While the forces of Imperial Japan mostly fought in the Far East during the Second World War,
especially in the Pacific, they still went toe-to-toe with a wide variety of Allied
forces. From the Allies' perspective, fighting the Japanese was pretty much always terrible.
For the most part, the Japanese were seen as ruthless zealots who brutalised POWs
and always fought to the bloody, bitter end.
But what did the Japanese think of Allied forces? The answer to this question is,
of course, incredibly complicated and subjective, so in this video, we're going to look at just
a few examples that offer valuable insights into the Japanese perspective and then offer
our opinion on which Allied forces the Japanese hated fighting the most.
Before we go any further, we have to understand some key values that
shaped the Japanese perspective [Text:
While we intend to cover this topic in greater detail in a future video, this is the gist of it.
Firstly, Imperial Japan saw itself as Asia's only hope against the West,
a Rising Sun whose light would banish the Western powers—including America, Britain,
France, the Netherlands, and Portugal—from the Far East. Issued in December 1941,
the Japanese military booklet Read This Alone And The War Can Be Won corroborates this:
"[T]ens of millions of Asian inhabitants
have suffered constant exploitation and persecution at [the white men's] hands.
The other peoples of the Far East trust and honour the Japanese and [hope] that, with the
help of the Japanese people, they may themselves achieve national independence and happiness."
Of course, looking at what Japan did in China, and seeing how the Japanese treated
the Pacific nations they—in quotation marks—"rescued" during World War II,
it does appear that this "saviour of Asia" narrative was a bit of a fib.
Other key Japanese values arose from the military's Bushido code of behaviour,
instilled in the Japanese during basic training. Perhaps the most
important aspect of the code was how it viewed surrender.
Basically, anyone who surrendered forfeited their honour—enemy soldiers included.
American Colonel Fred Borch summed it up well: "Those who had surrendered to
the Japanese—regardless of how courageously or honorably they had fought—merited nothing but
contempt; they had forfeited all honor and all rights to be treated with dignity or respect."
From the Meiji era to the 1930s, Japan employed Western innovations to evolve from an isolated
feudal society into an industrialized nation state. To continue to grow as an empire and
achieve great power status, Japan needed raw materials—which China had. After the July 1937
Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Japan began a full-scale invasion of mainland China.
This was the Second Sino-Japanese War.
At this point, the Japanese perceived China as an antiquated society with insufficient
military power to defend itself. Notably, China's armed forces were poorly equipped,
lacking the more modern artillery, tanks, and planes that industrialization had afforded Japan.
Straight up, China had no mechanized divisions at the start of the war.
Japanese soldiers had better training and were more disciplined, too.
They were ready to lay down their lives for the Emperor, and would sooner die than surrender.
The Chinese didn't seem to understand this mindset, and they suffered for it.
One event, in particular, illustrates just how little the Japanese thought of their enemy,
at least in the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
From mid-December 1937 through January 1937, the Japanese entered the Chinese
capital of Nanjing and perpetrated what became known as the Rape of Nanjing.
They killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, raped countless women, looted,
and burned. In Nanjing, Japanese soldiers operated on a "kill all captives" order.
Any Chinese troops who surrendered were judged according to the Bushido code and had therefore
forfeited their rights to dignity and respect. As such, the Japanese machine-gunned unarmed
prisoners to death, bayoneted them, hacked off their heads with swords, and burned them alive.
According to Japanese officer Tsuyoshi Noda, who had a competition with his buddy Toshiaki
Mukai to see which of them could kill more surrendered Chinese with a sword,
"We'd face an enemy trench that we'd captured, and when we called out,
"Ni, Lai-Lai!" (You, come here!), the Chinese soldiers were so stupid, they'd rush toward us
all at once. Then we'd line them up and cut them down, from one end of the line to the other."
It's a testament to Japan's resolve that it was able to fight the Second Sino-Japanese War
and World War II at the same time. Throw war with the Soviet Union into the mix,
and Japan would surely have been done for.
In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo.
This heightened pre-existing tensions with the Soviet Union,
which feared what Japan would do with such a large foothold on the mainland [Text:
Bear in mind that Japan had already defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
According to Amnon Sella's article Khalkhin-Gol: The Forgotten War, "There was a growing feeling
in Japan, particularly in military circles, that their country was stronger than the USSR.
Japanese military commanders envisaged the Soviet Far East, with its inadequate communications,
relatively small armed forces, and disputed border area as vulnerable."
With this in mind, border skirmishes between Japan and the USSR erupted in and around Manchukuo.
In 1939, these skirmishes escalated to the Battles of Khalkhin Gol.
Khalkhin Gol showed the Japanese that the Soviet Union was no easy mark.
On the 20th of August, after a few months of intense fighting, Red Army Corps Commander Georgy
Zhukov launched a massive offensive, motorising two full infantry divisions with supply trucks
and coupling them with two tank divisions and two Mongolian cavalry divisions. With this force, he
performed a textbook pincer movement, encircling and eradicating the Japanese 23rd Division.
The Soviets weren't, in fact, vulnerable; the Japanese had underestimated them, and this
cost Japan the battle and ruined any hope they had of a continued offensive against the USSR.
Assessing their defeat, the Japanese concluded that a deciding factor had been the Soviets'
material superiority. Where Soviets boasted 600 artillery pieces, 400 armoured cars,
500 tanks, and 580 warplanes, the Japanese brought to bear just 300 artillery pieces,
90 tanks and tankettes, and 200 warplanes.
After World War II broke out, Japan realised it could not hope to fight China,
the Western Allies, and the Soviet Union all at once, so it signed the Soviet–Japanese
Neutrality Pact on the 13th of April 1941. This basically stipulated that,
while both nations could attack each other's allies, they could not attack each other.
This pact was upheld until August 1945, when the Red Army invaded Manchuria and reminded
the Japanese what they had rightly been afraid of after Khalkhin Gol.
While Japan underestimated the USSR, it overestimated Britain.
Japan and the United Kingdom have a long history of friendship,
starting with the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty back in 1854.
Japan fought abreast Britain in the First World War, but the subsequent Anglo-Japanese Alliance
was not renewed in 192 because the US had been pressuring Britain not to renew it.
During their friendship, Britain had built Japan
loads of ships and trained its naval personnel. The Japanese respected the power of the Royal
Navy and the British military as a whole, but they couldn't look past the embargoes
that Britain placed on Japan in response to Japan’s aggression in China and Manchuria.
Following their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded British Malaya,
steamrolling the British and their Commonwealth allies.
On the 10th of December, just a few days after the Malayan campaign had begun, the Royal Navy
battleship HMS Prince of Wales left Singapore to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet.
On her return, Imperial Japanese Navy bombers and torpedo bombers swooped her and her squadron and
put Prince of Wales below the waves. This was a massive symbolic defeat for the British, and for
the Japanese, a disappointment. They had expected more of a fight from the British flagship.
By mid-February, the Japanese had pushed through Malaya and seized Singapore, taking 85,000 Allied
troops, mostly British, as POWs. According to the Bushido code, these men had forfeited their
rights to dignity and respect. Many of these men were shipped to forced labour camps in
Malaya and elsewhere, some were detained in POW camps in Singapore, and others were massacred,
including some 50 wounded military personnel who were being treated in Alexandra Barracks Hospital.
"Man for man," said British Vice-Admiral Geoffrey Layton, "our men were inferior to the Japanese
in training and in the moral qualities of audacity, tenacity, discipline and devotion."
And, at least in these early stages of the war, we're sure the Japanese agreed with him.
So the Brits disappointed the Japanese,
but what about the other major Western Allied power, the USA?
The United States answered Japan's aggression in China and Manchuria with devastating embargoes,
and by mid-1941, they had cut Japan off from US oil entirely. Because around
80% of Japan's oil imports came from the US, Japan was now between a rock and a hard place.
Some Japanese leaders even considered the embargo a pre-emptive declaration of war.
According to the aforementioned Japanese military booklet Read This Alone And The War Can Be Won,
"At stake in the present war is the future prosperity or decline of the Empire.[L]ittle
by little, like a man strangling his victim with a soft cord of silken floss,
America has been prohibiting the export to Japan of oil."
If Japan couldn't get the oil and other raw materials it needed to press its
war against China from US imports, it would go elsewhere. In December 1941,
the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, hoping to cripple the US fleet so that
Japanese forces could more-easily conquer and plunder the Pacific.
In early Japanese war documents and propaganda, American soldiers were often portrayed as cowards.
To quote that military booklet again, "Our [American] opponents are even
more feeble than the Chinese Army. [They are] very effeminate and very cowardly."
But more often, US forces lived up to another Japanese portrayal—a demonic one.
There were countless instances of US troops massacring unarmed, surrendered Japanese soldiers,
for example, and the Americans also picked up the nasty habit of taking Japanese ears,
teeth, and bones as trophies and souvenirs. As historian Niall Ferguson put it,
"[B]oiling the flesh off [Japanese] skulls was not an uncommon practice."
If that wasn't enough, during the Guadalcanal campaign, US Marines retrieved a bunch of
letters penned by slain Japanese soldiers. According to I'm Staying with My Boys by
authors Jerry Cutter and Jim Proser, one of these Japanese letters read as follows:
"The Americans on this island are not ordinary troops, but Marines, a special force recruited
from jails and insane asylums for bloodlust. There is no honourable death to prisoners.
heir arms are cut off, [and] they are staked on the airfield and run over by steamrollers."
From anecdotes such as that, we might conclude that, of China, the Soviet Union,
Britain, and the United States, Japan feared American soldiers the most.
But this is, of course, just our pinion. The fact that Japan chose to sign a pact with the USSR
certainly stands for something, so we'd place the Soviet Union at a close second.
But what do you think? Which nation's warriors do you think the Japanese feared most?
Do you have any evidence that corroborates or, better,
contradicts the examples we discussed today? Were there any other nations whose soldiers struck
fear in the hearts of the Japanese? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.