4. Will to fight
Generally speaking, our impression of Japanese soldiers mainly focuses on these aspects: the Japanese soldiers shooting accurately, the bayonet fighting hard, the death of the battle, and the refusal of the wounded soldiers to accept rescue.
In fact, the Japanese soldiers' tactical movements are flexible, and they are not panicked when they are surrounded by small groups of troops, especially the sense of active attack.
Let's look at two examples.
One is that on August 4, 1938, when the 3rd Brigade of the 147th Wing of the 111th Brigade of the Japanese Army attacked the Ou Earthquake Department of the Nationalist 4th Army, Lieutenant Lieutenant Kubo Tadashi (a Japanese Shimonoseki, who had obtained the Kendo Five-Dan Qualification before the war) led another soldier to defeat the defenders of a company of the Nationalist army at Okatsuzan!
Let's take a look at Kubo's battles during this period:
On July 30, when the 3rd Brigade of the 147th Wing launched an attack on Pingfeng rock, Kubo Tadashi single-handedly infiltrated the Chinese defenders' positions to reconnoiter and gained face-to-face enemy information.
On the night of July 31, Kubo and a soldier broke into the Chinese garrison position, and the night attack was successful, ensuring that the 3rd Group successfully captured Pingfeng Rock.
At 7:00 a.m. on August 4, the squadrons of the 3rd Brigade burst to about 200 meters of Ōkaka Mountain, and Kubo Tadashi and three soldiers from the 12th Squadron rushed to a distance of only 50 meters from the Nationalist position, and then encountered a counterattack by the Chinese defenders.
After carefully observing the terrain of Mt. Ōkatsugu, Kubo ordered his 3 soldiers to retreat, bringing only sabers and pistols, and a military flag tied on his back to prevent himself from being mistakenly injured, and climbed up the cliff on the east side. Halfway through the climb, he found that Katsuki Ono, the commander of the brigade headquarters, had also followed. Eventually, the two men climbed to the top of the mountain under the cover of trees and thatch in the rock.
"Devil Lieutenant" Kubo Tadashi
At the top of the mountain, Kubo Tadashi and Ono observe the movement of the Nationalist army. They saw a hut on the slope thirty or forty meters ahead, where sixteen or seven Chinese soldiers were sitting around and chatting. Near the hut was a front-line position with Czech light machine guns, and seven or eight Chinese soldiers on the position were all facing the direction of the main Japanese force, without the slightest sense of danger from behind.
Kubo Tadashi gestured with his eyes to Ono to "kill the enemies in the house first." So, Ono was in front and Kubo was behind, and quietly sneaked to a distance of 20 meters from the hut and fired four or five shots into the house in a row.
However, after encountering a sudden attack, the nationalist soldiers in the hut or near the machine gun position on the position actually abandoned the position without resistance and fled! Not even the Czech machine gun was taken away!
Seeing that the officers and men of the Nationalist army chose to face themselves with their backs, Kubo Tadashi and Ono first shot twelve or three Chinese soldiers, then returned to the main position, picked up the grenades and light machine guns abandoned by the Nationalist soldiers, and launched an attack on the sixty or seventy Chinese soldiers who were assembling in the mountain pass, forcing them to collapse backwards.
After this, the Nationalist defenders of Ōkakakuyama also organized several counterattacks on the positions, but they were unsuccessful, and Kubo and his men persisted until the arrival of the main force of the Japanese army.
Captain Ono Katsumi
For his performance in battle, Lieutenant Kubo was commended by the commander of the Japanese Eleventh Army, Okamura Ninji
The second was that in the defense of Nanjing, the squadron leader of the 4th Squadron of the Ōno Wing of the Japanese 16th Division regiment, Saka Kiyoshi, personally led the charge, and Shikata Fujizo took the lead in climbing the Zhongshan Gate at the same time.
Because Shikata Fujizo was killed by a mine, BanQing became the first Japanese soldier to board the Nakayama Gate, so reporters took photos of him with injuries and published them in newspapers in Japan.
It was this Banqing, who commanded his squadron after the fall of Nanjing, shot and killed more than 300 Chinese prisoners of war outside the Xuanwu Gate. And in order to compare the performance of the Japanese "38" rifle and the Chinese "Zhongzheng" rifle, the commander of the Saka kiyoshi squadron ordered 30 Chinese prisoners of war to line up in two columns, and the Japanese soldiers used the 38th type and the middle to formally resist the back of the last person in each team, and then pulled the trigger at the same time, so the two teams fell, and the experimental result was that the "38" rifle pierced 12 people, and the "Zhongzheng" rifle pierced 14 people.
From these two examples, it can be seen that the officers on the Japanese side are soldiers, and the soldiers have a strong desire to take the initiative to fight, such as the captain Ono Katsuji (the captain is not a soldier, but a corporal non-commissioned officer, equivalent to the deputy squad leader of our army or the leader of the combat team in the squad) is not followed by Kubo's orders.
Although kubo's example of this battle is not as good as our army's "surprise attack on the White Tiger Regiment", it is similar to the Pang Guoxing combat group in the counterattack against India's self-defense, and it can even be said that the Indian artillery that was attacked fled is excusable, after all, the artillerymen do not necessarily carry guns on their bodies at all times, and what if they are unarmed and do not run?
But in the Battle of Da hakama mountain, the nationalist army was all infantry! There were also Czech-style and positions, more than twenty people faced with a southern pistol, one with two Japanese soldiers with three or eight large covers, and chose to flee, not so much Kubo Tadashi and Ono's strong combat effectiveness, but also the combat effectiveness of this company of the Nationalist Army was unimaginable!
It can also be seen that the Japanese soldiers have extreme contempt for the will to fight of the Nationalist army.
In fact, Japanese soldiers have always maintained a psychological advantage over the Nationalist army. Even if they lose the war, they don't think they are defeated at our hands. Their contentious admission to the defeat at the hands of the Americans and the Soviets is irrefutable because it is true.
This psychological superiority over the Chinese soldiers did not change even when our People's Liberation Army defeated the Kuomintang army in the War of Liberation. It was not until after the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea that the Volunteer Army used the strength of one army against the United Nations Army composed of sixteen countries and fought a draw, that it was a real change in the view of chinese soldiers and there was no psychological advantage. After all, the Japanese have suffered heavy losses at the hands of the US military.
We have also produced this psychological advantage, that is, when the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea fought against the South Korean army and the Print Army in the self-defense counterattack against India, and it still exists.
A strong will to fight does not mean not being afraid of death!
The strong-willed side is invincible in attack and tenacious in defense.
Whether it is a soldier of the Nationalist Army or a soldier of the New Fourth Army of the Eighth Route Army, there are many people who are not afraid of death, but not being afraid of death is not necessarily a manifestation of a strong will to fight. The officers and men of the Nationalist army in the Battle of Da hakama mountain are typically not afraid of death, and choose to use their backs against the enemy, so they die faster.
In the repeated long-lived charges launched by the Japanese army on the Pacific islands, even the wounded were waving their crutches to the front, which was a strong will to fight. It's a rush to commit suicide!
During the Battle of Sufinnish, when the almost frozen Soviet soldiers were roasting fire around the campfire, they killed their comrades one by one against the Finnish snipers in the forest, and did not even do the dodging action, that is, they were not afraid of death? It's numbness waiting to die!
Tomorrow we will discuss the reasons for the poor combat effectiveness of our army's individual soldiers.