The Reality of the Battlefield — The Price of the Cult of Spirit

When we speak of war, we tend to view the battlefield through the yardstick of victory and defeat — which side won. Yet when we trace what actually happened on the battlefields of the Pacific War, a reality emerges that this yardstick cannot fully measure. What took the lives of so many soldiers was not enemy bullets, nor artillery fire. It was hunger, disease, and the very organizational structure that produced them. In this installment, taking the two battlefields of Guadalcanal and Imphal as our axis, we look as calmly as we can at the reality of the battlefield, including the question of the harm Japanese forces inflicted there.

What ‘Starvation Island’ Laid Bare

Known as a turning point of the Pacific War, the Guadalcanal Campaign was an event that symbolized the reality of the battlefield. From August 1942 to February of the following year, Japanese forces fought fiercely with the Allies over this small island. Yet what defeated the Japanese army here was not necessarily the enemy’s military strength alone.

The total Japanese force that landed on this island is said to have numbered roughly 30,000, of whom only about 10,000 managed to withdraw; the dead and missing are said to have reached around 20,000. What deserves attention is the cause of death. It is said that far more soldiers fell to hunger and disease than died in direct combat, and estimates are known in which starvation and death from illness accounted for the majority of the dead. On an island where, having lost control of the air and sea, no food, ammunition, or medicine could reach them, the soldiers suffered from hunger and malaria. The island had originally been abbreviated as ‘Ga-to,’ but at some point the soldiers came to call it ‘Ga-to’ written with the character for starvation — ‘Starvation Island.’

Why was supply neglected to such a degree? In the background, it is said, lay multiple factors: the front lines spreading wider than expected at the war’s outset, and the ships that carried sea transport being lost one after another. Yet alongside these, what is often pointed to is the notion that willpower could make up for material strength. The idea that ‘with enough fighting spirit, anything can be overcome’ pushed the plain but decisive element of supply to the back of the line — such a view has been told and retold in later research and recollections.

The Road of Bones — The Collapse Called Imphal

The lesson of Guadalcanal, however, was not adequately learned. What symbolizes this is the Battle of Imphal, carried out in 1944.

This was an operation that sought to capture Imphal in British India from the direction of Burma (present-day Myanmar). Yet the line of advance lay across rugged mountains and jungle, and maintaining the long supply line was extremely difficult. Against the supplies required, transport capacity is said to have been only slight. And yet the operation was forced through. In popular accounts it is often told as an operation driven forward by the hardline insistence of Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi, who commanded it, and there is an anecdote that voices warning of the impossibility of supply were brushed aside with appeals to spirit. That said, there is also debate over whether responsibility may be attributed to a single commander alone, or whether the problem lay rather in the approval of the upper echelons and in the structure of the organization as a whole, and views differ.

The result was catastrophic. The operation collapsed, and because the bodies of soldiers who had fallen to hunger and disease lined the route of retreat, that road came to be called the ‘Road of Bones.’ The forces committed and their casualties vary by source, and estimates are known in which, of roughly 100,000 committed, around 30,000 were killed, with casualties growing far larger when the wounded and the sick are included — but there are differing views on the numbers. In any case, in that many soldiers lost their lives not to combat itself but to the hunger and disease brought on by the absence of supply, it was a tragedy of the same structure as Guadalcanal.

What Was Happening in the Occupied Territories — Not Looking Away from the Question of Harm

When we look at the reality of the battlefield, we cannot finish by speaking only of the hunger and disease that Japan’s own soldiers endured. For within the same war, Japanese forces also inflicted grave harm on local residents and prisoners in the territories they occupied. To look away from this fact would mean we had not truly faced history.

For example, after American and Filipino forces surrendered on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines in 1942, many prisoners were forced to march long distances under the blazing sun, and many lives were lost along the way — an event known as the ‘Bataan Death March.’ The number of victims varies by source, but the harshness of the treatment of prisoners is widely acknowledged, and after the war it came to the point where the responsible commanders on the ground were put on trial. Also, in the various occupied territories of Southeast Asia, policies of procuring food and supplies locally to sustain the front lines were adopted, and there are records of cases in which this strained the lives of residents, and cases in which prisoners and residents were mobilized for harsh labor on projects such as railway construction, producing many casualties.

These are parts that, within Japan, are difficult to touch on in detail, partly owing to the limited space of textbooks. Yet for the neighboring countries of Asia, they are also events that form the very core of the memory of the war. Looking at the aspect of harm inflicted alongside the aspect of harm suffered — this, one might say, is a perspective indispensable not in order to take a particular side, but in order to understand accurately what the enterprise of war brings about.

What Did the Soldiers Live Through?

I have continued so far with talk of structure, but the last thing we must not forget is the fact that within that structure lay the life of each individual soldier. Most of them were not leaders who had wished to start a war, but ordinary people who had been conscripted and sent to the battlefield. The young man from a farming family, the craftsman from a small-town workshop, the youth fresh out of school — all headed for distant islands and jungles by order.

The reality that these men fell to hunger and disease before ever fighting the enemy thrusts the absurdity of war upon us most sharply of all. At the same time, in the occupied territories, those same soldiers were also placed on the side of those who inflicted harm. One can be both victim and perpetrator at once — the battlefield was also a place that drove human beings toward both of those faces. To look at only one side is to miss the reality of the battlefield.

The front line, after Guadalcanal, continued to fall back, inch by inch. The gap in material strength only widened, and death from starvation and disease was repeated everywhere. Seen calmly, that there was no longer any hope of winning gradually became clear to those who knew the war’s situation.

Then why did the war not end there? Why, even with defeat in sight, could the decision to surrender not be made? In the next installment, we step into the very structure that made the war ‘impossible to end.’