Hello there! As a standard tactic, the banzai charge (as in a suicide attack; banzai is simply shorthand for tenno heika banzai, "Long live the emperor") actually represented a fairly late development in the span of the Second Sino-Japanese War and Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945). One of the most notable examples occurred at Attu (of the Aleutian Islands) on May 29, 1943 when the isolated and outnumbered Japanese garrison (2,600 men originally) launched a suicide attack against American lines. Before making the final charge, according to historian Edward Drea, their commander Col. Yamasaki Yasuyo informed Imperial General Headquarters that "he had ordered the able-bodied and wounded alike to fight to the death to avoid the humiliation of capture." Those too wounded and ill to participate were put to death "to preclude any stain on the warrior spirit." Yamasaki was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general. [1]
A medical orderly on Attu named Tatsuguchi Nobuo (English name Paul) happened to have kept his diary up until his last moments. His words, heartbreaking as they are, do reveal something of the despair and hopelessness felt among his fellow soldiers before fatalism finally set in:
May 21. Was strafed when amputating a patient's arm... Nervousness of our CO is severe and he has said his last word to his officers and NCOs--that he will die tomorrow; gave all his articles away... Everyone who heard this became desperate, and things became disorderly.
May 23. Everyone looked around for food and stole everything they could find.
May 26. [Amidst huge naval bombardment] Consciousness becomes vague... Strafing planes hit the next room, two hits from a 500 caliber shell, one stopped on the ceiling and the other penetrated. My room looks like an awful mess from the sand and pebbles that came down from the roof... No hope for reinforcement, will die for the cause of Imperial Edict.
May 28. Heard that they gave four shots of morphine to severely wounded and killed them. Ate half fried thistle. It is the first time I have eaten something fresh in six months. It is a delicacy.
May 29. Today we assembled in front of headquarters... The last assault is to be carried out. All the patients in the hospital were made to commit suicide. Only 33 years of living--and I am to die here. I have no regret... Banzai to Emperor... I am grateful that I have kept the peace in my soul... At 18 [o'clock] took care of all the patients with grenades. Goodbye, Taeko, my beloved wife who loved me to the last. Until we meet again, greet you God-speed. Misako, who just became four years old, will grow up unhindered. I feel sorry for you, Tokiko, born February of this year and gone without seeing your father. Well, be good. Matsue (brother), Dochan, Sukechan, Masachan, Mittichan, goodbye. [2]
Was the sacrifice effective militarily? Yamasaki's force, numbering between seven hundred and a thousand men, had moved at night under the cover of darkness, apparently hoping to slip past American defenses and then capture artillery and supplies in the rear; they managed to overrun a medical station and two command posts before being stopped at a perimeter quickly organized by American rear area personnel. Although the Japanese had initially caught their enemies off guard--many of whom were still sleeping--they were unable to advance further once they met withering fire. [3] By the end of May 30, nearly the entire Japanese force lay dead, with some five hundred soldiers having killed themselves with grenades rather than surrender. The Americans captured only twenty-nine men. Nevertheless, the U.S. Army also suffered relatively high losses. As the official history records: "Out of a force that totaled more than 15,000 men before the campaign ended, 549 Americans had given their lives on Attu, 1,148 had been wounded, and about 2,100 had been taken out of action by disease and nonbattle injuries... The price of victory was high. In terms of numbers engaged, Attu ranks as one of the most costly assaults in the Pacific. In terms of Japanese destroyed, the cost of taking Attu was second only to Iwo Jima: for every hundred of the enemy on the island, about seventy-one Americans were killed or wounded." [4] The Army's revised Handbook On Japanese Military Forces would later cite the Battle of Attu as evidence that "the Japanese conception of defense is essentially offensive," and that "[a] natural corollary of this offensive attitude is the determination not to surrender, but to fight on to the last man and the last round." [5]
On the following day, Imperial General Headquarters declared the garrison Attu gyokusai ("a jewel smashed"), implying "the transcendent moral quality of such sacrifice." "The concept electrified the nation," according to Drea, "...and made fighting to the death acceptable and accepted in the popular consciousness. Retired Maj. Gen. Sakurai, the author of Human Bullets, commented in the press that Yamasaki's act had rekindled the army's traditional fighting spirit, which he believed had been weakened by western influences." From that point on, military planners reemphasized the concept of fighting to the last man in training and tactical doctrine; banzai charges and mass suicide became fairly commonplace as measures of the last resort. Drea pointedly observes, however, that "by early 1944 the army had dropped gyokusai in favor of the clumsy phrase 'all achieved a heroic death in battle' because touting successive reverses on Tarawa and Makin islands in late 1943 as models of gyokusai left the public with the impression that the [armed] services were powerless to prevent inevitable defeats." [6]
Though the banzai charge was an "innovation" or sorts, ritual suicide was not. Since the 1910s, Japanese military planners had increasingly come to believe that a offensive doctrine combined with unique "intangible qualities" (a mythical samurai ethos) would allow them to overcome their enemies, even if it meant enormous losses in life. [7] In 1932, for example, the Imperial Army celebrated the memories of three soldiers who had fallen while charging Chinese fortifications in Shanghai; according to the official and sensationalized account, the men had attempted to breach Chinese positions by acting as "human bombs." In reality, no suicide attack had ever been ordered, and it appears that the bombs they were carrying had exploded prematurely. [8] As far as the average Japanese soldier was concerned, at least before the notion of gyokusai took shape after Attu, dying for the emperor in hopeless situations was hardly appealing. In one extreme case, Kayama Seiji, a soldier in the 37th Division, explained after the war that he "didn't give a damn" about the emperor: "Long live the emperor (tenno heika banzai)? No idiot says that!" Others felt pressured to live up to the expectations of their unit and of their communities back home. [9] Yet in 1944, an investigation by a staff officer in New Guinea noted worryingly that units frequently abandoned their copy of the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors during retreats--their "one and sole 'sacred treasure.'" That same year, British intelligence reported that Japanese troops often withdrew in defiance of orders to fight to the last man. Even the Japanese General Staff acknowledged that "[to] seek the safer course, to shirk one's duty and take refuge in a cave, is the natural impulse of every soldier..." An intelligence report in 1943 thus recommended: "It is necessary that training be given in the doctrine of committing suicide without hesitation..." [10]
To sum up, banzai charges did occur with growing frequency as the Pacific War dragged on, though the attacks were not particularly effective in the face of overwhelming firepower. Yet the notion of "death before surrender" came about largely through social pressure, indoctrination, and ultimately desperation; the average Japanese soldier had little desire to die in battle. I must admit that I'm not an expert on the Pacific Theater, but I hope you find this information helpful nonetheless! :)
[1] Edward J. Drea, Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 231.
[2] Quoted in Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (New York: Random House, 1991), 427.
[3] Fern Chandonnet, "The Recapture of Attu," in Alaska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered, ed. idem. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2008), 84f.; Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 181f.
[4] Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts, The United States Army in World War II (Washington DC: Department of the Army, 1964; reprint, Center of Military History, United States Army, 2000;), 295.
[5] U.S. War Department, Handbook on Japanese Military Forces, TM-E 30-480 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1944), 140.
[6] Drea, Japan's Imperial Army, 231.
[7] Leonard A. Humphreys, The Way of the Heavenly Sword: The Japanese Army in the 1920's (Stanford: Staford University Press, 1995), 13f.
[8] Drea, Japan's Imperial Army, 172f.
[9] Kawano Hitoshi, "Japanese Combat Morale: A Case Study of the Thirty-Seventh Division," in The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, ed. Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 343f.
[10] Harries and Harries, Soldiers of the Sun, 419-3.