I have a picture of an IJA soldier from WW2 that shows a WW1 style uniform (with the "bus driver cap") with 23 on his collar blazes.
Looking up the 23rd on Wikipedia it shows that they fought and were defeated in the battle of Nomonhan versus the Soviet Union, then the remnants of it formed the 119th IJA Division.
The 23rd was then reconstituted and in 1944 deployed to the Philippines where it fought the battle of Luzon.
The only problem I have is that my father who was a Marine in WW2, [1st and 3rd Amphibious Corps] (who had this picture in his possession), never fought or went to the Philippines.Looking at his record, he probably got it from either New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, or Okinawa.
So I was trying to determine if anyone here knew of the history of the 119th IJA Division? Or if they had information that parts of the 23rd went somewhere else? (my hunch is this is from the battle of Okinawa)
The other possibility that I have thought of is that this was a picture of a relative of the soldier that my father fought against and subsequently took the picture from.
I will be asking in the Japan subreddit for help as well, but thought I might find some answers here first to help me locate the correct family that this (and one other picture) belong to.
Thanks!
The picture:
Edit: Grammar, and added full picture group.
The collar indicates the infantry regiment that the man served in, not the division. In this case, it would indicate that this soldier served in the 23rd Infantry Regiment, which was part of the 6th Division, Kumamoto Garrison.
6th Division was assigned to 17th Army as part of the defense of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. It remained there during the Bougainville campaign which lasted until the end of the war. The Bougainville garrisons took heavy losses from combat, disease, and malnutrition, and roughly half survived to surrender after the capitulation of Japan in August 1945.
If your father fought at Bougainville, he would've been a Marine in the 3rd Marine Division. They left the island around 1944 when the campaign was handed off to ANZAC forces.
