Hi all. I've been playing a lot of World at War and watching The Pacific for no reason in particular and in both of them Japanese soldiers are shown to be loyal to the emperor to their dying breaths, killing even those they tried to help them after they were wounded in battle.
A lot of American troops seem to be just average people as you'd expect. A lot of them haven't seen combat and will throw up before, during or after a battle, but Japanese soldiers seem unfazed by the gore and ruin that surrounds them and have no problem fighting even after losing limbs by blowing themselves up with grenades. But were they all like that? I mean I figure some of them had to be just average kids, especially considering how Japan had like literally no army towards the very end of the war. I just find it hard to believe they'd all be that undyingly loyal.
First post on this sub feel free to take down if it violates any rules.
There are so many instances of Japanese "fanaticism" that I'm not sure where to start. The examples below are all pulled from The Fleet at Flood Tide although any book about the battle of Saipan will have similar stories.
The invasion of the Marianas provides a good example of how bad it got. The Japanese garrison on Saipan was about 32,000 troops. At the end of the battle approximately 900 prisoners were taken. The rest all fought to the death or committed suicide.
Many soldiers were willing to take Japanese civilians with them as well. There are a couple of cliffs on Saipan near Marpi Point that are now known as Suicide Cliff and Banzai Cliff. At the end of the battle thousands of civilians killed themselves by jumping off of these cliffs. In some cases it was voluntary, some of them were driven by fear (Japanese propaganda told them that Americans troops would commit horrific atrocities before killing them) and some were coerced/forced by the military. Some of the most awful stories from Suicide Cliff involve mothers either throwing their small children into the ocean or jumping off of the cliff with infants in their arms.
This is just one example, any book about the history of the Pacific war will have countless similar anecdotes. Your question about "were they all like that" is a bit tough to answer though because we can't know how many soldiers truly wanted to fight to the death and how many were threatened/coerced/peer pressured. There is a popular culture perception of Kamikaze pilots as fanatics who sought out death for the emperor, but there are some really sad stories of men who were coerced and pressured into flying Kamikaze missions. I doubt that anyone can give you an accurate statistic about how many Kamikazes truly wanted to kill themselves (it's not like they surveyed the pilots before they went off to die) but just be aware that many instances of "fanatical" behavior were not 100% voluntary.