Kwantung Army

Formation

The Kwantung Army's origins lie in the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War. In 1895 Qing China granted the Kwantung Leased Territory on the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki, only for the Triple Intervention to force its return weeks later; Russia leased the territory in 1898 and developed it as Russian Dalian. Japan's victory over Russia in 1904–1905 returned the lease and brought the South Manchurian Railway under Japanese control, and in 1906 the Kwantung Garrison was established at Port Arthur to defend the territory and the railway zone: one infantry division and a heavy siege artillery battalion, plus six independent garrison battalions as railway guards, 14,000 men in all, administered by the Kwantung Government-general whose governor also served as commander. In 1919 the government-general was split into separate civilian and military administrations, creating the Kwantung Army command.

Insubordination and Manchukuo

Nominally subordinate to the Imperial General Headquarters and the Army General Staff in Tokyo, the Kwantung Army often violated orders outright without suffering consequences. In 1928 staff officer Komoto Daisaku blew up the train of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin at Huanggutun, and in 1931 the Kwantung Army engineered the Liutiaohu (Mukden) Incident and the invasion of Manchuria, a massive act of insubordination against the express orders of Tokyo's political and military leadership. Presenting Imperial General Headquarters with a fait accompli, it was rewarded rather than punished: the conquest was ratified, and in 1932 the Kwantung Army was the main force in founding Manchukuo, the puppet state in Northeast China. Its commanding officer administered that state's politics and economic development and held authority to approve or countermand orders of Puyi, the nominal emperor; the same commander also served as Japanese ambassador to Manchukuo.

War in China and against the Red Army

After securing Manchukuo the Kwantung Army fought repeated border clashes to carve out a Japanese-dominated buffer zone in North China, and when full-scale war began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 its forces took part in the Battle of Beiping-Tianjin and Operation Chahar. Its reputation was severely shaken later in the decade during the Soviet–Japanese border conflicts. It fought the Red Army to a stalemate at Lake Khasan in 1938 and was decisively defeated at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 with heavy casualties. After that defeat the Kwantung Army was purged of its more insubordinate officers and of the proponents of the Hokushin-ron, or strike north, doctrine, and in the 1940s it became a notably obedient command.

Plans for war with the USSR

The Kwantung Army stood at the centre of Japanese planning for an invasion of the Soviet Far East. In 1938–1939 the Operations Bureau of the Army General Staff and the Kwantung Army jointly examined a pair of contingencies, Operational Plan No. 8 or Hachi-Go, which posited all-out war with the USSR beginning in 1943, and after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 the plan known as Kantokuen, the Kwantung Army Special Maneuvers, was drawn up. It would have been the largest combined-arms operation in Japanese history, involving seven armies and much of the empire's naval and air forces, and Emperor Hirohito approved it in part on 7 July. Conflicting preparations for an offensive in Southeast Asia, the demands of the Second Sino-Japanese War, fading prospects of a quick German victory and US economic sanctions combined to kill the plan at Imperial General Headquarters. The large Japanese force in Manchuria nevertheless forced the Soviets to keep considerable military resources in Siberia throughout the war.

Destruction

Kwantung Army strength grew from roughly 200,000 in 1938 to some 700,000 by 1941, and its headquarters moved to the new Manchukuo capital of Xinjing. The widening Pacific war reversed its position. As the front deteriorated, its best units and equipment were stripped away for the south and for China, leaving the command to face August 1945 with replacements of drastically lower quality. In the Soviet invasion of Manchuria the Kwantung Army lost roughly 84,000 dead and some 600,000 taken prisoner, and the prisoners were sent to labour camps in Siberia and the Far East and repatriated in stages over the following five years. Its collapse was followed by the Soviet entry into northern Korea and the division of the peninsula.

War crimes and responsibility

The Kwantung Army sponsored Unit 731, which carried out biological warfare and unethical experiments on civilians and prisoners of war. After the surrender, the Soviet Red Army uncovered chemical and biological weapons installations centred on Unit 731 and its subsidiaries, where experiments directed by Shirō Ishii used live Chinese, American and Russian civilians and POWs. Arrested by the American occupation authorities, Ishii and some 20,000 members of Unit 731 received immunity from war-crimes prosecution in exchange for germ-warfare data based on human experimentation; on 6 May 1947 General Douglas MacArthur wrote to Washington that additional data could be obtained by informing those involved that the information would be retained in intelligence channels and not used as war-crimes evidence, and the deal was concluded in 1948. Twelve members of Unit 731 and members of the Kwantung Army leadership were nevertheless convicted at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials, and former generals including Seishirō Itagaki, Iwane Matsui, Kenji Doihara, Hideki Tōjō and Akira Mutō were sentenced to death at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.

Assessment and memory

Who should bear responsibility for the Kwantung Army's actions remains contested. It was the most prestigious command in the Imperial Japanese Army, Japan and the USSR officially treated Khalkhin Gol as no more than a border incident, and the American immunity bargain left part of the perpetrator apparatus unpunished. Recording both the unit that actually drove the command chain and the consequences of its actions is the starting point for that dispute.