Quote:
Originally Posted by tater
Jap as line infantry?
They were terrorized when they faced real armies that actually had artillery that didn't use 3-4 guys on foot as the prime mover. They were utterly shattered by the Soviets before the war started. They won an excellent victory in Malaya, but everywhere else? When did they win in a real fight?
"Fighting spirit" is meaningless, or they'd have won the war.
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I'd be willing to wager there's more than one Army or Marine Corps veteran who would disagree with your take on the IJA. Guys who fought on Guadalcanal, Iwo, Okinawa, Peleliu, or who flew with the AVG. An enemy that won't give in, even when you're using flamethrowers on them, doesn't sound like a terrorized army to me. As to artillery, do you know of many World War Two artillery pieces that can out-punch the main guns of battleships and heavy cruisers - who, in reported cases, were using their main armament in direct fire?
The Japanese infantry were perpetually undersupplied by USN interdiction during the last half of the war, yet still they fought; still they exacted casualties in return.
And as a result of those tenacious defenses, the predicted casualties of Operations Coronet and Downfall topped, by some estimates,
one million American dead and wounded. One million. Sure, Japan would have lost the war, maybe even reduced to near-extinction levels (as some in Japanese High Command promised would be the case). One million invader casualties would have been pretty hard to swallow back home.
They may not have won the war, but it was not through any lack of tenacity.