WAR RESPONSIBILITY--delving into the past (3) / War fought on 'armchair plan'

The Yomiuri Shimbun

This is the third installment of a six-part introductory series on the responsibility of the war era's politicians and military leaders' in failing to avoid war.

Once a country has engaged in a war, it must discuss how and when to exit from the fighting. How did Japan envisage it might end the Pacific War?

There is a document containing an exit strategy approved by the Imperial Headquarters' Government Liaison Council immediately before the war.

The document states the army's rather self-righteous plan to speed up the end of the war against Britain, Chiang Kai-shek (then leader of China, part of which Japan claimed as its territory), the Netherlands and the United States.

The document argued that Japan should destroy British, Dutch and U.S. bases in the Far East to establish a system of self-reliance and self-defense.

Second, areas under Japan's control should be expanded to push the Chiang administration to yield to Japan.

Third, Japan should work with Germany and Italy to force Britain into submission and to discourage the United States from continuing with the war.

Based only on such a haphazard plan, the government and the Imperial Headquarters went to war against the United States, which had overwhelming production capacity.

Moreover, lucky initial successes in the war deluded Japan into overestimating its potential, and the country expanded the war front beyond the geographical limit Japan could maintain on its own strength.

The Battle of Guadalcanal that broke out in August 1942 on Guadalcanal Island, the southernmost end of the Solomon Islands, was nothing but a tragedy born out of a war without strategy.

The Imperial Japanese Navy was building an air field on the island as a front-line base for dividing U.S. and Australian forces, when U.S. forces mounted a large-scale offensive.

But the Imperial Headquarters made the mistake of sending small units of troops into the battle one after another, to have each routed by the Allied troops. The biggest contributor to Japan's defeat was its inability to transport enough troops and supplies to the island at one time.

Following the massive defeat in the Battle of Midway earlier in 1942, Japan gradually began losing the command of the seas in the Pacific.

The U.S. forces, on the other hand, took control of the islands that were Japan's strategic points one by one as if they were stepping stones, cleverly severing Japan's supply routes.

Of more than 20,000 Japanese troops who died in the Battle of Guadalcanal, 15,000 are believed to have died of starvation or illness.

Despite the deteriorating war situation, Imperial Headquarters leaders failed to advise the government of the details of the operation, shielding themselves behind the independence of the supreme command. They also concealed inconvenient information from the public when reporting the war.

There was an idea of "an absolute national defense area," selected zones in the Pacific that must be protected by all means, set up to downsize the battle front. But the whole idea turned out to be an armchair plan.

It was on Attu Island, part of the Aleutian Islands, in May 1943 that the first contingent of troops was completely wiped out in a battle described as a "gyokusai," or "honorable defeat." About 2,500 troops left on the island ran out of ammunition.

Instead of sending more troops to support them, the Imperial Headquarters wired them, "When it comes to the end, we hope you will gracefully choose gyokusai honorable deaths with determination to show the flower of the spirit of Imperial military personnel."

The U.S. forces appealed to the soldiers to surrender, but the Japanese soldiers charged forward to their death, binding each other's legs together with rope so that no one could hesitate.

In July 1944, defense troops on the island chose a similar end. And the government and the Imperial Headquarters began ordering airmen to carry out "tokko" suicide attacks with planes on enemy ships, without even trying to bring about an end to the war.