The names of 3,607 people who worked for Japan's notorious World War Two-era Unit 731 research group have been released, according to reports in The Japan Times.

Unit 731 conducted germ and chemical warfare experiments during World War Two, torturing and murdering thousands of civilians and prisoners of war.

The names of the people who committed its grisly crimes have long been concealed, and were hidden by U.S. prosecutors after the war in exchange for the unit's data and research. Its commander, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, was among those who received immunity from criminal charges. The U.S. decided to forgo prosecution to keep information about the experiments secret, and to stop the unit's research from falling into Soviet hands.

The names released are from a January 1, 1945 list of the people employed by the unit, which was officially called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. It details ranks, names and personal information—including family members—of 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat engineers who worked at the unit headquarters in the city of Harbin, in what is now northeastern China. During the war, Harbin was in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

Unit 731 was established in 1936 to develop biological weapons. Historians believe at least 3,000 people died at the Unit 731 facility between 1936 and 1945. The group infected prisoners with diseases including bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism and more. This research allowed Japanese forces in China to launch biological attacks, dropping plague-infected bombs on on Chinese cities. It has been estimated that up to 300,000 people died as a result of Japanese biological warfare in this period.

Prisoners, including Allied POWs, were also subjected to vivisection without anesthetic. According to testimony used at post-war trials, American bomber pilots were among those experimented upon at the Harbin headquarters, with some having organs removed.

Surgeons also purposefully left prisoners in freezing conditions to induce frostbite and allow them to study its effects on humans. Prisoners were used for testing weapons, including grenades and flamethrowers, and were forcefully infected with syphilis to study the disease's progression.

The identities of the Unit 731 employees have been released at the request of a group led by Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science. The group first requested the disclosure in 2015, but the list was released with mostly redacted information. Another declassified list was released in January, but some personal information was still hidden.

Nishiyama hopes to use the list to ask Kyoto University to investigate the legitimacy of a university degree awarded to one of Unit 731's officers. He believes that some of the officer's experiments may have been conducted on humans, not animals, as the officer claimed.

"Kyoto University has not made independent efforts to verify or atone for its role in wartime research. We hope that our petition will precipitate further verification by Kyoto University to look into the legitimacy of the dissertation," Nishiyama told The Japan Times.

"Unit 731 has a collective responsibility to account for its war crimes, and that those crimes must be atoned for as a way of showing that those crimes will never be repeated," Nishiyama said.</s>A group of Japanese scholars is set to reveal the names of the members of a Japanese World War II germ warfare unit that infected and starved Chinese and allied POWs in a series of gruesome experiments.

Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science in western Japan, has told local media his team is analysing a list of 3,607 members and plans to publish it online to encourage further historical study of the unit.

"This is the first time that we see a list of the names of nearly all its members being released in the form of an official document," the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted Nishiyama as saying.

Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army was set up in Manchuria after Japan formed a puppet state in northeastern China in 1931.

Its members -- some of them physicians from Japan's top medical universities -- conducted human experiments, injecting plague and other germs into their victims, testing germ bombs, and artificially causing frostbite to victims while depriving them of sleep and food.

The Japanese government denied the existence of the unit until 1998, when the Supreme Court indirectly acknowledged it by ruling there was an academic consensus that Unit 731 existed.

The list, recently released by the National Archives of Japan to Nishiyama's team, includes the names, ranks and addresses of those who belonged to Unit 731, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.

"This piece of valuable evidence supports all the testimonies given by those who knew the unit. This is a big step forward for efforts to reveal the hidden truth," Nishiyama said.

The list includes 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics of the unit.

Nishiyama could not be reached for immediate comment.

Japan, unlike Germany, has been widely accused of failing fully to face up to its wartime atrocities.

The subject is not widely taught in schools, and comments by conservative politicians glossing over the issue regularly anger other Asian nations which were the victims of occupation.</s>THE names of 3,607 members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s clandestine Unit 731, known for conducting heinous live germ and chemical warfare experiments on thousands of Chinese victims, have been disclosed by the National Archives of Japan, a research professor said yesterday.

“It is the first time that almost all the real names of the unit’s members have been unveiled. We will post them on the website so they can be utilized for research,” Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science, told a press briefing yesterday.

The names of those working at the headquarters of the notorious unit, as well as their ranks and other information, including their addresses and family members, are disclosed on the list, which is dated January 1, 1945.

The list covers 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics operating out of the headquarters of the unit, deceptively dubbed the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.

Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin in northeast China.

The unit was set up around 1936 and conducted vivisection experiments on live human beings to test germ-releasing bombs and chemical bombs among other criminal atrocities.

The unit became Japan’s top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base and operated as the nerve center of Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during World War II.

At least 3,000 people were used for human experimentation by Unit 731 along with a small percentage of Soviets, Mongolians, Koreans and soldiers of the Allied Forces taken captive. Some of those killed in ways unimaginable were just children.

More than 300,000 people across China were killed by Japan’s biological weapons during World War II.

The first list containing details of Unit 731’s war criminals was released in Japan after a request in 2015, but information on the unit’s participants was heavily redacted.

A declassified list released in January still obscured some of the information of the unit’s personnel.

Unit 731 managed to keep its atrocities largely concealed due to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East not prosecuting the unit’s commanders on condition they handed over germ warfare data to the United States.

A documentary released on August 13 by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, through testimonies of Unit 731 participants and authentic records of the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials in 1949, presented vividly the cruel truth to a Japanese public who knew little of the deplorable war crimes.</s>The National Archives of Japan has disclosed the names of 3,607 members of the Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious Unit 731 that conducted germ warfare experiments mainly on prisoners in China before and during the second world war, according to a researcher.

Katsuo Nishiyama, professor emeritus of Shiga University of Medical Science, told reporters, “It is the first time that almost all the real names of the unit’s members have been unveiled. We will post them on the website so they can be utilised for research.”

The list dated January 1, 1945, includes the names and ranks as well as personal information such as addresses and family members of 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses and 1,117 combat medics, mainly those attached to the headquarters of the unit, officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.

The unit, established in 1936 for the purpose of developing biological weapons, conducted research mostly using Chinese and Koreans arrested on espionage charges.

The research included infecting prisoners with germs before performing vivisections on them and deliberately causing frostbite to observe the process of necrosis.

A request to disclose the list was first filed in 2015. Initially, the released list was mostly blacked out but almost all the names and ranks were declassified in January following negotiations, although the personal information of some people was still excluded.

A group led by Nishiyama plans to urge Kyoto University to determine the legitimacy of a university degree conferred on an army medical officer of the unit, arguing his dissertation may have been based on experiments on living people.

The group has been collecting signatures to back its request.

Unit 731 was involved in research into more than 20 types of bacteria including anthrax, smallpox and botulinum, and about 3,000 people worked at its headquarters in the suburbs of Harbin in Manchuria. Historians believe thousands died in the human experiments.

The history of the unit had long been concealed. The unit’s commander, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, and others received immunity from prosecution by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East after giving the United States the data collected by the unit on germ warfare.

The Kwantung Army was part of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in northeastern China, which was under Japanese control.</s>Japan has disclosed the names of thousands of members of Unit 731, a notorious branch of the imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on Chinese civilians in the 1930s and 40s as it sought to develop chemical and biological weapons.

The country’s national archives passed on the names of 3,607 people in response to a request by Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science, in a move that could reignite the public debate over Japanese atrocities committed in occupied China before and during the second world war.

“This is the first time that an official document showing the real names of almost all members of Unit 731 has been disclosed,” Nishiyama told the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. “The list is important evidence that supports testimony by those involved. Its discovery will be a major step toward unveiling concealed facts.”

The document lists members of the Kwantung army’s Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department – the unit’s official name – and is dated 1 January 1945. It includes the names, ranks and contact details of more than 1,000 army medics, as well as dozens of doctors, surgeons, nurses and engineers.

Japan reluctantly acknowledged the unit’s existence in the late 1990s, but has refused to discuss its activities. Instead, accounts of the unit’s activities have been built around testimony from former members, photographs and documentary evidence.

In 2006, Toyo Ishii, a former nurse, said she had helped bury the remains of victims of Japan’s biological warfare programme at a site in Tokyo, as US forces moved into the Japanese capital at the end of the second word war. Ishii said she and her colleagues had been ordered to bury numerous corpses, bones and body parts following Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

Other accounts indicate that similar experiments took place in other parts of China. In 2006, Akira Makino, a former doctor, said he had been ordered to conduct experiments on condemned men while stationed on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines.

Formed in the mid-1930s in Harbin, north-eastern China, Unit 731 conducted lethal experiments on an estimated 3,000 prisoners, who were mostly Chinese and Korean. 



According to historical accounts, male and female prisoners, named “logs” by their torturers, were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia after they had been deliberately infected with diseases such as typhus and cholera. Some had limbs amputated or organs removed.

As Japan headed towards defeat in the summer of 1945, the unit’s leader, Lt Gen Shiro Ishii, forbade researchers from discussing their work and ordered the demolition of the unit’s Harbin headquarters.



At the end of the war, US authorities secretly granted unit officials immunity from prosecution in return for access to their research. Several former Unit 731 officials went on to have successful careers in medicine, academia and business.

Nishiyama reportedly plans to publish the list online to encourage historians to conduct further studies into the unit.</s>It had the boring and bureaucratic name of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department. But this secretive unit of the Japanese army during World War II—better known as Unit 731—conducted germ warfare and other lethal experiments on live prisoners of war, explains the Guardian.

Now, at the request of scholars, Japan has for the first time released the names of 3,607 of those in the unit, a list that includes 52 surgeons, 49 engineers, 38 nurses, and 1,117 combat medics.

The unit, developed in 1936 with the intent of developing biological weapons, conducted its experiments mostly in China on Chinese and Korean prisoners accused of espionage, reports the Japan Times.

Its existence remained a secret for decades after the war, in part because the US and its allies did not want the work made public. Among other things, doctors would inject the plague into victims, deliberately cause frostbite, and deprive prisoners of food and water to observe the effects, per the AFP.

Surgeons also would perform operations on live prisoners as if they were lab rats. "The list is important evidence that supports testimony by those involved," says Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science.

He said he hopes its publication will lead to more information about the unit, which conducted experiments with 20 different kinds of bacteria, including anthrax and smallpox.

By one estimate, 3,000 people died at the hands of the unit. One tangible result: Nishiyama will be pushing to have a university degree revoked from at least one medical officer whose dissertation is believed to have been based on the human experiments.

This article originally appeared on Newser: They Experimented on Live POWs. Now, Names Released</s>To many informed observers the advent of the new twentieth century heralded the demise of the old China. Japan’s victory had exposed China’s military weakness, which the western powers were quick to exploit, placing the empire in danger of dismemberment. In January 1898 Germany secured a ninety-nine-year lease on the Shandong Peninsula as a settlement for the murder of two German missionaries. Two months later Russia negotiated a long-term agreement with the Chinese court for a leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula between Dairen and Port Arthur (where Russian warships had been anchored since the previous December). Great Britain reacted by extracting concessions in April for a naval base at Weihaiwei. France carved out a sphere of influence in southern China, and Japan sought railroad concessions in Fujian opposite its Taiwan colony.

Popular Chinese resentment over thirty years of foreign humiliation boiled over in 1900 as a series of violent attacks against foreigners led by the Boxers, a secret society that enjoyed covert backing from the Qing court, tapped widespread local support with its antiforeign and anti-Christian rhetoric. The murder of the German ambassador to China and the subsequent Boxer siege of the foreign legation quarter at Peking caused the western powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States) as well as Japan to send troops to north China to rescue the diplomatic missions, protect western missionaries, and punish the Boxers. The Japanese army would use the occasion to showcase its latest military reforms.

A small, hurriedly assembled allied expeditionary force under British command of about 2,000 troops, including approximately 300 Japanese, marched from Tianjin for Peking in early June. On June 12, mixed Boxer and Qing army forces halted the advance by destroying a bridge about 30 miles from the capital. The road-bound and badly outnumbered allies withdrew to the vicinity of Tianjin, having suffered more than 300 casualties.

Aware of the worsening conditions, the general staff in Tokyo drafted ambitious contingency plans, but the cabinet, with fresh and bitter memories of the Tripartite Intervention, refused to deploy large forces unless requested by the western powers. Three days later the general staff did dispatch a 1,300-man provisional force to north China commanded by Maj. Gen. Fukushima Yasumasa, director of the second (intelligence) department, chosen because his fluent English enabled him to communicate with the British commander. Fukushima’s detachment landed on July 5 near Tianjin.

During the interval, a few hundred naval infantry from the Sasebo Special Landing Force had joined British, Russian, and German troops to seize the Dagu forts near Tianjin on June 17, but four days later the Qing court declared war on the foreign powers. The dangerous circumstances compelled the British, then heavily engaged in the Boer War, to ask Japan for additional reinforcements. Overriding personal doubts about supporting what many Japanese thought amounted to a religious crusade by the western powers against the Chinese, Foreign Minister Aoki Shūzō calculated that the advantages of participating in an allied coalition were too attractive to ignore. Prime Minister Yamagata thought likewise, but others in the cabinet demanded guarantees from the westerners in return for the risks and cost of reinforcements. The cabinet alerted the 5th Division on July 6 for China duty but set no timetable for its deployment.

More ground troops were urgently needed to lift the Boxer siege of the foreign legations at Peking, and the Japanese had the only readily available forces in the region. As mentioned, the British army was tied down in South Africa, and it would take too much time and weaken internal security to deploy large forces from its India garrisons. On July 8, the British ambassador to Japan offered Aoki one million British pounds in exchange for more reinforcements. Shortly afterward, advance units of the 5th Division departed for China, bringing Japanese strength to 3,800 personnel of the 17,000-man allied force.

This second, stronger expeditionary army stormed Tianjin on July 14 and occupied the city. The allies then consolidated and awaited the remainder of the 5th Division and other coalition reinforcements. In early August the expedition pushed toward Peking where on August 14 it lifted the Boxer siege. By that time, the 13,000-man Japanese force was the largest single contingent, about 40 percent of the approximately 33,000-man allied expedition.

Japanese troops were on their best behavior throughout the campaign. The 5th Division commander (who had taken operational control from Fukushima) ordered the troops to demonstrate Japan’s brand of discipline, courage, and fortitude in battle to the world. Officers at all levels enforced draconian standards of discipline. Junior officers warned troops that the army would summarily and severely deal with violence against Chinese households, arson, or theft. Rape was punishable by immediate arrest and decapitation. Even minor infractions were harshly punished. Fukushima remained in China to enforce frontline discipline.

Japanese troops acquitted themselves well on all counts, although a British military observer felt their aggressiveness, densely packed formations, and willingness to attack cost them excessive and disproportionate casualties. During the Tianjin fighting, for example, they suffered more than half of the allied casualties (400 of 730) but comprised less than one-quarter of the force (3,800 of 17,000). The story was similar at Peking, where they accounted for almost two-thirds of the losses (280 of 453) but slightly less than half of the assault force. The only major lapse in discipline occurred when all ranks joined their allies in the widespread looting in Peking, apparently with the understanding that whatever the westerners did, the Japanese could do too. A British correspondent noted, however, that the Japanese plundered “so nicely that it did not seem like looting at all.”

As part of the September 1901 settlement with the Chinese court, the coalition powers were allowed to station troops between Tianjin and Peking to protect their nationals and maintain a secure line of communication to the sea. The war ministry activated the China Garrison Army, the designation for army units stationed in North China under terms of the Boxer Protocol. The new army was a provisional unit, not a regular one (whose troop basis was fixed by imperial decree) and drew on elements from several homeland divisions assigned to it on a temporary one-year rotating basis. Other concessions included Russia’s right to retain its reinforced garrisons in Manchuria, pending a phased withdrawal.

The Boxer Rebellion revealed Great Britain’s growing difficulty in maintaining its influence in northeast Asia. The Boer War had drained the British army and forced diplomats to pay Japan to send troops to quell the Boxers and counterbalance Russian military intervention. The European alliance system had isolated Britain internationally, and in East Asia the combined Franco-Russian navies outnumbered the British fleet. Engaged in a naval race with Germany and wary of Russia’s meddling in China and the implications of the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the British needed allies. Japan was likewise diplomatically isolated after the Tripartite Intervention and had to deal with the Russian presence in Manchuria and its potential threat to Korea. By signing the 1902 Anglo-Japanese naval alliance, the parties agreed to respect each other’s interests in China, maintain strict neutrality in case one or the other became involved in a war, and to intervene if a third party entered the conflict. For Britain, the treaty restored the naval balance in East Asian waters and provided an army to check Russian expansion. For Japan, it allowed the army to address the Russian threat to Korea without fear of foreign intervention.

The treaty assumed greater significance when Russia did not withdraw the reinforcements it had sent to Manchuria to protect its railway zones and seemed intent on further expansion. Military engineers were improving the Russian naval base and fortress at Port Arthur, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad was nearing completion. Russia’s greatly improved strategic mobility, particularly the potential to move large units rapidly by rail to Manchuria, alarmed Japan’s leaders, and Yamagata’s repeated warnings of the dangers the railroad posed to Japan’s national interests seemed to be coming true.

The army had regarded Russia as its traditional enemy, but the general staff only began substantive operational planning for war with Russia in 1900. Initial plans envisaged capturing Port Arthur, followed by a decisive battle near Mukden in Manchuria with secondary amphibious operations directed against Russia’s Maritime Provinces. After the arrival of additional Russian reinforcements in Manchuria during July 1900 and the completion of most sections of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the general staff revised plans in 1901 to focus on the defense of Korea.

The next year Maj. Tanaka Giichi, recently returned from attaché duty in Russia, took charge of a small planning group within the general staff that worked under tight security. By August 1902 it had recast the staff’s war plans into a strategy that, much like the Sino-Japanese conflict, depended on Japan’s naval capabilities. If the navy could control the Yellow Sea, the army could safely deploy troops to the continent and Manchuria would be the main theater of operations. Should the navy only be able to control the Tsushima Strait, the army would land in southern Korea and defend Japanese interests on the peninsula.

For its part, the navy was dissatisfied with the arrangements for imperial headquarters, which, in case of war, would be commanded by an army general. Frustrated by playing second fiddle to the army-dominated IGHQ, naval leaders, especially Adm. Yamamoto Gombei, aggressively demanded changes to the IGHQ regulations to make the naval chief of staff coequal to his army counterpart, in effect the recognition of an independent naval general staff. Gen. Kawakami Sōroku adamantly opposed Yamamoto and insisted that wartime operations had to be based on peacetime plans prepared by a single authority—the army.

After Kawakami’s death in 1899, both services continually appealed to the throne for a resolution of command authority. Finally, in December 1903, with war with Russia looming, army Chief of Staff Gen. Ōyama and Prime Minister Yamagata petitioned the emperor to allow both the chief of the naval general staff and the chief of the general staff to advise the throne on matters of national defense and military operations. This change created a wartime headquarters in which the army and navy general staffs were independent of one another, but did not resolve fundamental issues of joint planning, joint operations, or command and control.

Vice Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Tamura Iyozō was the brain behind the army’s operational and mobilization concepts for the war. Having spent six years as a junior officer studying in Germany, Tamura was one of a handful of Japanese officers well versed in Clausewitz’s theories of war and had matured into a first-rate if conservative strategist. To keep Tamura’s work secret, the army’s annual report submitted to the throne continued to describe a defensive national strategy, even while the general staff rewrote its offensive contingency plans.

When Russian troops did not leave Manchuria as the Boxer Protocol stipulated, on April 21, 1903, the prime and foreign ministers met with senior statesmen at Yamagata’s Kyoto villa, where they agreed to seek a diplomatic solution. If diplomacy failed, they would resort to war. Maj. Gen. Iguchi Shōgo, director of the general affairs department, a hawkish short-war proponent, pressured Tamura to notify the cabinet that the army was ready for war at a moment’s notice. Tamura, however, harbored serious reservations about the army’s combat readiness—the new, enlarged force structure had just become operational—and used the Russian threat to justify greater army expansion.

Army Chief of Staff Field Marshal Ōyama Iwao notified the emperor that Russian meddling in East Asia would erode the overseas gains Japan had made since the restoration and that Russian domination of Korea would directly threaten national security. Immediate military preparations for war were necessary. Amidst these conflicting military assessments, an imperial conference on June 23 concluded that concessions to Russia were possible regarding Manchuria, but Korea was a vital national interest and therefore nonnegotiable.

Tamura died suddenly in October 1903, having literally worked himself to death. His loss was a crushing blow to the general staff coming as it did at a critical juncture in Japanese-Russian relations that found leadership in disarray. Prime Minister Katsura Tarō was indecisive, Yamagata was depressed, and Ōyama was not psychologically ready for war. Gen. Iguchi lamented that the army and the navy were at odds over strategy, and the navy minister was placing parochial service interests above the national good. The only bright spot was Lt. Gen. Kodama Gentarō’s willingness to accept a demotion in order to replace Tamura, an act that Iguchi regarded as proof that “heaven has not yet abandoned our empire.”

Kodama resigned two ministerial portfolios and took a two-rank demotion to serve as army vice chief of staff. Under his guidance in February 1904 the general staff finalized a two-stage campaign plan that sought the destruction of the Russian field armies in Manchuria as well as the Russian Pacific Fleet. During stage one, the First Army would advance to the banks of the Yalu River to prevent a Russian invasion of northern Korea. The Second Army would establish a base of operations on the southeastern Liaodong Peninsula; then the Third Army would land, advance to Port Arthur, isolate the fortress, attack it if necessary, and support the other armies. As the First and Second armies moved north into Manchuria, the smaller Fourth Army would land between them along the northeast bank of the Bohai Gulf to secure their flanks and protect the rail line of communication.

Kodama’s objective was to encircle and destroy the Russian Siberian Independent Corps and the Second Corps near Liaoyang before reinforcements from European Russia could arrive and overwhelm the Japanese with their superior numbers. Staff officers calculated that it would take about six months to move eight divisions from Europe to Manchuria, giving the army that much time to achieve Kodama’s objectives. There were no specific plans for a second year of campaigning.

Unable to resolve the impasse with Russia through diplomacy, the February 4, 1904, imperial conference decided on war. For several days afterward Emperor Meiji was unable to sleep or eat, dreading the possibility of having to report a defeat to his ancestors. He later told the empress that it was not his wish to fight Russia and worried about facing his subjects if Japan lost. Senior army officers were also well aware that Japan could not win a protracted war. Amidst uncertainty and trepidation Japan severed diplomatic relations with Russia on February 6, and two days later, without a formal declaration of war, the navy launched a surprise attack against the Russian squadron moored in the harbor at Port Arthur.

The surprise attack aimed to destroy the Russian fleet at anchor or at least neutralize the enemy fleet by sinking obsolete Japanese transports to block the harbor entrance. Maritime supremacy would then pass to the Japanese navy and permit the army to ship troops safely to Korea’s west coast and the Liaodong Peninsula. Russian contempt for the Japanese led them to underestimate the seriousness of the threat and leave Port Arthur unprepared for a sudden raid. Still, the Japanese naval attack neither destroyed the Russian squadron, although it did heavily damage three capital ships, nor closed the harbor. The Russian fleet-in-being at Port Arthur remained a strategic liability for Japan that would extract a terrible toll on the emperor’s army. On February 10 Meiji issued a memorial declaring war against Russia.

Imperial General Headquarters was established on the palace grounds the next day. Unlike the case during the Sino-Japanese War, the prime and foreign ministers were excluded from the headquarters and the army barred civilian ministers from officially attending IGHQ meetings, although, as will be discussed, informal networks kept civilian leaders well apprised of developments. IGHQ became the official operations center where senior staff officers reported to the emperor on strictly military matters rather than the locus of civilian-military policy formulation. Strategic decision-making occurred during the deliberations of the senior statesmen that usually preceded an imperial conference and made the meeting in the emperor’s presence the highest decision-making mechanism for wartime military and foreign policy issues. There was no formal apparatus to connect military and civilian policy, and the system depended on informal personal relationships cemented by years of working together in the government.

Three subsequent attempts by the navy—in late February, late March, and again in May—to seal the Port Arthur channel by sinking old transports in the mouth of the harbor also failed. The army general staff had scripted a tightly sequenced deployment schedule that depended at every stage on the navy’s support, and with each disappointment, army-navy relations deteriorated. In mid-March, for example, the First Army landed safely near Pyongyang. The general staff then was shocked and dumbfounded when the navy announced that it was postponing further blockship operations against Port Arthur until mid-May. Unable to delay the Second Army’s scheduled May 5 landing on the Liaodong Peninsula, the army had to risk its slow-moving troop transports to possible attack by the Port Arthur squadron in order to meet its short-war timetable.

Meanwhile, the First Army moved north from Inchon and in two days of fighting over April 30 and May 1 pushed the Russians back along the Yalu River near Andong. This minor engagement had major ramifications. The Japanese, regarded by many in the West as quaint little people from an exotic land, had defeated Caucasian troops of a world-class power. Stock markets in New York and London suddenly realized Japan was a sound investment, and foreign purchases of government bonds and offers of loans buoyed the wartime economy. On the home front, however, the public was shocked and critical because the more than 900 Japanese killed or wounded exceeded total battle casualties for the Sino-Japanese War. Vice War Minister Lt. Gen. Ishimoto Shinroku defended the troops’ performance to reporters by attributing the losses to modern weapons technology, not incompetent leadership.

On May 25, the Second Army’s three divisions attacked an entrenched Russian infantry regiment defending Nanshan on the narrow neck of the high ground that separated the northern and southern halves of the Liaodong Peninsula. Fighting began early in the day with a three-hour artillery preparation, followed by a textbook frontal assault against the still mostly intact Russian positions. By midmorning the Second Army had thrown its final reserves into the battle but still could not break the defenses. As artillery ammunition dwindled, casualties mounted, and the troops became exhausted, staff officers recommended that Gen. Oku Yasukata, the Second Army commander, withdraw and regroup. Oku instead ordered renewed attacks, regardless of losses.

Tactical doctrine depended on dense columns to build up sufficient fire superiority to carry a defensive position, but Nanshan’s limited maneuver space canalized infantry attacks into direct frontal assaults. The combination of tactics and terrain left massed attackers exposed to withering Russian fire that inflicted staggering losses before the Russians finally retreated in the late afternoon. The army later described these assaults as “human-bullet attacks” and claimed for public consumption that they epitomized uniquely Japanese virtues of courage, determination, and self-sacrifice. In fact, when staff officers at imperial headquarters received the first official reports of 3,817 casualties in the Nanshan fighting, their immediate reaction was that a careless cipher clerk had mistakenly added an extra digit.

The army’s tactical doctrine was mismatched against modern weapons technology. According to a young captain attached to the Second Army, “It’s not our human-bullet tactics that throw away brave warriors’ lives. It’s the superior Russian fortifications and equipment and our lack of machine gun firepower that gives us no chance of winning. With machine guns extending the distance [of the killing zone], table-top tactics can no longer have any practical application.” Extended lines of skirmishers soon replaced the densely packed columns, and intervals between individual soldiers increased. Some tactical commanders, such as Col. Ichiwara Shinichirō, quickly adapted. Ichiwara’s nonchalant attitude had embarrassed his junior officers during peacetime maneuvers, but at Nanshan he repeatedly rallied his men, ignoring heavy Russian fire. In real fighting, he later remarked, the enemy was less cooperative than on exercises.

Army Chief of Staff Yamagata, Prime Minister Katsura (concurrently an active duty general), War Minister Terauchi Masatake, Manchurian Army commander Ōyama, and his chief of staff, Kodama, gathered at Imperial General Headquarters on June 10 to set the operational direction of war. Katsura participated in IGHQ conferences in his capacity as a retired general officer but was not kept informed officially about operational matters. However, he received accurate information from the senior statesmen (Yamagata and Itō) because the army did provide them accounts of the military situation. Katsura was also a close friend and drinking companion of War Minister Terauchi, who likely passed him information. Because of the cumbersome and exclusionary bureaucratic system, informal personal relations played a crucial role in coordinating military, political, and diplomatic initiatives. A brief review of operations highlights these deficiencies.</s>The Manchurian Army, consisting of the First and Second armies, would advance along the South Manchurian Railroad to Liaoyang, where the First Army would envelop the enemy’s right flank, destroy the Russian field army, and open the way to Mukden and the decisive battle before Russia could mobilize its full military strength. Simultaneously, the Third Army would attack Port Arthur and after taking the fortress rejoin the field armies near Mukden. The Russian commander, however, fought a series of skillful delaying actions in June and July to buy time for reinforcements to arrive from European Russia. Port Arthur was left isolated and besieged by the recently arrived Third Army.

General staff officers had not originally considered seizing the port and were unaware of the extent of Russian improvements to the fortress’s defenses. Russian military engineers had shrouded their work in tight security, and Japanese spies lacked the technical expertise to determine the strength of the improved concrete-and-steel fortifications. As a consequence, they reported that the Russians had merely extended existing trench lines, leaving the impression that Port Arthur was weakly defended as it had been during the Sino-Japanese War.

On August 19 the complexion of the war changed dramatically when the Third Army commander, Lt. Gen. Nogi Marasuke’s, ill-conceived frontal assault against Port Arthur cost at least 16,000 killed and wounded, a disaster compounded by his stubborn refusal to halt the futile attacks. A few days later Ōyama’s armies suffered more than 23,000 casualties during the seven-day battle for Liaoyang (August 25–September 3). The First Army struck the Russian center while the Second and Fourth armies turned the enemy’s eastern flank. Unable to encircle the Russians, the Japanese resorted to costly frontal attacks.

Though the army publicly glorified the efforts of the so-called human-bullets to sustain home-front morale, more responsible commanders were appalled at the needless slaughter. Junior officers blamed the “big-shot tacticians” for stubbornly applying textbook tactics that needlessly threw away soldiers’ lives. Ōyama relieved three major generals, all brigade commanders, because their inflexibility caused unnecessary casualties.

The combination of heavy losses and the inability to encircle and destroy the enemy field army shook Japanese regimental and division commanders’ self-confidence. At the height of the Liaoyang fighting, Tokyo newspaper editorials confidently predicted another Sedan, a reference to the Prussian army’s encirclement and destruction of the French army in 1870. Self-confident and certain of the outcome, the First Army’s officers and men anticipated truce talks after the battle. Morale plummeted as the realization sunk in that they faced renewed fighting. Replacements for Nogi’s Third Army at Port Arthur lost heart when battle-toughened veterans dismissed them as cannon fodder. The commander of a Guard infantry brigade wrote to the vice chief of staff that just declaring morale was high did not necessarily make it so. Discipline suffered, and the army resorted to field gendarmes to drive reluctant troops forward, at least in one case at bayonet point.

Although the army had steadily expanded from 123,000 officers and men in 1896 to 191,000 in 1903 and increased its reserves proportionately, it could not compensate for the unexpectedly high attrition during the opening engagements. These battles made clear that more troops were needed. Immediately after the Liaoyang fighting, the emperor, at IGHQ’s request, on September 29 activated four new divisions, doubled the second reserve obligation to ten years, extended the age limit for the first reserve term from 32 to 37 years old, and added forty-eight infantry battalions to the second reserve. The new provisional divisions would be organized by February 1905, but they would not be trained and ready for operations until late May at the earliest. By the time the first of the new formations was activated on April 15, 1905, the major fighting was over.

The Vladivostok naval squadron added to the overall sense of gloom and anxiety in Japan. On the morning of April 26, Russian warships surprised and sank a small Japanese ship carrying a 200-man infantry company. The soldiers refused surrender or rescue and went down with their sinking ship. Army authorities stoked patriotic home-front fires by portraying the act as a deliberate decision to avoid the shame of surrender and the debasement of captivity. Russian raiders continued to cruise the Sea of Japan, picking off victims, spreading panic among Japanese coastal towns, and provoking public criticism of the military’s incompetence.

In mid-June the Vladivostok squadron sank a large army troop transport carrying almost 2,000 soldiers and irreplaceable artillery and stores. When the admiral charged with protecting the convoy could not find the Russian warships to retaliate, angry Tokyoites stoned his house, denounced him as a Russian agent, and demanded his suicide. Wild rumors about the Vladivostok fleet terrified civilians and forced the cabinet to order an emergency reinforcement of coastal defenses in Tokyo Bay and Tsushima Island.

While the Russian squadron rampaged seemingly at will and Nogi’s Port Arthur offensive collapsed, the northern front stabilized around Liaoyang. By the end of September the army had committed three divisions to Port Arthur, sent eight to Liaoyang, and mobilized 65,000 replacements to fill the losses in its infantry divisions. In addition, field army commanders wanted the two divisions remaining in the homeland strategic reserve, but IGHQ insisted that they were needed for coastal defense against a possible Russian landing. Emperor Meiji intervened in the dispute between the field army and IGHQ by deciding that one homeland division would deploy to Liaoyang.

In early October a Russian offensive surprised the Second Army at the Shahe River, about 45 miles northeast of Liaoyang, and in the week-long battle that followed, three Japanese armies again failed to envelop the Russian flanks. Losses were heavy: more than 41,000 Russian and 20,000 Japanese fell. By this time, sickness was ravaging the field armies as beriberi, typhoid, and dysentery incapacitated thousands more troops. Ōyama halted his armies to regroup.

While Ōyama reconstituted his battered forces, imperial headquarters, reacting to the navy’s demands that Port Arthur be taken quickly, again ordered Nogi to attack the fortress. After his first setback, IGHQ had reinforced the Third Army with heavy artillery in hopes of breaching the Russian defenses. Higher headquarters grasped that artillery observers atop the dominating heights of Hill 203 could direct accurate plunging fire onto Port Arthur and its harbor, making them untenable. Nogi and his staff, however, had never been to the front lines and regarded the heights, particularly Hill 203, as secondary to the Third Army’s objective of capturing the town.

After a council with IGHQ liaison officers on September 5, the Third Army staff agreed to attack Hill 203. Assaults two weeks later seized outposts on Hill 203 but could not take the crest. Although Nogi had received reports from the front that parts of Port Arthur could be seen from recently captured hills, the full impact of this intelligence escaped him, and he suspended the offensive on September 22 after suffering 5,000 casualties.

The well-publicized struggle for Port Arthur captured world attention, and the western press popularized Nogi for its readers as the personification of the samurai warrior, who uncomplainingly endured hardship and suffering. Kodama and other senior commanders, however, were appalled by Nogi’s incompetence, which had shifted the strategic focus of the war, cost tens of thousands of unnecessary casualties, consumed vast quantities of scarce war material, and achieved nothing. The Third Army opened its third major offensive on November 26 and the next day finally captured Hill 203. The fortress and naval base were defenseless and soon surrendered. More than 59,000 Japanese casualties paid for Nogi’s victory.

In late January 1905, Russian forces tried to drive the Japanese back to Liao-yang and inflict as many casualties as possible. Fighting in bitterly cold weather near San-de-pu, the Japanese stopped the counterattack—at a cost of more than 9,000 casualties. Next followed the epic struggle from February 22 through March 10 for Mukden, a battle that pitted almost 300,000 Russians against slightly more than 200,000 Japanese. The Japanese again tried a sweeping double envelopment but could not close their pincers in time to trap the retreating Russian armies. Despite losses of 70,000 Japanese and almost 90,000 Russians, the battle was indecisive and the ground war in Manchuria was stalemated.

Tokyo misread these results. On March 11, Katsura and Terauchi proposed new offensives to Yamagata, who in turn forwarded their recommendations to Ōyama. Responding from Manchuria a few days later, Ōyama described Mukden as indeed a great victory, but he dwelled on his heavy casualties and exhausted supplies. He needed time to rebuild his logistics network and wanted the cabinet’s guidance in the form of a unified military-diplomatic policy on whether to pursue the Russians or switch to a protracted war strategy.

Ōyama’s sobering assessment convinced Yamagata and Terauchi that Japan had no means of forcing the Russians to capitulate, short of attacking Moscow or St. Petersburg, which of course was impossible. The Manchurian Army could not even attack Harbin some 250 miles away because of recent personnel losses, especially among officer ranks; ammunition shortages; logistics deficiencies; and transportation problems, including a requirement for extensive railroad construction to build a line for transporting supplies to forward units. Taking this into account, on March 23 Yamagata requested the cabinet end the war by diplomatic means.

IGHQ recalled Kodama to Tokyo at the end of March for discussions on whether to continue a protracted war or sue for peace. Kodama’s outspoken criticism of the general staff’s ineptitude peaked when he called the vice chief of staff a fool for starting a fire without knowing how to put it out. At an April 8 meeting, the senior statesmen and major cabinet ministers resigned themselves to the possibility of a protracted war unless diplomatic measures could achieve satisfactory peace terms.

In mid-October 1904 the Russian Baltic Fleet had sortied from its home port for an eight-month, 10,000-mile voyage via the Cape of Good Hope to reinforce the Russian Far Eastern squadrons and relieve Port Arthur. The adventure ended on May 27, 1905, in the Tsushima Strait, where Vice Adm. Tōgō Heihachirō’s combined fleet sank twelve first-line Russian warships and captured four more. Antiwar demonstrations erupted in Russia, where the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied. Internal unrest, the gloomy military situation, and the czar’s concern about a possible invasion of Sakhalin made the Russians amenable to negotiations. Japan’s leaders, aware that their armies and resources were exhausted, were likewise anxious for talks and secretly approached U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate. After a month of discussions at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, mainly about Russian refusal to consider indemnities or territorial concessions, on September 5 the Russians grudgingly agreed to cede southern Sakhalin Island to Japan. In addition, Japan received exclusive rights in Korea and control of Russian railroad lines in southern Manchuria. But there was no indemnity.

During the lead-up to war, the army appealed to an increasingly literate public and conscript force with themes of Japan’s uniqueness by virtue of the unbroken imperial line. Pamphlets subsidized by the war ministry explained in simple language that the army protected Japan from foreign threats, much like the wall around a storehouse kept wild animals or thieves from stealing treasures. Essays popularized notions that seishin and the intangible factors of battle were responsible for tiny Japan’s victory over the enormous Chinese Empire and that Japan had to fight Russia to save China from itself and prevent a collapse of the international order.

Building on that foundation, wartime propaganda had concealed Japan’s military weaknesses to manufacture an unprecedented national commitment to the war across the society. The potent combination of prewar indoctrination and wartime propaganda raised popular anticipation that shared hardships would entitle everyone to benefit from the fruits of victory. With these unrealistic expectations, the Japanese people were infuriated that the treaty contained no indemnity and doled out seemingly paltry rewards for such great sacrifices. Anti-treaty rioting and popular demonstrations erupted in Tokyo as the public directed its fury against the civilian cabinet. It might better have targeted the army.

Despite its extensive planning, modern weaponry, and expanded force structure, the 1904 army was still an amateurish one, characterized by regional cliques, favoritism, incompetence, and nepotism. In 1901, for example, the staff college had reorganized its curriculum to prepare officers for command of large units (brigade and higher echelon) and educate them with the latest technological principles. Instruction, however, remained rooted in tactics, and the curriculum stressed individual initiative that taught officers to command by resolute action and not get bogged down in details. Staff officers assigned to the respective armies in the Russo-Japanese War were expected to be decisive, but they lacked practical experience and tended toward doctrinaire staff college solutions, regardless of circumstances. An uncritical adherence to the norm pervaded the officer corps.

Many senior officers had made their rank and reputations as young soldiers in the restoration wars of the 1860s or the Satsuma Rebellion of the mid-1870s. Too many were autodidacts, ill prepared to encounter the rapid advances in early twentieth-century technology, military professionalism, and warfare. Nogi, for instance, a veteran of the restoration wars, the Satsuma Rebellion, and the Sino-Japanese War, was stumped when looking at a topographic map of the Port Arthur defenses. Unable to understand terrain contours or elevations, he concluded the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and ordered an attack into the most difficult and best-defended terrain, where his troops suffered enormous and unnecessary losses.

Nogi’s selection for high command also illustrated the regional biases and web of personal connections that hampered the creation of an effective professional officer corps. The army originally recalled Nogi from retirement in February 1904 to command a reserve Guard division. Two of the three serving army generals (Oku and Kuroki Tamemoto) were slated to command the First and the Second armies. The third, Sakuma Samata, had retired in October 1902 and at age 61 was judged too old to withstand the rigors of field campaigning. Yamagata then selected the 55-year-old Nogi to command the Third Army and assigned him the responsibility for Port Arthur because Nogi had captured the fortress in 1895. Nogi’s Chōshū lineage and long-standing acquaintance with Yamagata made him acceptable to the Chōshū clique that dominated the army; in addition, Nogi was on friendly terms with many senior naval officers, making him a suitable liaison for a joint campaign. But Nogi was a martinet and an aesthetic who carried his notions of a samurai code to extremes and had never psychologically recovered from losing his battle standard during the Satsuma Rebellion. Yamagata and the other generals recognized his limitations, but they still agreed that Nogi could handle what was planned as a minor secondary operation to isolate Port Arthur.

The army selected Maj. Gen. Ijichi Kōsuke as Nogi’s chief of staff. Ijichi was a superannuated artillery officer and former instructor at the staff college. He hailed from Satsuma, the cradle of many naval officers, making him acceptable to the navy and serving the army’s desire to balance its regional cliques. He was also Ōyama’s son-in-law. Though army authorities did not think much of Ijichi’s abilities, they considered him at least capable of conducting a siege. Neither Ijichi nor Nogi, however, understood modern fortifications, and Nogi’s lack of self-confidence allowed Ijichi to make operational decisions. Ijichi was incompetent, opinionated, but cautious, and he deferred to his overworked deputy, Lt. Col. Ōba Jirō, a Chōshū native, and a very aggressive personality.

In this dysfunctional headquarters, staff officers displayed little ability or initiative, leaving Ōba, an infantry officer unacquainted with siege tactics, to handle most planning. The army’s expert of fortifications and siege warfare was Maj. Gen. Uehara Yūsaku, a French-educated engineer officer. But Uehara’s father-in-law was Lt. Gen. Nozu Michitsura, the 64-year-old commander of the Fourth Army, who insisted on Uehara for his chief of staff. Unfortunately Nozu’s difficult personality made it all but impossible for anyone but his son-in-law to work with him. Personal relationships were no better in the two main armies.

Lt. Gen. Kuroki, a 60-year-old Satsuma native, commanded the First Army. He had led a division in the Sino-Japanese War, cultivated a rude and simple lifestyle, and loved good cigars. Despite appearances, he was a bookish officer, fond of history, and not a risk-taker. His chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Fujii Shigeta, was mean-spirited, nasty, and ignorant of the working of a headquarters staff. He had been the commandant of the staff college, and after it closed for the duration of the war he was assigned to Kuroki. Fujii proved inflexible, indecisive, and continually at odds with his highly talented deputy. Vice Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Nagaoka Gaishi regarded Fujii and Ijichi as equally dangerous incompetents whom the army would be better off without.

Lt. Gen. Oku Yasukata, commander of the Second Army, was barely on speaking terms with his chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Ochiai Toyosaburō. A protégé of the late Tamura, Ochiai had headed the general staff’s fifth (war history) department and served as an instructor at the staff college. He had a flair for map maneuvers and tabletop tactics, but in actual operations he proved stubborn, inflexible, and ignorant of logistics as well as rear area security requirements. Ochiai handpicked his subordinates from the ranks of staff college instructors, and, like their mentor, they were fixated on map exercises and theory, unable to adapt swiftly to rapidly changing battlefield conditions of real warfare.

Intelligence collection and analysis was also personality-driven and idiosyncratic. Maj. Gen. Fukushima was the chief of the intelligence department of the general staff. Col. Matsukawa Toshitane, an infantry officer and director of the first (operations) department, however, relied on his own intelligence sources, splitting the general staff into fiercely competitive Matsukawa and Fukushima factions. The general staff’s arrogance so alienated the foreign ministry that diplomats refused to share the intelligence that they gathered in the United States or Europe, leaving the army without strategic data regarding domestic unrest in Russia, manipulation of radical elements there, or the Port Arthur defenses. At the operational level, officers treated intelligence casually because the top graduates of the staff college invariably went into combat arms—infantry, artillery, cavalry—and were taught to and preferred to make their own assessments.

Operational intelligence repeatedly ignored inconvenient discoveries that might disrupt planning already in progress. After the Liaoyang battle, the long-serving military attaché in London, Lt. Col. Utsunomiya Tarō, received intelligence from British sources that the Russian Second Army was about to counterattack the Japanese right flank. Imperial General Headquarters decided that the Russians could not move large formations through the rugged, mountainous terrain and did not pass on the warning. Oku was thus surprised on October 5 when the Russians struck his exposed right flank to open the Battle of Shahe.

In mid-January 1905 Utsunomiya and the military attaché to Berlin, Lt. Col. Ōi Shigemoto, reported that Russians planned to attack the left flank of Ōyama’s Manchurian Army along the Shahe River. Manchurian Army staff officers insisted that the bitter cold and deep snow made a major offensive impossible. When eight Russian divisions attacked in the middle of a late January snowstorm, Ōyama’s headquarters dismissed the offensive as a minor reconnaissance-in-force.

The displacement of IGHQ to Hiroshima a decade earlier had been disruptive because the government ministries remained in Tokyo, requiring extensive and expensive coordination that resulted in frequent delays. This time the emperor stayed in Tokyo to coordinate civil government as well as military affairs. Senior officers then complained that IGHQ was too far removed from the front lines to act as an operational headquarters, and in March 1904 Vice Chief of Staff Kodama suggested a supreme command headed by a crown prince be established in Manchuria.

Ōyama, the newly appointed commander of the field armies in Manchuria, insisted on total control of the overseas forces, including logistics and personnel matters. War Minister Terauchi rejected the general staff’s proposal to grant Ōyama such sweeping authority because it would turn IGHQ into a cipher. Furthermore, Terauchi and Prime Minister Katsura—the latter acting as a general, not as the prime minister—wanted IGHQ to coordinate the joint campaign against Port Arthur directly from Tokyo. Based on Yamagata’s counsel, on May 25 the emperor instructed Terauchi and Ōyama to establish a senior field headquarters to command Manchurian armies and gave Ōyama operational control of the field forces.

On June 20, the war ministry activated the Manchurian Army Headquarters, appointed Ōyama as supreme commander, promoted Kodama to general, and reassigned him as Ōyama’s chief of staff. Yamagata became chief of staff (rear) with control of logistics, personnel, and administrative matters at IGHQ; Nagaoka Gaishi was the vice chief of staff (rear). The brightest young officers were assigned to the Manchurian Army while recalled officers or senior statesmen staffed Imperial General Headquarters. Friction quickly developed between the Manchurian Army and IGHQ, especially over the development of the Port Arthur campaign, the deployment of strategic homeland reserves to Manchuria, and the mobilization of new divisions.

Dysfunctional personalities, a cumbersome command-and-control network, and a poorly integrated imperial headquarters exacerbated the army’s fundamental problem: it was essentially refighting its last war, having projected casualty rates, ammunition consumption, and logistics requirements based on its Sino-Japanese War experience.

After driving the Russians from Nanshan, IGHQ expected to systematically isolate Port Arthur, causing it to fall. As mentioned, the second department’s outdated intelligence underestimated the much-improved fortress defenses that skillfully blended formidable new strong points into the hilly topography. Based on shopworn intelligence, in late February 1904 Maj. Ōba Jirō and Maj. Tanaka Giichi (both then concurrently general staff and IGHQ staff officers), among others, recommended seizing the seemingly weak fortress before reinforcements arrived from western Russia. Kodama wanted to keep his armies intact and thought it better to isolate Port Arthur rather than storm it. Once the navy closed the harbor entrance, the Russians would be isolated and the Third Army could prevent the garrison from threatening the First Army’s rear areas. Port Arthur would wither on the vine.

Because the navy failed to close the harbor, it had to blockade Port Arthur and patrol the nearby waters to prevent the escape of the Russian naval squadron. Put differently, the Russian fleet-in-being at Port Arthur tied down a goodly part of the combined fleet. To unleash the fleet, the navy pressed IGHQ to order the army to capture the fortress, which would also neutralize the Russian fleet. Under mounting pressure from the navy, on June 24 IGHQ ordered Nogi to attack Port Arthur as soon as possible. A few weeks later, intelligence reported that the Russian Baltic fleet was making preparations to sortie. Tōgō then requested via the naval chief of staff on July 12 that the army attack Port Arthur without delay to allow the navy the time it needed to refit before arrival of the Baltic fleet. Whatever Nogi’s faults—and they were many—he was the only field commander subjected to repeated operational interference by Imperial General Headquarters and the navy.

IGHQ hoped to avoid a frontal attack by maneuvering the Third Army farther west to take the fortress from the rear. Nogi and his staff complained that repositioning the troops and artillery would take too much time and pull the Third Army farther from its railhead supply point. He understood his mission was to capture the city, not the defensive outposts on the high ground overlooking it, and, as mentioned, was unable to read topographic maps so chose the shortest direct route to Port Arthur.

A two-day bombardment by Nogi’s light artillery did not seriously damage the concrete-and-steel–reinforced bunkers. Russian machine-gun crews secure inside their fortifications raked the massed attackers, who became snarled in barbed-wire entanglements. Faulty intelligence that the Russian line had broken prompted Nogi to renew the costly attacks. By the time he called off the assaults, the Third Army had suffered almost 16,000 casualties, including more than 5,000 killed in action. An Osaka-based regiment refused to attack after suffering heavy losses and was escorted to the rear under guard.

Losses among officers were extremely heavy because tactical commanders followed their training and led from the front. The 44th Infantry Regiment, for instance, had two of its three battalion commanders killed and the third wounded; it lost all twelve of its company commanders, eight killed and four wounded; and thirty-five of forty lieutenants were killed or wounded. Nogi’s losses and the subsequent 23,000 casualties suffered at Liaoyang precipitated a chronic replacement crisis that was exacerbated by the lack of tactical skills and leadership ability among many replacement reserve officers and NCOs.

Government authorities tried to conceal the magnitude of Nogi’s defeat through a combination of strict censorship, tight restrictions on war correspondents, and control of battlefield news releases. Army service regulations issued in January 1904 to protect military secrets complemented home ministry restrictions on newspaper articles enacted the previous year to stifle dissent. Police censors paid special attention to articles that they thought might lower the morale of soldiers’ families.

At the opening of the Russo-Japanese War, the government mobilized patriotic associations to organize nationwide relief campaigns to assist families of soldiers serving overseas and send troops small packages of sundries. Officials also diverted public attention from battlefield realities by publicizing real or imagined heroism and tales of glorious death in battle. Official propaganda unintentionally inflated popular expectations, working the public into a patriotic fervor that backfired when unrealistic goals could not be met. For instance, in August the government-sponsored preparations were under way nationwide to celebrate the anticipated fall of Port Arthur, but popular enthusiasm soon waned when victory was not forthcoming. After another Tokyo pro-war rally degenerated into a brawl that left thirty-nine people dead or injured, even “spontaneous” victory parades fell under greater police scrutiny.

Despite government and army propaganda, Nogi too fell under a cloud of growing criticism. Irate citizens denounced him as a butcher, stoned his home, and threatened his wife. Nor could the government’s upbeat official version of events conceal the grievous losses from the Japanese public. Hospital trains departed nightly from Ujina, and by mid-September the sight of caravans of wounded soldiers passing through the Tokyo streets to hospitals was commonplace. Letters from frontline soldiers and stories from replacements reached home with tales of heavy casualties, widespread illness, and war weariness. Inflation, numerous new special taxes on land and consumables to pay for the war, the continual reserve mobilizations of replacements, and rumors of terrible casualties weighed heavily on popular morale.</s>Monogamy and growing old produce the same results. Sleeping with the same person over and over again takes the razor sharp blade of passion and dulls it flat. So too, living in the world, truly living in it and not just in one small cell of it, reduces the sharp peaks of our emotions, rounds them out into dull stones which weroll over and over again with aged fingers. I think that this is part of what wisdom is – this overfamiliarity with life, so that we know it more but feel it less.

So yesterday begins with my friends calling me too early on a Saturday morning. “Have you read, have you heard about the Americans attacking Syria?” How can I have heard when I have been sleeping?

My fiend Gulya comes and it is her first question to me. “I am so afraid of war,” she says. She tells me the story of her father who was 61 when she was born, and so, old enough to have fought in the Great Patriotic War as it is called here in Russia. Every year on his birthday he would toast with the plea for no more war. She shakes her head,” but there is so much war in the world now”. Indeed, indeed – America is fighting war on 8 fronts now. War is a very profitable business and business is good. Matter of factly I tell her this and then ask her how much avocados are selling for at Billa. We decide to go and find out.

The people’s worry about a war occurring between America and Russia arises out of a misconception. First, the misconception that America and Russia are not already at war and second, that the “war” that they imagine on the brink of their Russian horizons will be World War III, the great nuclear holocaust. Neither the Americans nor the Russians want that kind of war, and for several reasons, I don’t think it will ever happen. First of all, at this point, Russia is at a disadvantage. It is said, quite rightly of Putin, that he plays a weak hand strongly. This is true, for him the war is a slow, chess game which he plays so well. Move then counter move in the public arena, the building of alliances, the unification despite differences with other countries, and yes, a computer war fought by geeks in solitary enclaves. Putin does not want war. Let me repeat that, Putin does not want war.

Several months ago when I went home to America to visit my family my son-in-law takes me over to my storage unit so I can get some things. As we are poking around an aged copy of SeymoreMelman’sThe Permanent War Economy, falls out. My daughter’s husband takes it home to read and a few days later he says to me, “Everything in this book is still true today.” Uh huh. Yep. True that.

What is it that was true then and is true now? Capitalism in America wants and needs wars to sustain itself. War is the way the testosterone drive hegemons of American Capitalism masturbate. Melman tells us the same thing the year before his death in 2004 that he told us when he was a young professor at Columbia in 1975:

“The Permanent War Economy of the United States has endured since the end of World War II in 1945. Since then the U.S. has been at war – somewhere – every year, in Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan – all this to the accompaniment of shorter military forays in Africa, Chile, Grenada, Panama.”

America today is fighting on at least 8 different fronts. Beyond this the US Central Commands website states that it is active in 20 countries across the Middle East and is “actively ramping-up military training, counterterrorism programs, logistical support and funding to the military in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

So it is that profits are booming and unemployment is low as the poor, having few other alternatives to “survive”, sign up for the military.

America wants and needs war, to be sure, to be sure, but it does not want one grand war with Russia which will end conflicts, as that would put an end to the slow but steady accumulation of profits. It hopes to wear Putin and Russian people down via economic siege. Rather, the needs of capitalism are better filled by the status quo…..an endless proliferation of slow wars and never ending conflicts all over the world. For these it produces ever less believable provocations and justifications whether they be “fighting terrorists” or “fighting communists”, “spreading democracy” or “bringing to an end crimes against humanity.” These noble causes are but delusions for sacrificing human beings on the high altar upon which is worshipped the greatest of all gods: wealth.

There is only one man that stands before the Empire and tries to interfere with its plans; but even he contributes to their accumulation of profits as they send Tomahawk missiles to test his weapons. Each missile used demands that another be created, and each that is created produces profits.

Vladimir Vladimirovich, take good care of yourself.

Mary Metzger is a 72 year old retired teacher who has lived in Moscow for the past ten years. She studied Women’s Studies under Barbara Eherenreich and Deidre English at S.U.N.Y. Old Westerbury. She did her graduate work at New York University under Bertell Ollman where she studied Marx, Hegel and the Dialectic. She went on to teach at Kean University, Rutgers University, N.Y.U., and most recenly, at The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology where she taught the Philosophy of Science. Her particular area of interest is the dialectic of nature, and she is currently working on a history of the dialectic. She is the mother of three, the gradmother of five, and the great grandmother of 2.</s>US Navy FM-2 Wildcat fighters fly an escort mission, probably during airstrikes on Japanese facilities on Rota Island, Marianas, June 24, 1944. US Navy/Wikimedia Commons

When Japan introduced the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, it gained a remarkable plane that racked up an impressive combat record through 1941. However, despite its incredible performance for the time, the Zero couldn't hold up.

The Grumman F6F Hellcat achieved fame as a Zero-killer after it was introduced in 1943. But it was its predecessor, the Grumman F4F Wildcat, that held the line during the first campaigns of World War II.

So, how did the Wildcat match up so well against the fearsome Zero?

First, it's important to understand that a big part of the Zero's reputation came from racking up kills in China against a lot of second-rate planes with poorly-trained pilots. After all, there was a reason that the Republic of China hired the American Volunteer Group to help out during the Second Sino-Japanese War — Chinese pilots had a hard time cutting it.

But, believe it or not, the Wildcat almost never made it to the field.

Marine Tech Sgt. R.W. Greenwood in a Grumman Wildcat fighter plane at Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, that was credited with shooting down 19 Japanese aircraft, as shown by the number of Japanese flags on his plane, March 22, 1943. AP Photo

The original F4F Wildcat was a biplane that lost out to the Brewster F2A Buffalo in a competition to field the next carrier-born fighter. Grumman, unsatisfied by losing out a contract, pitched two upgraded designs, and the F4F-3 was finally accepted into service. It was a good thing, too. As it turned out, the Brewster Buffalo was a piece of crap — whether at Midway or over Burma, Buffalos got consistently fell to Zeros, costing the lives of Allied pilots.

When the F4F faced off with the Zero, however, it proved to be a very tough customer. A Zero's armament consisted of two 7.7mm machine guns and two 20mm cannon. The former had a lot of ammo, but offered little hitting power. The latter packed a punch, but the ammo supply was limited. As a result, in combat, many Japanese pilots would empty their 7.7mm machine guns only to see the Wildcat was still flying.

By contrast, the Wildcat's battery of four to six M2 .50-caliber machine guns brought not only hitting power to bear against the lightly armored Zero, but also came with an ample supply of ammo. Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa was able to score seven kills against Japanese planes in one day with a Wildcat.

But ammo wasn't the only advantage. Wildcat pilots had an edge in terms of enemy intelligence thanks to the discovery of the Akutan Zero, a recovered, crashed Zero that gave the US insight into its inner-workings (this vessel made a cameo in a training film featuring future President Ronald Reagan).

Learn more about this plane that held the line against the odds in the video below.
The names of 3,607 employees of Unit 731, a Japanese military medical experimentation unit associated with war crimes during World War II, are released. Prosecutors in the United States had kept their identities secret following the war in exchange for access to data gleaned from the project.