Colonel Masanobu Tsuji of the IJA walked through the gate of a small former brigade headquarters complex near the city of Taihoku (now Taipei) on the island of Taiwan, which had been part of the Japanese Empire since 1895. It was the first day of 1941, and hot and muggy despite being the middle of winter. Tsuji was used to the chilly weather of Nanking (now Nanjing), where he had served until he was “exiled.”
His transfer from China felt to Tsuji like an exile, and it was. He complained often of having been “driven out” of his post with the staff of the 400,000-man China Expeditionary Army (Shina Hakan Gun) to a minuscule post in a remote backwater far from the action. He complained that after 18 years as an officer, he now commanded only 30 people, and they included mainly typists and file clerks, not samurai.
The recently activated Taiwan Army Number 82 Section was the smallest unit Tsuji had yet to experience in his career, but it was growing. As he walked through the gate, his ears were filled with the sound of hammers, and his nostrils with the smell of newly sawn lumber.
Born on October 11, 1901 in Ishikawa Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, Masanobu Tsuji had graduated from the Imperial Japanese War College (Rikugun Daigakko) in 1931, and had served most of his active-duty career in China or on the Manchukuo border during the wars with the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Tsuji was aggressive and obstinate by nature, and proud of it. He knew that this rubbed people up the wrong way, but he was proud of this as well. He only rubbed people up the wrong way when he thought they needed rubbing, and when no one else in the hierarchy had the courage to do it.
According to John Toland, in The Rising Sun, Tsuji
made a commonplace of eccentricity; once he had burned down a geisha house filled with fellow officers in a fit of moral indignation. With his roundish face, bald head and small, blinking eyes, he looked like the typical staff officer, but his brilliant maverick spirit inspired fanatic devotion in the younger staff officers. They revered him as Japan’s “God of Operations,” the hope of the Orient.
Toland reports that some of Tsuji’s superiors did not share the ardor of the junior officers for Tsuji. He mentions that Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, the deputy inspector general of IJA training, one of the most respected officers in the service, and later the wartime commander of the 16th Army, “saw the genius in Tsuji – but also the madman.”
Within the IJA, there existed a subculture of the officer corps who were practitioners of the art of gekokujo, but Tsuji was a master. Gekokujo is a form of passive-aggressive institutional insubordination, dating back to the Warring States Period of the fifteenth century, which roughly translates as “the lower overcomes the higher,” or “lesser ranks lead from below.” Essentially, the bottom line of gekokujo was that “the end justifies the means.” Gekokujo was one of those things lurking beneath the surface of the organizational culture that had long been tolerated because those ends which were justified by the means included a passionate, unyielding devotion to the empire and the emperor.
However, the practice had become abruptly less tolerable after it had served as a justification for the “February 26 Incident” in 1936, when a cadre of insubordinate “gekokujan” IJA officers attempted a coup against the Tokyo government. Though the coup failed, it resulted in a role for active-duty military officers in the heretofore civilian cabinet, and this would effectively open the door to a military-dominated Japanese government.
Tsuji’s banishment had been precipitated not by gekokujo, but by guilt through association with his role model. This man, who was a grand master of the art of gekokujo, was the pugnacious and implacable General Kanji Ishihara (also written as Ishiwara), the officer who had been among those who engineered the 1931 Mukden Incident which gave Japan the pretext to invade and occupy Manchuria. The Japanese government was as stunned as the Chinese by how quickly and successfully Manchuria was occupied and turned into the puppet state of Manchukuo.
Had his ploy failed, Ishihara expected to be court-martialed – or worse – but his gekokujo served him well and succeeded, earning him the adoration of his troops, a permanent following, and the reluctant congratulations of his government. Failure is an orphan, but success has many willing fathers, and Ishihara came away from Mukden with many willing sons, including Tsuji.
In turn, Ishihara promulgated his East Asia Federation or East Asia League (Toa Renmei Undo), an “Asia for Asiatics” policy that was a precursor to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere concept. The Toa Renmei Undo doctrine imagined that Japan and puppet Manchukuo should ally themselves with China against non-Asian influences in Asia, especially the Comintern and the Soviet Union. While the pan-Asian component of the doctrine may have dovetailed with the official vision of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, when Ishihara went so far as to propose that Japan should stop fighting China, that was the last straw. There was no future in China for IJA officers who considered the basic mission of the China Expeditionary Army to be flawed. Ishihara was relieved of his duties and placed on the retired list. If he had not been a leader of long service who had a great deal of respect within the officer corps, he might not have been allowed merely to slip away.
Tsuji, meanwhile, was also recalled to Tokyo. As far as the IJA was concerned, there was no place whatsoever in its ranks for Ishihara after China, but for Tsuji, it was another matter. He had the markings of an insubordinate, but the generals in Tokyo recognized that he had the makings of a useful insubordinate.
When he learned of their plans for him, Tsuji was astonished. He was one of those staff officers who lived and breathed Hokushinron, the Northern Road doctrine. He had spent much of his career fighting the Soviets along the frontier between Manchuria and Siberia, and even when he was in China, he kept one eye looking north.
When he took up his post at Taihoku at the beginning of 1941, he learned that the task before him at Number 82 Section was the direct opposite. He was now destined to walk the Nanshinron, the Southern Road. The architects of Tsuji’s exile had placed him in charge of drawing up the first-ever contingency plans for IJA operations in Southeast Asia. Tsuji writes in his memoirs:
Japanese soldiers were familiar only with the intensely cold regions of Manchukuo. None of them had any understanding of the meaning of the words “squall” or “jungle,” much less any experience of these things. Consequently it was essential to begin to collect fundamental data for military operations in tropical areas … Even among the commissioned officers chosen for the staff there was not one who had had any real experience of the tropics.
Moreover, Tsuji was stunned that this unprecedented task given to the tiny Number 82 Section headquarters carried a virtually impossible deadline. As he explains,
to this unpretentious and promiscuously chosen household was allotted the task of collecting, in approximately six months, all conceivable data connected with tropical warfare – the organization of Army corps, equipment, campaign direction, management and treatment of weapons, sanitation, supply, administration of occupied territory, and military strategy, tactics, and geography.
Six months to reorient an army for a type of warfare not previously imagined? How could this be done? Only by assigning the job to someone with the tenacity of an angry dog, the man with the “brilliant maverick spirit.” There was method in the decision to assign this task to the aggressive and obstinate Colonel Masanobu Tsuji. The unit was officially under the command of Colonel Yoshihide Hayashi, but by all accounts Tsuji was its driving wheel.
Number 82 Section was also known, officially and benignly, as the Taiwan Army Research Department, but to its officers, it was the “Doro Nawa Unit.” Roughly translated, Doro Nawa is a figure of speech that means catching a thief and thinking later about a rope to bind him. An analogous figure of speech is “putting the cart before the horse.” It was the perception of Tsuji and his fellow officers that, having abruptly embraced the Nanshinron strategy, the Imperial General Headquarters had imposed a ridiculous timetable for its implementation.
It was the task of the Doro Nawa to train an army and design a strategy for operations never before envisioned or undertaken by the IJA, and to do it in half a year – when plans for operations against the Soviet Union had been developed and refined over more than a decade.
Tsuji and his fellow planners scratched their heads in dismay, pondering the problem and asking seemingly imponderable rhetorical questions. “What alterations had to be made in the organization of troops and the type of weapons and equipment used on the Siberian and Manchurian battlefields at twenty degrees below zero to meet requirements for fighting in the dense jungles of the tropics?” Tsuji wondered. “How should tactics and strategy used against the Soviet Union be revised for action against British and American armies?”
Winston Churchill begins his book The Hinge of Fate, the third volume of his massive history of World War II, with the assertion that Japan had “long prepared” for the campaign in Southeast Asia. Indeed, this was widely assumed by Allied planners throughout the war. In fact, the plans were compiled in a remarkably short time.
Through January and into February 1941, in the tropical heat to which he knew he must accustom himself, Tsuji pored over every bit of information that he could find about Southeast Asia. To his newly constructed headquarters, he called in civilians who had worked in Southeast Asia with Japanese firms – from the Ishihara Mining Company to the Taiwan Bank. He brought in professors from the Japanese university in Taiwan who could brief his team on tropical diseases and hygiene. He even sat down with an old sea captain who had sailed the waters of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, to learn what he could about the nuances of weather, winds, and tides.
By the middle of February, it was time to evaluate tactics with a practical exercise. Sailing from Taiwan, clad in tropical weight uniforms and carrying gear which Number 82 Section had guessed would be compatible with tropical operations, a small contingent of IJA troops invaded Kagoshima Prefecture on Kyushu, the southernmost prefecture among the main islands of Japan.
Tsuji recalls that “the project was not characterized by either originality or peculiarity” but hastens to add that the maneuvers “brought together talented officers from all quarters, including naval staff men. During the two week period they came to know one another by sight and became friendly. Later these acquaintanceships were to prove of tremendous value on the battlefield.”
A larger, second round of amphibious landing exercises was scheduled four months later on Hainan Island, off southern China, which had been used as a staging base for operations in southern China, as well as for operations related to the occupation of French Indochina.
These exercises went forward in June 1941, utilizing troops drawn from the IJA’s 23rd Army, a garrison command recently formed in Fuchow, and not the units that would be used in the actual operations in Southeast Asia. These had yet to be determined. The maneuvers were aimed at refining more than merely amphibious landing techniques. They were, as Tsuji later writes,
designed to work out a technique for an attack and a long-range penetration of approximately one thousand kilometers [625 miles] into enemy territory – the distance from southern Thailand to Singapore – and were to take into account the probability of strong resistance along the whole route of the attack and the fact that all bridges would be destroyed and roads damaged by the enemy.
Tsuji and his staff evaluated everything from how to pack horses into the hold of a ship to the endurance of troops on a sea voyage. In the case of the latter, he crowded men “three to a mat” and left them aboard ships for a week with a limited ration of water. Once ashore, Tsuji put the troops through their paces, studying the best means for moving quickly through a jungle. His engineers, meanwhile, were tasked with rapidly destroying and rebuilding bridges under primitive conditions.
Given that amphibious operations were relatively new for the IJA, Tsuji recalls that there were many unknowns to be investigated. As American planners of amphibious operations were soon to learn,
the most difficult problem of all was to determine methods of disembarking men and equipment on open beaches with due regard for dangerous coral or hidden and sunken rocks; but eventually after considerable trouble satisfactory routines were evolved. Our study of these matters was carried out with the utmost seriousness; it was as a sword smeared with blood.
On the evening of June 22, Tsuji and his fellow officers were sitting down to a meal of boiled rice and salted fish at their encampment on Hainan. They had just lopped open some coconuts to drain their juice, when the wireless operator ran up to their table with news of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
To officers who still held a grudge against their Axis partner for having concluded the 1939 pact with Stalin – Japan’s mortal enemy – Germany’s abrupt violation of this treaty was just as confusing. Citing an understanding that came from experience fighting the Soviet armies, Tsuji claims in his memoirs that he could see Hitler’s folly:
I, at that time, felt intuitively that a dark shadow had come over the future of Germany, which had consistently disregarded international good faith. War must have a morality and a reason which is understandable at home and abroad. From a propaganda standpoint Hitler’s attack placed the Soviets in a one-hundred-per-cent more advantageous position. Putting aside all questions of international morality, however, and looking at the position from a purely strategic aspect, the question arose whether the German nation had any real prospect of victory when confronted simultaneously by the Anglo-Saxon and Slav races.
Of course, Tsuji’s memoirs were written ten years later, with the hindsight of knowing how Hitler’s campaign against the Soviets had finally climaxed.
Two days later, Tsuji received a wire ordering him to come to Tokyo as soon as the Hainan exercises concluded, and to serve as a staff assistant on the Headquarters General Staff.