Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire. Fergal Keane
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Название: Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 – The Epic Story of the Last Great Stand of Empire
Автор: Fergal Keane
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007439867
isbn:
* Bushido, The Way of the Warrior, was a code originating in the Samurai era which emphasised the virtues of discipline, sacrifice and courage. Every Japanese officer was enjoined to embrace bushido as his guiding principle.
* It should be pointed out that the rescript also emphasised that ‘superiors should never treat their inferiors with contempt or arrogance … making kindness their chief aim’.
* The first election with adult male suffrage in Japan did not take place until 1928. Two years later a right-winger shot the prime minister, and two years after that young naval officers killed his successor. The slide into military rule and international isolation quickened. In 1931 the army, ignoring the Cabinet, staged an incident in Manchuria that led ultimately to Japan’s departure from the League of Nations.
* The coup might have succeeded if Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the rebels claimed to act, had chosen to support the Imperial Way. But he was appalled by the attacks on his most senior advisers and condemned the plotters; martial law was declared and the mutinous officers either committed suicide or were captured and executed. But the 26 February incident boosted the military, which used the instability that followed as an excuse to increase their grip on the levers of power. It was the critical moment after which the march to war in Asia became inevitable. John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936–1945 (Pen and Sword, 2005), p. 17.
* Japanese forces stationed in China under an international agreement provoked a confrontation by staging night manoeuvres on 7 July 1937. After a dispute with the Chinese over the alleged kidnapping of a Japanese soldier during the operation the Japanese opened fire on Chinese positions. The soldier was later found unharmed.
* Major General Charles Orde Wingate (1903–1944) has remained as divisive a figure after his death as he was in his lifetime. His ideas for long-range penetration operations behind enemy lines, and the use of air power to deploy and supply these troops, foreshadowed the special operations forces of today. Perhaps his most important achievement was in boosting public and troop morale with his first Chindit expedition in 1943. Coming after the humiliation of the retreat from Burma and the failed first Arakan offensive, the image of the British forces surprising the Japanese behind their own lines was a morale and propaganda coup. It also inadvertently hastened the Japanese to disaster by convincing them that they could send large forces of men across the mountains into India. They did not appreciate the appalling human cost of Wingate’s operations or the extent to which he increasingly depended on the diversion of huge air resources to deploy and supply his troops. Of the 3,000 Chindits who entered Burma on the first expedition, one thousand never returned and a further six hundred were too ravaged by illness to ever fight again. On the second Chindit expedition – ‘Operation Thursday’ – a force of some 12,000 men sustained 944 dead, 2,434 wounded and 452 missing. Wingate was killed on 24 March,1944 when his plane crashed near Imphal.
* The Japanese plan for a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ approved by the Cabinet in 1940 made no mention of India, nor did the Japanese officials who outlined the Empire’s territorial ambitions in their discussions with Germany ever suggest such a conquest. When the British conducted an inquiry in 1948 and interviewed fourteen top ranking Japanese officers, it concluded that ‘a search of all the available records failed to reveal any documents which would provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not the Japanese government entertained concrete plans for the invasion of India by the Japanese Army.’ (Cited p. 142, The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Burma
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