The number of human beings killed as a direct or indirect result of
World War II is staggering. Honestly, my jaw drops every time I read into it,
and I can't help but take a step back and contemplate how those figures are far, far
more than just that. Every one of them represents a human being — someone's daughter, someone's son
Military persons, of course, make up a portion of these figures, and in this series,
we're going to look into not only military deaths, but some of the most catastrophic
military casualties — which we'll define as including deaths, injuries, illnesses,
captures, and even desertions. We'll be looking through a fairly broad scope, considering freakish
casualties to military units on the scale of formations to commands while keeping that scope
pointed at identifiable military operations rather than attempting to encompass the war as a whole.
It's also important to note that it's pretty much impossible to calculate casualties with precision,
and the actual military casualties may be far less or more than the figures gathered for this series.
Anyways, without further ado let's get into part 1 of the Pacific Theatre.
The Battle of Kohima was the culmination of the Japanese U-Go Offensive, in which the Japanese
wanted to push into India through the towns of Imphal and Kohima and thwart British plans to
invade Burma. The Japanese invaded with only three week's worth of supplies, intending to capture
them along the way, but this was countered heavily by the Allies, and this ill-advised decision would
eventually lead to a Japanese defeat. In the middle of April 1944, the Japanese surrounded
Kohima Ridge, where British and Indian troops were garrisoned. They then sieged the ridge with
shells, squashing the Allied troops into a tighter and tighter space and cutting off their supplies.
In one spot, the fighting occurred literally over the width of a tennis court. Allied reinforcements
came, and the Japanese started to starve and get sick. They fought it out for a while,
in and around Kohima, but eventually withdrew, dragging their malnourished
selves away and taking their own lives in shame. Colonel Hugh Richards was in command of British
and Indian troops, and even after being reinforced by a portion of the 161st Indian Brigade,
their combined force was only 2,500 — of which 1,000 were noncombatants. These numbers were
later reinforced by the bulk of the 161st Indian Brigade and the British 2nd Division.
Lieutenant General Kotoku Sato led the Japanese 31st Division of the 15th Army. The division was
composed of the 58th Regiment, the 124th Regiment, the 138th Regiment,
and the 31st Mountain Artillery Regiment, and between 12,000 and 15,000 strong.
The belligerents fought in and around the fragmented, burnt-out husk of Kohima,
though perhaps the most infamous stage of this battle was the fun-time bungalow and
tennis courts of the Deputy Commissioner. Here, the Allies and the Japanese fought between muddy
trenches, hurling grenades and devolving to hand-to-hand combat under torrential rain.
Littered with corpses, the court itself was a fly and rat-infested no-man's land.
John Pennington Harman, born in 1914 in Beckenham, London, was only 29 when he died in the arms
of his company commander in Kohima. Early in April 1944, he charged a troublesome Japanese
machine-gun post alone, lobbing a grenade into it and blowing it up. The following morning,
he fixed a bayonet to his Lee-Enfield rifle and charged at a group of Japanese soldiers
who were burrowing in, blasting four and sticking one. Returning to his team,
he was caught in enemy fire though still made it back to his trench,
where his eyes shut forever. For these actions, he received a Victoria Cross.
Retreating from the neighbouring battle at Imphal, Senior Private Manabu Wada of the Japanese 131st
Infantry regiment reflected on what he saw: "Once we found a tent in the jungle; inside it were the
bodies of six nurses. [...] In another tent we found the bodies of three soldiers who had
killed themselves. How could one ever forget such terrible, distressing sights as the dead nurses,
and the soldiers who had taken their own lives?" [...] Even with the support of our sticks we
fell amongst the corpses again and again as we stumbled on rocks and tree roots [...] I cannot
forget the sight of one corpse lying in a pool of knee-high water; all its flesh and blood had been
dissolved by the maggots and the water so that now it was no more than a bleached uniform."
Overall, the Japenese 31st Division suffered 5,764 battle casualties in Kohima and some
1,300 more to starvation, disease, and exhaustion either during the battle or
the retreat. That's almost half of the division's original 12,000 to 15,000,
if we're going with the upper estimate. Shizuo Maruyama, a Japanese war correspondent, wrote: “We
had no ammunition, no clothes, no food, no guns. At Kohima, we were starved and then crushed.”
After losing the Phillippine island of Leyte to the Japanese,
the Americans wanted it back. Once it was in their hands, they intended to use it as
a launchpad to retake the Southeast Asian countries Japan had occupied, and then move
towards the Japanese Home Islands. On the 20th of October 1944, after bombarding Leyte from the sea,
the U.S. 6th Army landed on its northeastern coast. The Japanese weren't so keen to give it up,
though they were just a little outgunned and had, therefore, to rely on a bit of strategy.
The Combined Fleetsent their "Northern Force" as bait to lure the U.S. Navy away from Leyte,
and their "Southern Force" and "Centre Force" to creep around the back and attack the 6th Army's
landing. Due to enemy ambushes, miscommunications within Japanese command, and deceptions,
as well as acts of bravery, played out by the Americans, the Japanese Combined Fleet failed,
and was essentially unmade, in a series of battles known collectively as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
The 3rd and 7th U.S. Navy fleets, with warships numbering around 300,
were under separate command, which led to some major coordination issues,
particularly involving Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. of the 3rd Fleet.
The Japanese Combined Fleet totalled 63 warships, with Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita,
commander of the Centre Force, receiving scrutiny for his decisions in the Battle off Samar.
The opposing navies battled it out in the waters surrounding Leyte, notably in the Palawan Passage,
the San Bernardino Strait, and the Surigao Strait. TIME correspondents in Leyte described
it like this: "American power came back to the Philippines today over the glass-smooth,
grass-green waters of Leyte Gulf under a tropical sun coming through
an ominous haze lit by yellow flashes and the blasting of guns.” Casualties, however,
would have occurred on and in the burning and/or sinking warships, and in the water.
At a reunion for U.S. veterans of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Hank Pyzdrowski,
a captain aboard the USS Gambier Bay, shared his experience swimming to shore after he watched the
escort carrier capsize and sink: "The second day, sharks attacked. Later on, as men began
dying on the life rafts, you'd have to cut people off and let them drift to keep the sharks away."
Yukio Seki, born in Iyo Saijō, a small town in Japan, was raised by a mother and father
who ran an antique store which specialised in tea ceremony utensils. He pursued a navy
career from a young age and got on his first battleship, Fuso, in 1941. Seki led a squadron
of five kamikaze Zeros against the U.S. in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and did his
family proud by smashing his plane into USS St. Lo. The U.S. Navy action report reads:
"A tremendous crash followed quickly followed by an explosion as one or both of the enemy's
bombs exploded. [...] There was a hole in the flight deck with smoldering edges which sprang
into flame. [...] This was followed in a matter of seconds by a much more violent explosion,
which rolled back a part of the flight deck bursting through aft of the original hole.
The next heavy explosion tore out more of the flight deck and also blew the forward elevator
out of its shaft." The magazine had exploded, and in the next half an hour, St. Lo was destroyed.
Overall, 26 warships of the Japanese Combined Fleet were destroyed in the Battle of Leyte Gulf,
in exchange for a U.S. loss of only 7. This translated to around 12,500 Japanse casualties.
Forget about a specific unit — their defeat pretty much destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The Americans thought capturing the volcanic island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese would be
a significant strategic move on the way to invading the Japanese Home Islands. Though,
the Japanese had dug the island out like an ant nest, allowing them to withstand pre-landing naval
artillery bombardment and cover their machine-gun, mortar, and artillery positions, and the "1-week"
victory the Americans had planned stretched out and out, costing them torrents of blood. The
Japanese knew they had no hope of victory against superior forces, though they weren't
going to die until they'd maimed their enemy and made them think twice about invading Japan.
The U.S. forces invading the island were the V Amphibious Corps,` the 7th
Air Force, and the 5th Fleet, with a combined might of around 110,000.
Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi led the 10th Division of the Imperial Japanese
Army in the defence of Iwo Jima; this was a force between 20,500 and 21,000 strong.
Where the Americans crashed onto the coast in their amphibious vehicles in February 1945,
the beach was made up of soft black volcanic ash,
and the way up into Japanese fortifications was steep, slippery, and almost insurmountable.
An excerpt from the book The Battle for Iwo Jima by Robert Leckie describes what it was
like when the Japanese opened up on the American beachhead: "At first it came as a
ragged rattle of machine-gun bullets, growing gradually lower and fiercer until at last all
the pent-up fury of a hundred hurricanes seemed to be breaking upon the heads of the Americans.
Shells screeched and crashed, every hummock spat automatic fire and the very soft soil
underfoot erupted underfoot with hundreds of exploding land mines ... Marines walking erect
crumpled and fell. Concussion lifted them and slammed them down, or tore them apart."
Higher up, on the rocky cheeks and scalp of the island, flamethrowers and
hand-to-hand fighting were the methods of death, which often came at night.
2nd Lt. Benjamin Roselle's experience paints the picture pretty well: A mortar shell exploded next
to him, and he looked down to see that his left foot was clinging to his leg by only
a ribbon. Then another struck at him, filling his other leg with shrapnel. He waited a while,
an hour or so, and then a third shell erupted on his shoulder. Then came another which threw
him into the air and shredded his thighs. Hitting the ground, he looked at his watch,
only for another mortar shell to go off, blast the watch from his forearm, and take a column of
flesh with it. He later said, "I was beginning to know what it must be like to be crucified."
Japanese veteran Shuichi Yamaguchi was one of the few from the 10th Division to surrender.
Out of shame, he concealed the story of his surrender until he was 95, when he said:
"It was a one-sided battle. [...] a living hell for us. [...] Japanese soldiers were dead all over
the place, their bodies were infested with maggots and lice. [...] I was captured because I left the
tunnel to get water for soldiers who were dying." When Yamaguchi got back home after being a POW for
three years, his family had already built him a gravestone, thinking he'd perished on the island.
While the Americans "won," the V Amphibious Corps, the 7th Air Force, and the 5th Fleet
took 26,000 combined casualties over 36 days. However, only 6,800 of those were deaths,
and this is hardly comparable with the 17,000 to 18,000 from the Japanese 10th Division
pronounced dead or missing, especially as the division started off 20,000 to 21,000
strong. Though, it was certainly not the fight America was looking for, and the strategic
importance of the capture became a point of controversy thereon, with William V. Pratt,
a retired Chief of Naval Operations stating: “There has been a certain amount of public
criticism over this expenditure of manpower to acquire a small, Godforsaken island,
useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base. The public wants to
know if the occupation of Iwo Jima was a military necessity and wonders if the same sort of airbase
could not have been reached by acquiring other strategic localities at lower cost.”
So guys, that was part 1 of the Pacific Theatre,
and we got plenty more episodes of this series to watch.