The Allies pressed on
As early as 1931, Japan and China clashed in northeast China, and in 1937, the Sino-Japanese War between the two sides quickly expanded. Japan invaded large areas of China by force. After Hideki Tojo, who advocated war with the United States, replaced Fumihiro Konoe, who opposed war against the United States, as Prime Minister of Japan, on December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Army, which had occupied part of China, attacked Pearl Harbor and quickly occupied many Asian regions as its own colonies, and then the Pacific War broke out with the participation of the United States. At first, Japan was somewhat successful in the East Asian region, but the situation was reversed after the Battle of Midway broke out on June 4, 1942.
Chiang Kai-shek, chairman of the Military Commission of the Nationalist Government, U.S. President Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Cairo, Egypt, November 25, 1943
In September 1943, the Kingdom of Italy, the leader of the Axis powers and one of the Triple Alliances, surrendered to the Allies, and the war in Europe was reversed by the Allies. On November 27, 1943, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Chairman of the Military Commission of the National Government of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Cairo Declaration. The Allies stated that the Allies would continue to fight Japan until Japan was willing to surrender unconditionally, that Japan would return the islands it occupied in the Pacific and Chinese territories after the war, and that Korea would be free and independent after World War II.
Beginning in 1944 , Japan suffered defeats in the Mariana Islands and Palau in the southwest Pacific and the Philippines. After Japan lost Saipan in July 1944, Army General Kuniaki Koiso, who had claimed that the Philippines would be the site of the decisive battle, replaced Hideki Tojo as Prime Minister of Japan. In the first half of 1945, under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur, the Allies began planning to capture Iwo Jima and Okinawa on the outskirts of the Japanese archipelago, after which the Allies also planned the fall and regarded Okinawa as a transit area for invasion of the Japanese mainland. On the other hand, from 1941 to the Soviet-German War, the Soviet Union only stationed 40 divisions in Asia to counter the Japanese Kwantung Army , in case Germany and the Northern Advance sent instigated it to advance north, but after Germany's gradual defeat in 1944 and 1945, the Soviet Union began to quietly redeploy its troops from the European theater to the Far Eastern border.
While advancing into the Japanese mainland, Allied submarine patrols in the Pacific and Operation Starvation off the coast of Japan succeeded in destroying the Japanese merchant fleet. Because Japan did not produce enough natural resources itself, industrial production had to rely on the occupied Manchuria, East Asia and the Dutch East Indies to import raw materials, especially oil and other important raw materials, mainly relying on overseas transportation to supply troops. In addition to destroying Japan's convoys, the Allies also launched large-scale strategic bombing of industrial areas of Honshu in November 1944 in the hope of disrupting Japan's wartime economic development, and these military operations did force Japan's production of coal, iron, steel, rubber, and other vital materials to a fraction of the pre-war amount.
Defensive readiness
Due to the heavy losses suffered by the battleships and members of the Imperial Japanese Navy in previous battles, the Japanese naval forces could no longer continue to fight the Allies as an effective fighting force. After the Allies bombed the Kure Naval Factory, the Japanese Navy's remaining major large combat ships were only 6 aircraft carriers, 4 cruisers, and 1 battleship, although none of them had enough fuel to sail. In addition, although Japan still has 19 destroyers and 38 submarines still operational capability, warships are still limited by lack of fuel and cannot be used.
In the case that the Allies could invade the Japanese mainland directly from Kyushu at any time, and Manchuria as a colony was facing a military threat from the Soviet Union, the Japanese military department concluded in the report: "We can no longer have any hope of success in the war, and the only way is for Japan's 100 million citizens to sacrifice their lives to fight the enemy, making them lose their fighting spirit, and Japan used to exaggerate its population to 100 million citizens, but in fact the actual population in the 1944 census was about 7. About 2 million people. ”
As a last-ditch attempt to halt the Allied advance, the Imperial Japanese High Command ordered the remaining fuel to be preserved for the subsequent Allied invasion and planned a decisive operation to defend Kyushu. The plan fundamentally abandoned the "defense in depth" concept adopted by Japan during the Allied invasions of Pereliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and instead focused everything on beachheads. The Japanese planned to send more than 3,000 Special Strike Team fighters to attack amphibious transport units while Allied forces were landing on beaches and transporting supplies, and if the first attack could not force the Allies to evacuate the coast, send an "Last Operational Fleet of the Navy" consisting of 3,500 daredevils and 5,000 ocean-shaking suicide boats and the rest of the destroyers or submarines to launch an offensive.
If the Allies succeeded in defeating the Japanese forces trying to defend Kyushu at the "last minute" and conquered the area, the Japanese deployed the last remaining 3,000 fighters to other islands to continue to prevent the Allied approach. At the same time, the Japanese army began to dig a series of underground caves in Nagano City to withstand the Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland for a long time, and even excavated the official ruins of Matsushiro Omoto to provide for the emperor and other imperial families to live in, and planned to continue to command the remaining troops in battle.
Shigemitsu Aoi
However, while Koiso's Kuniaki cabinet was preparing to launch defensive operations on the Japanese mainland, the Japanese government also began negotiations for an armistice on some battlefields. In 1944, the Japanese government sent former Japanese War Minister Issei Ugaki to China to try to make preliminary contact with the Nationalist government led by Chiang Kai-shek about the armistice agreement. In March 1944, Miao Bin, who served as vice president of the Examination Institute in the Wang Jingwei Nationalist Government, went to Japan on behalf of the Nationalist Government to negotiate an armistice after contacting and communicating with several Nationalist government officials. However, when Foreign Minister Aoi Shigemitsu did not trust the news brought by Miao Bin, and other high-level Japanese officials, including Minoruhiko Higashikumiya and Umezu Mijiro, did not pay attention to it, the peace negotiations between Japan and China, led by Koiso, could only be broken.
At the same time, after strong opposition from other Japanese government officials and the loss of Japanese local rule in the Philippines, the cabinet of Kuniaki Koiso collapsed, and then Admiral Kantaro Suzuki formed a cabinet. Other attempts to end the war included the 1939 attempt by Major General Imai Takeo, deputy chief of the Japanese General Staff, and the attempt to reach a peace agreement with Chinese General He Zhuguo, and the 1945 attempt by Stuart Leighton, president of Yenching University, and Zhou Fohai, mayor of Shanghai, to contact China to negotiate with the Japanese government, but they were reluctant to discuss the signing of a peace treaty due to the Japanese government's distrust of intermediaries.
Senior
Leading the group
In 1945, Japan's strategic decision-making in the second half of the war was mainly made by the Council of Military Councils established by Kuniaki Koiso in 1944, which included the so-called "six major" important military and political officials, including the Prime Minister of Japan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Japan), the Minister of War, the Chief of Army Staff, the Minister of the Navy, and the Chief of Military Command of the Navy Province. After Suzuki became Prime Minister on April 7, 1945, key members of the committee included:
- Prime Minister: Admiral Kantaro Suzuki
- Minister of Foreign Affairs: Shigeru Togo
- Minister of War: Army General Anan Weiji
- Minister of the Navy: Admiral Mitsumasa Minouchi
- Chief of the Army General Staff: Army General Mijiro Umezu
- Chief of the Navy Command: Admiral and Kawakojiro (later replaced by Deputy Admiral Toyoda, who was also a Admiral)
Kuniaki Koiso (March 22, 1880 – November 3, 1950) was a Japanese army general, politician, prime minister in the 41st cabinet, and a Class-A war criminal in World War II
Legally, these positions are nominated by the Japanese government itself and nominally appointed by the Emperor himself. After 1936, however, the Japanese Army and Navy were also given the power to nominate (or refuse to nominate) their respective top officials, largely because the military believed that it would prevent an inefficient Japanese government or the collapse of the existing government due to the resignation of some high-ranking officials.
Government view
In fact, Japanese leaders have been trying to end the war through negotiation, and in their plans before the outbreak of the war, they expected to attract the attention of the United States through rapid territorial expansion, and even directly enter into a military conflict with the United States to gain a negotiating advantage, and then use diplomatic means to allow Japan to continue to retain some of the newly occupied land. Later, in 1942, some politicians, public officials, members of the military, and the private public believed that the Japanese army should end the war while maintaining its superiority, but this idea was attacked by the Tojo Hideki cabinet, which wanted to lead Japan to victory in the war, and even began to arrest opposition figures such as Masayoshi Nakano.
After the U.S. military launched direct air strikes on the Japanese mainland in July 1944, the government began to pay attention to the idea of negotiating an end to World War II. After 1945, Japan's leadership agreed that the war situation was very unfavorable for Japan, but did not believe that diplomatic negotiations alone could be the best way to end the war. This idea also led to a split within the government into two different factions, the so-called pacifist advocating actively convincing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin through diplomatic channels to help mediate between Japan and the United States and other Allies.
Another hardliner argued that until a "decisive" battle was launched and the Allied casualties were numerous, the Allies would naturally be willing to offer more lenient terms to discuss postwar planning with Japan. Both approaches were based on Japan's experience in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, during which the war could not be ended despite a series of high-cost battles, and it was not until after the crucial Battle of the Tsushima Strait that the Russian Empire was willing to sign the Treaty of Portsmouth under the coordination of US President Theodore Roosevelt. However, at the end of January 1945, some government officials around the Emperor of Japan began to try to end the war by introducing a peaceful surrender clause that would still maintain the emperor's status. The proposals were quickly sent to the British and U.S. governments through various channels for discussion, with Army Five-Star General Douglas MacArthur summarizing the requests in a 40-page file and presenting them to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt two days before the Yalta Conference.
However , according to later reports , the file was returned after it was submitted to Roosevelt , leaving all proposals , including the assurance of the emperor's status, not fully discussed , and Roosevelt proposed that Allied policy during the period be framed within the framework of accepting only unconditional surrender. Suggestions that the Emperor might accept becoming a puppet ruler in order to retain his status were strongly opposed by members of the military who remained powerful within the Japanese government. In a May 21 message to all Japanese diplomats, Foreign Minister Togo also denied that Japan had made any peace proposals to the United States and Britain, so the move was not usually seen as a formal expression of Japan's willingness to surrender.