It almost certainly is. Not just because the Japanese imported a lot of military experts from other sources like Prussia. But more just that belief in the power of superior will is quite common in militaristic societies down through the ages, probably because in the pre-industrial era it not infrequently worked. He who broke ranks first almost always lost. In truth the difference was usually discipline, not sheer individual courage. But the two could be somewhat intertwined and it could be easy to draw the wrong conclusions and conflate one with the other, particularly when there is a pre-existing societal premium on valor.
Undisciplined elan could win fights if the other side was rattled enough. For example 18th century Austrian infantry were trained to fight other European powers by firing in ranks. But against the Ottomans they were trained to fire continuously. That’s because the Ottoman regulars ( who had shit discipline, but excellent elan/morale relating to their internal cultural milieu ) would often take the opportunity of any gap in musket fire to charge the line and engage hand-to-hand. And Austrian soldiers had a somewhat engrained military-cultural terror of the savagery of Ottoman troops ( who were paid bonuses on the spot for taking an enemy head ), such that they tended to get panicky and a line could thus collapse if directly assaulted.
The French concept of fighting élan vital is a much derided example. But really it was nothing new under the sun and the Japanese hardly needed French advice to embrace the idea of superior will, superior aggression = superior army. Modern Iran made the same mistake in the Iran-Iraq War. Anyway that term originated in 1907 from Henri Bergson, where in a pop-culture version it became something of a intellectual fad among parts of the French officer corps in the years leading up to WW I.
A man who worked for my Dad for many years lived through WWII. His job was behind the lines wet work so to speak. He was trained to hate the Japanese, everything he learned just made him worse.
He had a very hard time the rest of his life because of this. He would cross the street to keep from walking past anyone who even looked partially Oriental. He did this so that he would not be temped by some innocent act to react in the way he felt they should be dealt with.
The Military really let down all the guys that they let get, or were driven by circumstances to, develop that much hate. We know so much more now and still we keep men on tour after tour with little real help to get their heads straight.
The guy I knew was miserable the rest of his life. He knew it but just could not get it on his own. Late in life he met an amazing woman who helped him a lot after they were married. He died in the early 90’s after 45 years of hell after enduring 4+ years of combat hell.
Japanese military doctrine did call for offense over defense, despite repeated evidence that it was their tenacious defense on the various islands which caused most of the problems.
Iwo Jima and Okinawa are the most well-known examples of places where commanders elected to dig in and fight, which caused far more US casualties. However, even in Okinawa, and after they had not contested the beach, allowed the US to come to them, and fought from prepared positions, they still couldn’t keep restrain themselves, so they did several unwise counterattacks.
Incredible, because it’s not true. Or, rather, I would really like to see this cite.
The surrender of Japan has been very well documented and this has not been been shown to be the the case. Wike has a good introduction to the surrender, as a place to start. I’ve also posted about it a number of times.
Well, the Wikipedia article mentions that people collecting scrap bomb casings for the steel was an important point brought to Hirohito’s attention, among other failings. I would not be surprised that the fighting with sharp sticks and such plan wasn’t also known to him. It certainly was known to some of the “doves” in the government.
Tenacious defense causes casualties but rarely wins wars. This is a classic example of a country’s strategic objectives being in conflict with their abilities; after all, the entire point of Japan being at war was conquest and extension of their influence. you can’t defend you way to occupying the Philippines.
It’s also inescapably true that Japan’s greatest successes were NOT defensive battles, but offensive ones. You mention Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but those were, while bloody, thunderous defeats all the same. At Iwo Jima Japan had three men killed for every American killed, and at Okinawa the ratio might have been as high as ten to one. They were much worse losses for Japan than the Allies and cannot be said to have constituted a success of any kind.
By comparison, it is hard to name a Japanese campaign more successful than the capture of Malaya and Singapore. The Japanese lost perhaps 5,000 men and in return killed at least as many enemy troops, captured over a hundred thousand men, and conquered Britain’s greatest Asian base - all with incredibly audacious and aggressive offensive maneuvers.
:dubious: I pretty sure that Chinese “Human wave” attacks had been debunked as Allied propaganda. AFAIK, the Chinese perferred infiltration and close in fighting to negate the overwhelming advantage the US had in Air and Artillery.
At the high tide of the Japanese invasion of Asia, and on the assault toward India, it was their banzai tactics that cost them dear, and ultimately lost them everything gained in Burma.
It is notable that despite overwhelming numbers at Kohima, and at Imphal, the Japanese could not break through, the full frontal assault turned out to be useless but they never learned from it - its almost as if the Japanese military mindset was stuck in the pre WW1 era.
This extended to other areas of their military doctrine, at the beginning of WW2 they had a superb fight in the Zero, but it was soon outclassed, they never did make any significant improvements, their lack of convoy protection allowed subs to play merry hell with their supply lines, and undoubtedly shortened the war, they didn’t rotate their best pilots out to train others, so they lost a huge practical resource. They had their asses handed to them prior to WW2 by Russian tanks, and yet they never developed even halfway decent tanks, nor even effective anti tank weapons.
Their idea was simply that personal bravery will win out, and it doesn’t - resources and logistics do.
The basic Japanese war strategy was to quickly fight down to the DEI from Malaya in the west the PI in the east and and then form a defensive circle around Japan.
Then as the US fought back island by island, it would tire itself out and give in, allowing Japan to keep some or all of its conquests. Regardless of whatever you personally felt about the appropriateness of this strategy, this was theirs.
It turns out that the basic strategy was fatally flawed in that it was based on the premise that the US would fight only a short war and not a long struggle to the bitter end. With the US having more than ten times the industrial might of Japan, there simply was no way that Japan could have won. (The basic concept of why Japan was doomed is outlined here, which should be a sticky for any discussion of the Pacific War.)
As their strategy called for them to quickly take territory, and then punish the attacking enemy then they should have fought in such a way to maximize that punishment. This is their strategy, after all.
They were defensively at their best when they dug in and allowed the Americans to come to them, forgoing attempting to stop the US at the beach and with their crazy banzai charges. This can easily be seen by comparing US casualties in Iwo Jima and Okinawa compared to earlier island battles.
The imperial successes in the early days of the war were spectacular because they came against unprepared troops who seriously underestimated their air, naval and army capabilities. Any number of history books discuss this, but an excellent account is in my current reading material, Pacific Crucible.
You simply cannot make a comparison between Malay and Singapore, when the IJA had spent months planning and training for these offensive operations which caught the enemy completely by surprise, and where the Japanese quickly enjoyed air superiority and then the later defensive struggles where they were outgunned, no air support and limited resources, other than their own guts.
When evaluating the a team’s goal line defense, bringing up the quarterback’s passing stats has no relevance.
At Iwo Jima, the commander kept the course and remained dug in, consequently, it was a much bloodier battle for the Marines.
This is what they should have done at Okinawa. Their mission was to die, but to spill as much American blood as possible to drag out the war for as long as absolutely possible. You are simply wrong to assert that an offense would be possible at this stage.
One of the frustrations of living in Japan and working with them for 25 years was the slow pace of innovation most of the time. When they would change, the pace of amazing, but in so many cases, new ideas was hazardous to your career.
Granted, there were excellent adaptations by lower level officers, but the top leaders failed their nation.
Excellent points, although I’ll quibble that they were doomed to never take India even without the insanely crazy frontal charges. It just compounded their losses.
They were simply planning on a short war, and lacked the resources for R&D, even if they had wanted to.
Japan was obliged to go on the defensive after securing its immediate conquests, though. It could not hope to strike directly at the US or UK in order to defeat them, so a defensive perimeter would have to be established. Though it was not a tenable strategy in view of the resources of the nations, Japan’s only hope was to wear the US down in defensive battles to the point that it would no longer be willing to take the casualties needed for victory. Even the IJN with its continued obsession with the ‘decisive battle’ doctrine of the two opposing battle-lines meeting and duking it out could do the math and had planned pre-war on using attacks from airbases on Pacific islands, aircraft carriers, submarines and night torpedo attacks by destroyers to sink several of the US battleships as they crossed the Pacific to even the odds and set them in Japans favor before a Jutland-style engagement.
Only because Japanese casualties were essentially 100% KIA. American casualties on Iwo Jima were actually slightly higher than Japanese casualties, and before Japan returned to pointless and wasteful offensive action on Okinawa the casualty ratio was close to 1:1. While Japan was doomed in the end one way or the other as there was no breaking point for US willingness to continue the war until it had won, Japan was better served by staying dug in and making the Americans bleed for every yard as they did on Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and for a time on Okinawa than throwing their own lives away cheaply in futile and pointless counterattacks such as Saipan and Okinawa when it was decided to counterattack.
But the purpose of fighting isn’t to kill as many of the enemy as possible - the purpose of fighting is to win the war. And no war has ever been won solely by fighting defensively. At some point, you have to counter-attack. Did the Japanese have a counter-attack planned? Because if they didn’t, they were going to lose. Period.
Interesting! What I got out of them is that both sides were impressed with how fond the other was of hand grenades. And that the Japanese were unclear on the concept of scouting.
Correct my comment to say “suggest” and not “said.”
So your point about not winning wars with defense means exactly what? By 1944 and 1945, how specifically does that help the Japanese win the war against the US?
However, this was their strategy, however deeply flawed it was. Their plan was to try to bleed America dry and wasting their soldiers on meaningless banzai charges directly contradicted that strategy.
You call Iwo Jima a defeat. It was intended to be a defeat, but to hurt the US in the process. A good book to understand the concept is They Were Expendable, although it’s been four decades since I read it, so I may be misremembering.
The idea is that when an army is retreating, some poor sonofabitch or “sonsof” get designated to stand their ground and fight to the death, allowing others to escape. So the lone machine gunner gets to slow down the attacking forces while his company is able to retreat and regroup.
The idea for the Japanese though the later half of the war was to dig in, and force the US to pay for territory with blood. Their military doctrine called for exacting as much punishment on the US and expected that the Allies would quit at some point.
Even at the end, the extremists within the military believed that they could stop the US by making their losses too great. retreating to the internal mountains of Nagano, if necessary.
There was no illusion that Japan could mount offenses similar to 1941 and early '42.
Had the Soviet entry into the war and the atomic bombs not convinced the Japanese to surrender, there was an ongoing debate within the US military on the wisdom of attacking Japan through Kyushu. This debate was because of increased US casualties in later campaigns such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa suggested that it would have been extremely costly.
From the same link,
Let’s look at two earlier battles: Guam and Saipan. I’ll take the stats from Wiki.
Guam:
US
1,747 killed,
6,053 wounded
Total 13,790
Japan
18,040+ killed,
485 POWs
Total 29,921
Ratio US to Japanese casualties(+POW) 1:2.2
Saipan
US
3,426 killed
10,364 wounded
Total 7,800
Japan
24,000 killed
5,000 suicides
921 prisoners
Total 18,525
Ratio US to Japanese casualties(+POW) 1:2.4
In both Saipan and Guam, the Japanese repeatedly attacked the US and suffered greatly for that. The change in strategy in later battles such as Iwo Jima, that is to fight more defensively was clearly better for their situation.
Off all the battles, Iwo Jima was where they stuck to their new strategy of defensive fighting, and caused the highest ratio of casualties.
The whole mindset of the Japanese was generated long before war came. They were very insular post 1920 and this allowed a certain type of self glorification to be employed in nationalistic fervour.
This also led to an uncorroborated view of other nations, they simply assumed a world view which was pretty racist, so they assumed on no evidence whatsoever that Americans would not fight - they also assumed everyone else would give up and they also believed their own self glorifying propaganda - that Japanese warriors would somehow always win out, almost by power of will alone.
It wasn’t unusual, lots of other nations stereotypes the citizens of their rivals - the outlooks of both Japan and Germany were similar in many ways, but the latter were always prepared to assess learn and change.
That’s sort of the whole point; the war was unwinnable by Japan. The first 100 days was their offensive act wherein they seized the resources needed for war in China without having to accede to the American oil embargo. There was absolutely nothing they could do to prevent Act II from happening, the Act wherein America having mobilized its resources counterattacks Japan’s conquests and goes on to attack Japan itself. The only real ‘plan’ was that American morale would break because of its eventual unwillingness to take the casualties needed for victory; it was in a sense trying to pull a ‘Vietnam’ on America only under entirely different circumstances where there was anything but a lack of popular support for the war back home.
While it’s just a discussion on tactics in a war where the strategic situation was hopeless anyway, in battles where Japan stuck to the defensive they were able to get casualty ratios of ~1:1 such as at Peleliu and Iwo Jima, while at other battles where they insisted on hopeless counterattacks they took much heavier losses than the Americans, or rather took fewer Americans with them. As TokyoBayer notes, and something that I think should be emphasized, is that Japan knew that these battles were already lost when they were being fought. It was only a question of how long and costly they could make it for the Americans, not if they could be won or lost. They weren’t carrying out counterattacks with any hope of succeeding; they were fatalistic counterattacks conducted for the sake of dying and with the full knowledge that they would fail. It’s the same mentality that was prepared for Japan to commit national suicide before surrendering.
As Dissonance alludes, the US actually ran into a problem like that once before as well. It famously didn’t work for us, either. Without getting into a hijack about that war, one comment I sometimes hear is that the US was on the verge of winning when public opinion forced the US to leave. The problem with that is, as you suggest, the war needs to be taken to them, and the US wasn’t doing that for specific reasons (again, without getting into a debate if those reasons were good or not).
I don’t believe that most people are aware of situation prior to the war and that both two powers were quite ware that Japan and the US had mutually exclusive goals in the Pacific and were on a course of war from well before Pearl Harbor.
An interesting 1925 novel, The Great Pacific War, of which I’ve only read the summaries, outlines many things which actually occurred in the war, including it opening by surprise attacks by Japan and island hoping by the US. Likewise, the attack on Pearl Harbor had been war gamed as well, with great success coming from a surprise attack on a Sunday morning.
It’s just that both sides misjudged the other’s abilities and determination. The Allies completely missed the boat on Japan’s aircraft abilities, for example, and Japan did not believe that the US would continue to fight even after its nose got bloodied.
As I’m sure you are very aware, let me add some comments. Interestingly, although it was Japan which forced the change in the US and British naval doctrine from centering around battleships to carriers, they failed to connect the dots on what that would mean for their country.
The island hopping strategy was enhanced by the shear number of planes which the USN carriers could bring to bear against a stronghold. Once the island’s aircraft were knocked out of the picture, then it could be bypassed.
Another factor which they failed to foresee was the development of long range bombers which allowed their cities to be bombed to rubble before they were in danger of a direct invasion.
That and completely neglecting to study the U-boat campaign and its implications for itself, an island country, and one without an industrial giant friend.
As you pointed out, Japan did not learn the right lessons in the war.
In addition, Germany had a much larger industrial base and the good fortune of being able to conquer countries which added to that base, where Japan was not.