Posted on 12/12/2001 7:27:01 PM PST by Hopalong
Colonel Masanobu Tsuji (I put his family name last, in the western convention) was a tactical genius, a master of improvisation, and one of the criminals to wear uniform in the period 1932-1945. These are notes I put together in 1994 from various sources. They're presented in chronological order, divided into rough "chapters." I have omitted source references, to make the text easier to read, but it's followed by a bibliography. - Dan Ford (later: the file concludes with comments from readers of this page)
About this time he posed for a photograph, carrying a samurai sword but dressed in a field uniform. The cloth forage cap bears one star over the bill. From what can be seen if it under the cap, Tsuji's head appears to have been shaved clean, and his wears the round-lensed Oriental spectacles that were so savagely caricatured in American propaganda cartoons during the Pacific War. He is wide of jaw but narrow of shoulder.
About 1930 he attended the War University as a lieutenant, where he quarreled, he said, with his instructors on matters of military tactics. Studied Chinese, though indifferently, and at some time studied Russian to about the same degree of enthusiasm. Perhaps it was here that he was, as he later claimed, a classmate of Prince Chichibu, the Emperor's younger brother.
It was a time of conspiracies. In the army, the two major groups were the *Tosei* (Control) faction, of which Majo Gen Hideko Tojo was a prominent member, and which favored a strong army that did not mix into politics. The more radical *Kodo* (Imperial Way) group wanted a "restoration" with the Emperor acting as a god, free of political advisers, bureaucrats, and business interests, with the army as his main support. The *Kodo* faction was condemned not only by army headquarters but by the Emperor himself. The officers who held to this view were ready to mount a coup in November 1934, when Capt Tsuji was a company commander at the Military Academy. (Among his students was a young Thai whom he would meet again in Bangkok in 1945.) Learning that five cadets were involved in the coup, he infilatrated a trusted cadet into the conspiracy and got a list of names which he sent to Major Katakura at Imperial Headquarters. The cadets were arrested on Nov 2; though not convicted, they were expelled from the academy, and the two officers who had recruited them were dismissed from the army. The *Kodo* group believed that the entire affair had been devised as a trap by Tsuji. In any event, he stored up influence where it mattered: with such future commanders as Tojo, Renya Mutaguchi, and Tomioka Yamashita.
"Tsuji was one of the most extraordinary men in the entire Japanese army. . . . Tsuji was a man of extraordinary ingenuity and courage; he declared himself immune to death by enemy action, he was cruel and barbarous; he had mysterious sources of power and probably direct access to Tojo; he carried out the functions of a government spy. No respector of persons he would advise his superiors without hesitation; often he would give orders in their name without the slightest authority. Not unexpectedly he was detested throughout the entire Japanese Army; but where the business of fighting was concerned, he was invariably right."
"With his roundish face, bald head and small, blinking eyes, he looked like the typical staff officer." But was he bald or merely shaven? He was a protoge of Col Takeo Ishihira, who was "determined to make Manchuria into a Buddhist paradise of five nationalities living in harmony." Tsuji would have gone further, "making Asia one great brotherhood, an Asia for the Asians." By his own account, when in his thirties "I . . . divorced my wife and left my (two) children to participate in the movement for national reformation," and it may be this period he had in mind.
By 1935, in what appears to be a passport photo, he has grown a small mustache; his spectacles reflect the light and magnify his Oriental eyefolds, giving him a cruel aspect that would have satisfied Americans devotees of "Yellow Peril" books, movies, and comics. Two years later, by which time the Japanese army and navy had launched a two-pronged attack on China proper, a photograph shows him wearing wore the mushroom-cap steel helmet and an officer's high-necked tunic, crossed by a belt of the sort standard in the British army of the time, which further emphasizes his narrow shoulders. A photograph taken later, though still apparently in China (perhaps Manchuria?), shows him as a grubby field soldier, his mustache now seems to have flowered into what, for a Japanese, would be a full beard. He is seated on the ground with his lower legs crossed, almost in a lotus position, a rifle across his thigh, a tin cup in his right hand, a canteen or hongo mess-kit in his lap, much braid on his right shoulder, and an indubitably sour look on his face. Behind him is a horse from which he may have just dismounted, a bedroll tied behind the saddle. Again, the single star on the front of his forage cap.
Spring 1938 the Emperor's younger brother Prince Chichibu inspected Manchuria, at which time Tsuji and other members of his graduating class at Army University attended a banquet in his honor.
Identified as one of the "officers responsible for provoking the diastrous Nomonhan incident in 1939. With the rank of major, Tsuji was one of the senior staff officers for General Ueda Kenkichi, commander of the Kwantung Army. Immediately thereafter (Sept 1939) posted to 11th Army Headquarters in Hankou.
He recruited friends and alocytes in China. One was a young officer nameed Shigeharu Asaeda, "an agile, muscular six-footer." From a poor family, Asaeda applied to the Military Academy because it was free. "In China he fought so recklessly that Tsuji sought him out."
Another devotee was Yoshio Kodama, commended to Tsuji by Ishihara. Looked for him at Nanjing Army Headquarters. "Oh, that crazy man lives in a filthy little room behind the stable," Colonel Imai told him. Asking Tsuji about his quarters, Kodama was lectured: "These headquarters officers are all rotten. They are only working for their medals. Every night they go to parties and play with geishas. Since the China Incident, all the military have gone bad. They hate me because I know all this and speak out." He had also turned one staff officer over to the kempeitai for "corruption," as a result of which the officer committed suicide. As the story was told, he had once burned down a geisha house with his fellow officers inside. Either through loyalty to his wife and children, or out of a more generalized mysogyny or perhaps homosexuality, had nothing to do with women when he was campaigning.
In Dec 1940, however, three divisions in China were ordered to train for tropical duty. Col Yoshihide Hayashi put in charge of the Taiwan Army Research Section with the task of collecting data on tropical warfare. On 1 Jan 1941 Tsuji arrived to join the unit--exiled to Taiwan, it was said, by Ishihara's nemesis Hideki Tojo. On the other hand, a British historian regarded Tsuji as Tojo's man, and his assignment an effort by Tojo to get the best possible planning into the invasion of Malay, which produced 38 percent of the world's rubber and 58 percent of its tin, and which was also the gateway to Britain's major naval base on the island of Singapore. In any event, he soon became "the driving force" of the department: "his brilliant maverick spirit inspired fantatic devotion in the younger staff officers," who soon dubbed him the "God of Operations."
Among them was the sturdy Capt Asaeda, now 29. Transferred to a desk job at the War Ministry, he had abandoned his post and his family, taken a new name, and headed south with the intention of fighting Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. He made the mistake of visiting Tsuji, who sent him under guard to Japan, where he was allowed to retire from the army to avoid scandal. He returned to Formosa to confront his betrayer but again became a convert, volunteering to serve as a secret agent. He was assigned to Burma, Malaya, and Thailand, and began to study the language and geography of all three.
In March or April, Asaeda went to Thailand as an agricultural engineer. He photographed key areas, chatted with Thais of low and high rank, and decided that the country could be taken over a fight. He then went to Burma, apparently by crossing the border, and "discovered terrain and climate peculiarities that changed the accepted theories of tropical warfare." Tsuji next sent Asaeda to Malaya to gather information on beaches and tides.
In June, secret maneuvers on Japanese-controlled Hainan Island in the Gulf of Tonkin under supervision of Hayashi and Tsuji. Like a good samurai, Tsuji was convinced that training and attitude would overcome physical obstacles: against doctrine, "he packed thousands of full equipped soldiers into the sweltering holds of ships, three to a tatami (a mat about six by three feet), and kept them there for a week in temperatures up to 120 degrees with little water." The same with horses. They were then landed on open beaches under simulated combat conditions--infantry, artillery, and engineers.
Gen Yamashita and his 25th Army were assigned to the Malaya invasion. He welcomed Tsuji's information but took the precaution of supplementing it with his own, sending Major Teruno Kunitake on a clandestine survey of the Malay peninsula. Traveling the length of the colony, he reported that it had far more bridges than Tsuji had estimated, prompting Yamashita to attach an engineer regiment to each division, with quantities of bridging material, and that the engineers be given additional and strenuous practice in river crossing.
Tsuji meanwhile must have returned to Tokyo, for we see him in action against Prime Minster Konoye. Decision to war: he wore a pistol (see?). "two secret organizations, which had learned of the proposed Konoye-Roosevelt meetings, were plotting to murder the Prime Minister." One a "gangland-style assault in Tokyo," the other a railroad bombing as with Marshal Chang. "The latter plan was devised by a lieutenant colonel named Masanobu Tsuji, already an idol of the most radical young officers. A chauvinist of the first water, he was determined to thwart a summit meeting that was destined to end in a disgraceful peace."
Tsuji picked his acquaintance from China: Yoshio Kodama, now leader of the most active nationalist party, who had been jailed for handing the Emperor a rightist petition demanding relief for the unemployed, and again (wrongly, says Toland) for dynamiting the Finance Minister's home. Konoye would travel by train from Tokyo to Yokosuka, and would blow it up at the Rokugo Bridge outside Tokyo. An unsuccesful attempt on Koyone's life was made by four men armed with daggers and presumably unallied with Tsuji, Sep 18 as the PM was leaving his rural home in Ogikubo, 45 min from Tokyo. In the event, the trip was never made, and on Sep 17 Konoye left the capital to rusticate in the seaside resort of Kamakura. On Oct 17 the Emperor ordered Tojo to form a new cabinet; the war party was in the saddle.
On 22 Oct Tsuji decided to make his own reconnaissance of Malaya. Persuaded Captain Ikeda, commander of a reconnaissance squadron (probably the 18th Independent Chutai: Francillon roster), to fly him over the British colony. They took off from Saigon at dawn in a twin-engined Mitsubishi Ki-46 "commandant reconnaissance" plane, called Type 100 by the JAAF and later dubbed "Dinah" by Allied pilots. Could fly high and fast and far. Tsuji in air force uniform in case they were forced down, but the plane was unmarked. Overflew northern Malaya and scouted its airfields, with rain clouds forcing them as low as 6,500 ft. Still in air force uniform, Tsuji reported findings to General Hisaichi Terauchi, Southern Army commander, and new plans were drawn up. He flew to Tokyo to present it to Army General Staff in person with the help of another old friend, Col Takushiro Hattori, two years older than Tsuji, and now chief of Operations Section of General Staff.
The convoys sailed on 4 Dec, each man religiously studying the pamphlet Tsuji had written, and reached the coast of Malaya at midnight on December 7/8. (Because of the time zones involved, this was actually before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.) The main landing went brilliantly, but Tsuji's probes into Thailand were the stuff of which comic operas are made. Major Asaeda found himself landing on mudflat instead of the white-sand beach he had reconnoitered; some men drowned and others were killed by Thai fire. Tsuji had a better landing but his local contact was fast asleep; he had to go to the Japanese consulate and awaken him. When they tried to enlist the Thai police to assist them in crossing the Malay border, their answer was a volley of shots.
Though outnumbered two-to-one, the Japanese never stopped to consolidate their gains, to rest or regroup or resupply; they came down the main roads on bicycles, impressing native conscripts to carry and care for the bicycles during firefights; they crossed rivers on plank bridges resting on the shoulders of the engineer troops; when the bicycle tires burst from the heat, they rode on the rims, raising such a din that terrified Indian troops broke and ran in the belief that tanks were approaching; when the bikes broke down, they were repaired with parts from local machines--cheap, Japanese-built bicycles that the Malays had imported in preference to more expensive British models.
The Japanese advanced so quickly in Malaya that even they were often unprepared to follow up their successes. Only Tsuji seemed to take it in stride. He was often at the front giving advice and devising fresh plans. At a roadblock halfway down the peninsula he decided that a frontal attack was called for, but army hq insisted on a flank attack, which was successful. Nevertheless, Tsuji stormed in headquarters at midnight, shouting: "What are you doing sleeping while a battle is going on?" He went into the bedroom of Lt General Sosaku Suzuki, Yamashita's chief of staff, who greeted him politely. "What do you mean wearing nightwear when I'm reporting from the front line?" Tsuji yelled. Suzuki dutifully changed into his dress uniform and buckled on his sword. "I am the chief operational staff officer responsible for the operations of the entire [25th] army. I submitted my idea based on actual front-line conditions and your rejection of my request means you no longer have confidence in me." He raved until dawn, when he wrote out his resignation and retired to his quarters, emerging a week later to resume his duties. He, Suzuki, and Yamashita all acted as if nothing had happened.
In Singapore, "five thousand Chinese had been murdered largely at his instigation for 'supporting' British colonialism." According to Lt General Sosaku Suzuki, quoted by a fellow officer later in the war: "It was the Ishihara-Tsuji clique--the personifcation of *gekokujo*--that brought the Japanese Army to this deplorable situation. In Malaya, Tsuji's speech and conduct were often insolent; and there was this problem of inhumane treamtent of Chinese merchants, so I advised General Yamashita to punish Tsuji severely and then dismiss him. But he feigned ignorance. I tell you, so long as they [such men] exert influence on the Army, it can only lead to ruin. Extermination of these poisonous insects should take precedence over all other problems."
Tsuji believed that all prisoners should be executed, the Americans because they were colonialists and the Filipinos because they had betrayed their fellow Asians. Evidently convinced by this logic, a division staff officer phoned Colonel Imai and told him: "Kill all prisoners and those offering to surrender." Imai, who already held more than a thousand Fil- American prisoners, demanded that the order be put in writing, then he released his prisoners into the rain forest. A similar order was received by a recently arrived garrison commander, Maj Gen Torao Ikuta, who was told by the staff officer who called him that his own division was already executing prisoners. Ikuta also asked for a written order. But other officers, whose names for good reason have vanished from the record, carried out Tsuji's oral instructions, which were reinforced by the press. On April 28, the Japan Times & Advertiser wrote of the white soldiers: "They surrender after sacrificing all the lives they can, except their own. . . . they cannot be treated as ordinary prisoners of war. They have broken the commandments of God, and their defeat is their punishment. To show them mercy is to prolong the war. . . . An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Hesitation is uncalled for, and the wrongdoers must be wiped out."
Homma had ordered his troops to respect the Filipinos, and to refrain from raping and looting them. His benevolence angered both his immediate superior, Gen Hisaichi Terauchi, commander of the Southern Army, and likewise those of his underlings who followed the lead of Col Tsuji--and his colleague from the Taiwan Army Research Section, Yoshihide Hayashi, now a major general and military administrator of the 14th Army.
When Maj Gen Kiyotake Kawaguchi, commander in the Visayans, was ordered to execute Chief Justice Jose Santos and his son, he responded with the suggestion that instead Santos be given a position in the Filipino puppet government. Homma evidently approved this suggestion and gave Hayashi instructions that it be carried out. Nevertheless, the message came back to Kawaguchi: "His guilt is obvious. Dispose of him immediately." Kawagchi then wrote his classmate Hayashi. This time, an order came back to deliver Santos father and son to Davao for execution; it was followed by an officer to ensure the executions were carried out. Kawaguchi then had the chief justice shot, but spared his son and again complained to Gen Homma, who expressed his regret and evidently fingered Hayashi and also rebuked him. Kawaguchi confronted Hayashi next day. "What a shameful thing you did," he said. "I trusted you as my classmate." Hayashi replied: "But Imperial Headquarters was so insistence about the execution of Santos." Kawaguchi: "Whom do you mean by Imperial Headquarters?" Hayashi: "It was Tsuji."
Others were sentenced to death in the same fashion, including Gen Manuel Roxas, former speaker of the Philippines House of Representatives. Roxas's execution order was issued in the name of Gen Homma and stamped by Hayashi and three staff officers. The officers holding him ignored the order, and Roxas survived to become the first president of an independent Philippines.
Tsuji persuaded his superiors in Tokyo to send him to Rabaul as an observer. As usual, he soon became a go-between, arguing the army's need for a full-scale relief expedition to Admiral Yamamoto aboard the flagship Yamato. Yamamoto saw in the relief an opportunity for the "decisive battle" to win the Pacific War. Tsuji returned to Rabaul to work out the details with Lt Gen Harukichi Hyakutake's staff officer, Col Haruo Konuma, a classmate of his from the Military Academy. But by Oct 20, when reinforcements came ashore the troops were in such terrible shape that Tsuji and Konuma had to scrap their battle plan and devise a surprise night attack on Henderson Field from the rear. A 15-mile trail had been cut through terrain so difficult that for most of the distance soldiers had to crouch to pass beneath the branches. Air, naval, and artillery bombardment so devastated the airfield that only 11 American planes were able to get off, and they inflicted only minor damage on the Japanese ships, enabling 4,000 troops, supplies, and heavy guns to get ashore. Though numerically stronger, the U.S. Marines by this time were badly worn down by two months of combat.
The Japanese assault force consisted of 5,600 infantry plus support troops, with Tsuji personally directing operations. Each man carried an artillery shell or piece of a field gun in addition to his own gear. Cooking was not allowed. By the third day, men were so exhausted that they had to abandon equipment by the trail.
Tsuji detested Kawaguchi for his softness toward Roxas in the Philippines. The general was genial to Tsuji, however. "I'm glad to find you here," he said, and outlined his misgivings about the attack plan. He regarded the terrain as too rough for the frontal assault that had been assigned to him, and navy photographs suggested that the Americans had strengthened their positions; he wanted to move behind the enemy's eastern flank. "I don't need to see the pictures," Tsuji said. "I'm familiar with the terrain and I agree fully with your proposal." Kawaguchi suggested they take it to Lt Gen Masao Maruyama, who had the command of the larger force. "I will explain prsonally to His Excellency Maruyama," Tsuji replied. "I wish you great success." They shook hands. "Well, the battle is really getting interesting, isn't it?" he added with a laugh.
The attack was finally set for midnight on 24-25 Oct, with every man "to fight desperately and fulfill his duty in repayment of His Majesty's favor." Kawaguchi however was still 36 hours from the newly-agreed assault line. He cable-phoned Maruyama but was told there could be no delay, and Kawaguchi realized that Tsuji had never told the commander about the change in plans. Kawaguchi responded that he would have one battalion in position, whereupon he was replaced--Tsuji's intention, apparently. Tsuji called 17th Army Hq and told his colleague Col Konuma that "Kawaguchi refused to advance, and the division commander relieved him of his command."
In the end, the diversionary attack was launched prematurely, costing 9 tanks and 600 infantrymen--and alerting the Americans, who on the 24th spotted rice fires and scouts. That night, the leading battalions attacked and was were almost immediately pinned down by American fire. Tsuji was struck with "an omen of doom" and his bones "felt cold." By dawn, one of the best regiments in the 2nd Division had been virtually destroyed. A naval assault force, assuming the field had been seized on schedule, was savaged by planes from Henderson Field. Nevertheless Yamamoto decided to press the naval attack. Ashore, the 2nd Division commander personally led the attack and was fatally shot along with most of his officers. The division lost 3,000 men in the two-day battle.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Japanese fleets engaged in a major battle whose immediate outcome favored the latter, but which nevertheless cost many planes and prevented the Japanese navy from supporting the effort to retake Guadalcanal.
Col Tsuji headed back down the Maruyama Trail to report on the fate of the 2nd Div. On the way, he passed a terribly wounded battalion commander and some of his men, whom Tsuji fed with rice from his own *hango*. They opened their mouths like baby sparrows when the chopsticks came toward them
Took him 5 days to reach the coast, where he asked for rice to be sent to the front and dictated the following radiogram to Army Chief of Staff Marshal Sugiyama : "I must bear the whole responsibility for the failure of the 2nd Division which courageously fought for days and lost more than half their men in desperate attacks. They failed because I underestimated the enemy's fighting power and insisted on my own operations plans which was erroneous." Saying he deserved "a sentence of ten thousand deaths," he asked to be transferred to the 17th Army on Guadalcanal. Probably a ritual request. In any event, it was denied on Nov 3. When Kawaguchi left the island (Nov 4?), "feeling as if my intestines were cut," Toland says that "He nursed more hatred for his countryman Tsuji than for the enemy.....
Best regards. S&W R.I.P..
Giving him some credit for his subordinate role at Singapore, he seems tactically vastly overrated, no doubt at least partly because of his high opinion of himself in his autobiography.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
The slander that the United State was somehow indirectly involved or covered up Imperial Japanese "medical" war crimes is bizarre on its face, but the timing is also curious. Quoted in your post is a certain Doctor Nie Jing-bao, so:
Victims of the "forgotten medical atrocities" were mainly Chinese and included people from Hong Kong, said Dr Nie Jing-bao, a lecturer from the University of Otago's Bioethics Centre in New Zealand. The US had been involved in covering up Japanese human experimentation similar to that of Nazi Germany, said Dr Nie, who is visiting Baptist University.He said none of the Japanese doctors involved had been prosecuted and had instead gone on to take up prominent positions.
"Justice has never been done yet, even after 50 years . . . Thousands of people died," Dr Nie said. "When I work on this topic, I often feel the ghosts of the victims are watching me."
All very dramatic and emotional, but if these atrocities were "forgotten", how did the good, sleepless Doctor come to remember them and be haunted in his dreams, especially, er, just now?
Couldn't somehow be through the National Archives and Records Administration's War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group established by a Presidential Executive Order of 11 January 1999, could it?
The putative purpose was to investigate Nazi War Crimes, but Japanese War Crimes were also included, and by September of 2000, indeed, this working group had already hired a few new employees to sift through recent records ordered declassified from various American Intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and one of the new employees, a certain Professor Mayo seems to have suddenly become familiar with such matters as the Japanese medical atrocities and Col. Masanobu Tsuji as well:
Dr. Mayo reported on the U.S. Government decision in 1947 not to prosecute General Ishii Shiro, head of Japan's biological warfare program, in exchange for information resulting from experiments, which included experiments on humans, including POWs. She also reviewed the case of Col. Tsuji Masanobu, who was wanted by both British and Americans for various war crimes, including the brutalities against Americans during the Bataan Death March. He eluded capture, changed identities and by the '50s was elected to Japan's House of Representatives.
My heavens, how fast news, and bizarre anti- American slanders, seem to travel in certain little vicious, pseudo-academic circles, eh?
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
The Communist Party of Japan, with its glorious past, occupies a very important place in the communist movement worldwide. The party, in its history, has gone through many trials and tribulations. When Japan joined the Axis powers during the second world war, it was the darkest period in human history, not only for Japan but for the whole world. Having played a crucial role then, the Japanese Communist Party has grown into a formidable force to be reckoned with.At the time the second world war came to a conclusive end with the defeat of the fascist alliance, there were unprovoked atomic explosions on two cities of Japan by US imperialists, which remains the most horrifying experience in the history of mankind. That was a terrifying signal which the US made to the world about its long-term design of global domination. While the people all over the world joined their voice with that of the people of Japan to condemn this, the Japanese ruling classes ultimately joined the bandwagon of US imperialism, the worst enemy of world peace. Since then, the Communist Party of Japan has consistently been fighting against this unholy alliance, for scrapping of the security pact with the USA and for dismantling of the US army bases in Japan.
Yep—definitely rings some of the same bells as the argument that the United States connived to cover up, was therefore implicated in, and, as an obviously "racist" imperialist power, must thus pay "reparations" for Imperial Japan's medical atrocities upon Chinese during WWII.
When old Soviet Union disintegrated, did the old Comintern also go out of business or merely find a new headquarters in the flat next door?
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
A little like the British version of the Battle of New Orleans—The War of 1812 was over, British troops at New Orleans were just minding their own business and, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—wholly unprovoked, the Americans under Jackson charged out of the swamps and cut them down, hehe.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
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