After the "Taisho Disarmament" in 1925, the Japanese Army retained only 17 permanent divisions and 250,000 active troops, and the military department had not yet reached the level of "rampage", so in those years, Little Japan was relatively stopped. It can be seen that the non-wartime strength of a permanent division of the Japanese army is only more than 12,000 people, and the so-called more than 25,000 people are full of troops in wartime, so after the outbreak of the all-out War of Resistance Against Japan in 1937, the total strength of the Japanese Army quickly expanded to more than 510,000 people, but it was still the 17 divisions.
Stills of the Changsha Defense War
By the beginning of 1945, when Japan was close to surrender, the Japanese Army had 168 divisions. Many military enthusiasts believe that Japan's mobilization ability and military strength in the later stages of the war were stronger, but in fact, this is an illusion, and China has had the concept of "soldiers are expensive but not expensive" since ancient times. At this time, although the Japanese Army swelled to about 5.4 million people, this was already the peak of its dying period, and quantity could not replace quality.
On another level, Japan is far inferior to Nazi Germany, which has a similar population base, with a total of 14.2 million Germans mobilized to join the army, with a peak strength of 7.8 million, and the number of infantry divisions exceeding 300. At the beginning of 1945, the Japanese Army and Navy together also had a maximum of 6.67 million people, of which although there were few naval ships, there were still more than 1.3 million personnel of various types, so the actual strength of the Army was 5.4 million.
Even among the 5 million or so, the proportion of strong soldiers is not high, because the Japanese soldiers have hung up more than 2 million, according to the proportion of the wartime period, at least the same number of wounded and disabled, that is, nearly 5 million people have been lost. Generally speaking, men of the right age between the ages of 18 and 40 are the normal conscription range, accounting for only 6-7% of the total population, and do not forget that half of the population is still women.
At that time, the population of Japan (not counting colonies) was only 80 million people, so it was relatively normal for active duty and reserve forces plus the first replenishment and the second replenishment to have more than 4 million, and after years of war, it was good that this part of the people could live half of them, and the first to die must be the first to enlist.
That is to say, by the end of the war, the Japanese Army had a maximum of 2 million qualified soldiers, so how did the other more than 3 million come from? Of course, it was to expand the scope of conscription, and by 1944, men from 14 to 60 years old were required to perform military service. How strong can a 60-year-old man and a 14-year-old be? The number of soldiers is just excessive, so although the number of soldiers is large, the top use is already very small.
In the TV series "Changsha Defense War", the little devil and Bu Ichiro, also sixteen or seventeen years old, his father was killed by the anti-Japanese army and his mother did WAF, he resisted the three or eight big covers higher than him to invade China, and finally killed himself. According to the recollections of the veterans of the Tenth Army, during the Hengyang Defense War, there were many high school students among the shirtless charging ghosts, which was no longer a military mobilization ability, but a national madness.
In the Battle of Nomonkan in 1939, the total number of casualties between Japan and the Soviet Union was not very large, and the combat effectiveness of the veterans of the Kwantung Army was still relatively strong. When the Soviet army attacked the northeast in 1945, it was completely crushed on the 800,000 Kwantung Army, the reason was that the Kwantung Army was already empty, not only most of the heavy weapons were transferred back to China, but its composition was also old, weak, sick and disabled plus "pioneer regiment peasants", of course, it could not withstand the Soviet Union's hundred battles transferred back from the European battlefield.
Not only is it inferior to Germany, not to mention the two major military powers of the United States and the Soviet Union, Japan's ability to mobilize for war is even inferior to that of Britain. The main reason restricting its ability to mobilize is the lack of production capacity of the military industry and the lack of resources, the soldiers are completely out of production of high-consumption groups, equipment, food, clothes, hats, shoes and socks, and all other uses must be spent by the state finances, by the end of the war, the Japanese government has basically gone bankrupt, the inflation rate is as high as 400%.
The Japanese army's 38 large covers began to be desperately produced in 1907, and more than 3 million were built before surrender, and the German basic rifle 98K was produced from 14.5 million units from 1935 to 1945. The total production of the Japanese crooked handle (28,000), the crutch (41,000) and the 999 (53,000) together did not exceed 120,000, while the Germans produced 1 million MG42 general-purpose machine guns alone, which is the gap.
Japan's so-called "industrialization" is called compared with the Asian agricultural countries, and the production capacity of Europe and the United States is still very different, and there are not enough weapons to talk about equipping troops. In 1945, the Kwantung Army was even slightly deficient in the 38th Gai. Therefore, Japan's military expansion is also a little bit, because its national financial capacity is relatively limited: when the war began in 1937, there were 17 permanent divisions, and at the end of the year, there were 24 special divisions; in 1938, it was expanded to 34, in 1939 it reached 43, and in 1940 it was expanded to 49; and there were only 51 divisions in November 1941, when the Pacific War broke out, and it can be seen that the growth was relatively slow.
In 1942, it increased to 58 divisions, in 1943 the total number was 70, in 1944 it was 99, but in the first half of 1945 it suddenly swelled to 168 divisions, and if you think about it, you know what the 69 divisions and regiments that have been expanded in the past six months are: independent mixed brigades are upgraded, independent infantry brigades are upgraded, independent garrisons are upgraded, and a large number of old and weak soldiers are crammed in during the period. Most of these divisions and regiments have not yet participated in the battle, and they have surrendered their weapons on the mainland, and you can't even assess the combat effectiveness.
In the Battle of Western Hunan in early 1945, the Fourth Front army captured more than 400 Japanese prisoners for the first time, Wang Yaowu rushed to inspect, but found that it was a large group of hairless Japanese children, wang Yaowu, who had been in the battlefield for a long time, was disappointed, but at the same time sighed: "The Japanese are almost finished."