I’m currently reading a book by Patrick O’Donnell called Into the Rising Sun. It’s a very captivating book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Pacific War. The book is basically a collection of stories from Veterans of the battles in the Philippines, Corregidor, Luzon, Negros and such.
One amazing thing almost all of the Marines have in common is that they all faced at one time or another a Japanese Banzai attack. These attacks usually came at dark or in the early hours of the morning. They basically consisted of one to two hundred Japanese soldiers with bolt action rifles and bayonets led by an officer armed with a pistol and samurai sword. They would attack the Marines position head on with no regard to cover or making any attempts to flank. The Marines were almost always dug in with a front line consisting two man foxholes. The Marines were mostly armed with semi-automatic rifles such as the M1 Garand and the M1 Carbine, the Garand had a 8 round clip and the Carbine a 15 or 30 round magazine. Standard procedure was to have an automatic weapon such as a BAR, Thompson or a .30 caliber light machine gun in every other foxhole. This gave the Marines an incredible amount of firepower. In addition to the rifles, they used grenades.
In each of these stories the Marines describe the Banzai charge as “terrifying” while they happened and then described them as a “massacare” after the fact. They told of hundreds of dead Japanese soldiers. After one encounter the Marines requested a bulldozer from the rear area so they could clear the bodies as they were impeding their field of fire. Basically, the Banzai charge amounted to nothing more than suicide as it was rarely successful.
So, my question is was the Banzai charge a legitimate maneuver taught in training or something that was an improvised, we have no idea what else to do, move by the local officers? I just can’t see any military person thinking that a Banzai charge was a good idea, yet the Japanese did it over and over. An every single time the results were the same. The Marines had a field day and killed almost every single participant in the Banzai charge.
I find it so hard to believe that the Japanese military who at times showed brilliance would waste the lives of their soldiers in this manner. Did any one in the Japanese chain of command really believe that these attacks would be successful? I realize that these are the same people that thought the Kamikaze was a great idea, but the difference between a Kamikaze and the Banzai charge was that the Kamikaze cost the life of one pilot per attack and it did have a chance of destroying a ship if the pilot was able to get through. The Banzai on the other hand cost hundreds of soldiers each time it was tried and was never successful. What a waste.
Wasn’t the banzai charge used in a last stand type scenario? If they didn’t see much hope of victory they’d just take as many of the enemy with them to hell.
That’s not quite the ideology behind it, though that is the end result.
Japanese belief during the war was that POWs are disgraceful. When they captured Americans, they treated them horribly,* thinking that they were shameless for surrendering, instead of dying in battle or commiting suicide if that wasn’t possible. And so they acted themselves, preferring to die in battle than back down when they knew that victory wasn’t possible.
Part of the history of this, in Bushido, is based on the psychology behind sword fights (where fights are one-on-one and both parties are evenly armed). He who does not fear death and goes into the battle with a clear head is the one who will (usually) win, because he has a clear head and no reservations about his actions. But I say part, because the more extreme aspects of Bushido were largely the beliefs of one guy (Yamamoto Tsunetomo) writing about an “idealised” past of the warrior class, and whose writings were picked up and endorsed by the WWII era Japanese government.
I’ve read one report about a group of Okinawans who fled into a cave, when the Americans invaded the island. A nurse, who had worked at one of the Japanese military POW camps, told them about the conditions that POWs suffer under. They assumed that the Americans were similar, and subsequently commited mass suicide rather than have to endure that. It’s plausible that some or many of the Japanese soldiers had similar beliefs and, regardless of their faithfulness to bushido, may have decided to rampage based on their fear of American POW camps.
From what I have read elsewhere, more Japanese soldiers died from starvation in the Pacific, than did from combat.
This was due to two things: the Japanese doctrine that each military unit must be self sufficient in food; and the success of Allied forces in cutting their supply lines.
The Banzai charges were acts of desperation. The soldiers made the conscious decision to attack with the hope of either dying in combat, or capturing food.
They did not want to die of starvation, so a suicide attack was preferable.
Sadly you are correct about the treatment of American POWs by the Japanese. There were many cases of cannibalism by the Japanese. Some of the recollections of the Marines in this book talk of finding captured Marines who had been carved up like a cow at a butcher shop. Many of the men said that once they saw this they vowed to never take another Japanese soldier prisoner, instead they killed every single one they encountered. The fighting in the Pacific cannot in any way be compared to the fighting in Europe. Both sides hated each other and truly thought the other was sub-human.
The Marines stated that after a battle they would finish of any wounded Japanese because many times when an aid man would try to offer help, a wounded Japanese would be hiding a grenade and set it off when a magic tried to offer help. So instead of showing compassion our Marines had to kill every Japanese soldier they came across, they would rather be hard and live, than compassionate and die.
One statement from one of the Marines really stuck with me. He said that he hated the Japanese do badly that if we had invaded Japan he a would have “personally killed every single man, woman and child there”. It’s hard to imagine that kind of hate. To this man’s credit he said that later in life he met some Japanese families in Alaska and the Japanese children really made an impression on him. He said that he no longer harbors any ill will towards the Japanese people. It really impress me that he was able to let his hatred go, it takes a strong man to be able to do that.
A bayonet charge is not unique to the Japanese and while it’s often suicidal, it’s part of a soldier’s basket of likely outcomes.
Some British soldiers in Burma mastered the technique of surgical bayonet charges during raids. An officer or sergeant would lob a grenade at the enemy. Even as the enemy is still reeling from the blast, the British and Burmese soldiers are already rushing them with fixed bayonets. I remember the hardest thing to do was make the British and Burmese jump out and charge as soon as the grenade goes off. That was the key.
But against dug in soldiers with weapons trained? That’s suicidal, unless you have overwhelming firepower superiority (every soldier doing a “marching fire” with a BAR maybe?)
One banzai charge that has documentation from the Japanese side is the final charge during the recapture of Attu Island. A Japanese-American doctor was serving on the island and kept a diary. He noted the COs explanation for the charge: they hoped to capture some American artillery pieces and turn those onto the American ships.
But it was still known to all as suicidal. The remaining wounded were “assisted” to commit suicide. (Or “killed” as we would call it.) They knew that they were not going to survive the battle. They only hoped to create a lot of havoc. They failed at their main goal, of course.
The Japanese throughout that era were really bad at doing the Math. Ratio of casualties, resource availability, production capabilities, etc. weren’t thought out in any rational way.
That death was practically inevitable at some point was generally a major factor. Better to die in battle, which a banzai charge would ensure, then wither away later. The time scale of days, weeks or even years didn’t matter. Dying “heroically” now was better than dying from starvation or disease later.
Remember that one of the asvantages of the US soldiers was how well-equipped they were. The might of US industries was strongly turned toward war production, and the logistics support of the US armed forces was very good. US forces were well supplied, and mostly re-supplied as needed, even as the front lines were moving forward rapidly. Even individual soldiers had amounts of ammunition that other armies envied.
Against a force with more limited supplies, such a charge would have been successful more often.
One of the most utterly strange stories I have heard of the (eventual) Japanese surrender was that the Emperor ordered the military to surrender after Nagasaki and Hiroshima were destroyed.
But not because they were destroyed - what tipped the scales, according to a recent seemingly well-researched document, was he heard that the population was being armed and trained to fight, to the last man, woman, and child - with spears. Against machine guns and flamethrowers.
I cannot comprehend such a mindset - they didn’t have enough steel to even produce a stamped “katana” - just enough steel for a spearhead, but they would not surrender.
Incredible.
Of course, my best friend in High School was raised to believe that “dying for one’s country was the greatest good one could ever hope to achieve” or some crap very near that. He didn’t come close, of course, but a few Vietnamese provided a “close enough” for the benefit of that screwed up excuse for a family.
Don’t think the woman who loved him agreed.
For the record, during the Korean War, NK and Chinese forces used “human wave” attacks that were often effective. They advanced firing submachine guns or assault rifles on full auto shooting from the hip. These weapons weren’t all that available to Japanese forces during WWII.
Oh, they (the high command) did the math and knew the numbers. But they constantly deluded themselves that these disadvantages could be overcome by superior fighting spirit. And that while Americans had plenty of ammo, we were too soft, weak and cowardly to stand up to real soldiers like the Imperial Japanese Army. Similarly, the official line was that an individual Soviet soldier was certainly brave enough, but was practically bovine in his lack of initiative and could easily be overcome by active troops with real Esprit de Corps.
Early victories in the war supplied a lot of confirmation bias to the IJA. They didn’t take into account that they had surprise against an uprepared foe who did not have the full arsenal of democracy running on overdrive. And the IJN did quite well against the USN around Guadalcanal. Until the IJN ran out of ships and planes. AND discovered that the USN was spoiling for a fight.
You’re right about the fatalism behind the Banzai charge. It really was just a way of committing suicide to avoid what they considered worse fates. There really was an obsession with death before surrender.
In many cases, the Japanese solders were not in a position to retreat. So they could stand where they were and wait for death or they could do what their commanding officer says and take the one chance they had of success - a charge. The commander has made up his mind to die so why shouldn’t he make those under him do the same?
The Allies, especially the Americans and Brits, had an overwhelming advantage in material after the first year. So much so that I think the Japanese, local commanders anyway, didn’t really understand how badly outmatched they were until it was too late. They were used to dealing with poorly armed, poorly trained enemies. Banzai charges worked great against island natives, Chinese militia, even well armed Allied conscipts in the the early part of the war. Not so much against entrenched marines.
That’s what you get when you keep your people ignorant and feed them on propaganda. They’ll die for the cause but they can’t adapt to changing conditions.
The idea that morale and elán will make up for any number of disadvantages has not been confined to the Japanese military in the past. The French thought much the same in 1870, and 1914.