject well, what comes out is that the IJN got carried away expanding into the vast Pacific and dragged the IJA with it, leaving the IJA to defend largely indefensible outposts which couldn’t survive without the IJN and the Japanese merchant navy, which weren’t up to the task for various reasons.
The essential problem was that the IJA and IJN operated as separate forces with separate objectives. This oversimplifies it, but it’s fair enough to say that before Pearl Harbor the IJA expanded into China which wasn’t available to the IJN, and after that the somewhat jealous IJN expanded into the Pacific which wasn’t available to the IJA.
A unified Japanese army and navy command with clear strategic objectives would have avoided this, as it did with the Americans in their Pacific actions, although there was certainly friction between the US army and navy but not to the extent that it destroyed the achievement of clear national strategy.
The American forces lacked the constitutional presence of the IJA and IJN at government level in formulating and deciding policy, so they had to conform with political direction which, whatever the many and great failings of politicians, was directed to America’s national strategic aims rather than being fragmented by turf wars between the IJA and IJN in advising the Emperor at Imperial Conference on national strategy.
Japan’s essential problem, independent of the IJA and IJN issues, was that it had a clear national strategy for expansion but no clear and unified army and navy strategies to achieve and hold what was achieved, or even clear strategic reasons for taking and holding anything after Rabaul to protect Truk which led to invading Papua to take and hold Port Moreseby to protect Rabaul from bomber attacks from Townsville in Australia which could reach Rabaul by refuelling at Moresby on the return leg, when Japan didn’t have an equivalent capacity to strike at Townsville, so the first thrust at Moresby led to the Battle of the Coral Sea which had adverse implications for the Japanese at Midway a bit later and a long way away. If the Japanese process of taking and holding something to protect something further back continued to its ultimate, they would have been in Buenos Aires and Antarctica by the end of 1943.
The IJA’s other big failing was that its soldiers and officers were brilliantly schooled in and very proficient in small to medium unit infantry tactics, up to battalion and perhaps brigade level, but those tactics relied on spirit and infiltration and envelopment and remorseless assaults against the enemy, which were devastating against a retreating enemy but suicidal against a tenaciously defending or successfully advancing one, such as Slim at his best in Burma or the Australians and Americans in New Guinea 1943-44.
The IJA’s senior commanders lacked the training and skills of the American and British in dealing with formations (and even the Australians with less than formations), and associated strategic manouevres. So they dug some brilliant holes in rocks and popped up from spider holes and were excellent at interlocking arcs of machine gun fire and mutually supported entrenchments, but they never bothered to ask themselves at a national strategic level whether it was worth doing all that in far flung outposts, notably New Guinea, which had modest strategic value and almost no economic value and which should never have been invaded for no benefit, while they were being slaughtered and starved and isolated when they should have been concentrated closer to Japan’s major conquests and LOC to defend them effectively.
In the defensive phase of the SWPA land war, Japanese commanders had a spectacular capacity to reinforce failure, and an even more spectacular inability to recognise that they were doing it to the detriment of Japan’s larger strategic benefit.
You got things that you said sir!,… after all this while, when i read about certain events in Pacific. It just the event per se that absorb my attention. Perhaps I am kinda ignorant type guy. Somehow now i realize how true it was, that both IJN and IJA seems having their own war. In China, Burma, parts of indonesia were mainly performed by IJA, and far flung oceans,. dominated by IJN, IJA also has to came up their own mode of transport for their fighting troops and how to re-supply them.
As for IJN, they even have their own Parachute Unit,…
Hello Gumalangi,
I’d like to learn more about the work by the Japanese in Menado, Sulawesi. I am interested in the Japanese in Celebes during WWII & haven’t heard of this before now.
TIA
Hello TIA
Regret that i cannot do much with your request, As those things i knew about the Japanese activities in Menado, are most of them came from word of mouth from so called ‘Pai Tua’ or old persons. For the accuracy of the story, it is certainly hard to be prooven. The other story of one small Dutch Gun-boat play hide and seek with IJN Armada,I obtained during an afternoon-tea story from my late father.
It is only the help of Mr George Eller, the story can be guaranteed. However, I can’t always ask others to do my homework . For me, History reading is only one of my part time activities.
However, I knew, few years back, one surviving Kaigun-ho, who was still alived and well. He was very close friend to my father. I am yet to check on his well being. I Lost contact with him when i Moved to Singapore.
Cheers