Kōtoku Satō

Kōtoku Satō (1893–1959) was a Japanese general who went down in history for a single act: in May 1944, as commander of the 31st Division fighting at Kohima in British India, he withdrew his starving soldiers against the explicit orders of his superior, Lieutenant General Renya Mutaguchi. In an army in which retreat without orders was considered a disgrace and fighting to the last man a duty, this was unprecedented. His decision sealed the defeat of the Japanese offensive against India, and Satō himself remained a contested figure for the rest of his life: to some, a commander who saved thousands of men from a pointless death; to others, an officer who abandoned the battlefield and the neighbouring units. Sources on his life outside 1944 are scant.

Youth and staff service (1893–1937)

Satō was born on 5 March 1893 in Yamagata Prefecture in northern Honshu, in the Shōnai region. He attended middle school in Tsuruoka and then the military preparatory school in Sendai. In 1913 he graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy (25th class) and was commissioned as a second lieutenant of infantry, and in 1921 he graduated from the Army War College. In the 1920s he alternated between staff posts and line infantry regiments.

From 1930 he worked in the military history department of the General Staff. According to Japanese studies, he came into contact there with officers of the Tōsei-ha faction, among them Kuniaki Koiso and Hideki Tōjō, and took part in drafting the charter of the Sakurakai – a secret society of radical younger officers founded by Lieutenant Colonel Kingorō Hashimoto. This led to a fierce quarrel with Mutaguchi, then a staff officer linked to the rival Kōdō-ha faction. Satō was convinced that Mutaguchi later blocked his promotion, and suspected that on the staff of the 6th Division at Kumamoto, where he was posted in 1934, he was being watched by Kōdō-ha officers on Mutaguchi’s instructions. This personal enmity, dating back to the early 1930s, still weighed on relations between the two generals in 1944.

In November 1931 he took command of a battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment; in December 1932 he became a lieutenant colonel, and from 1934 he served on the staff of the 6th Division. The factional feud in which he was entangled ended only after the failed putsch by young Kōdō-ha officers in the 26 February Incident of 1936, after which that faction lost its influence. In August 1937 Satō was promoted to colonel.

Lake Khasan (1938)

In October 1937 Satō took command of the 75th Infantry Regiment of the 19th Division, stationed in Korea on the border with Manchukuo and the USSR. In the summer of 1938 the regiment found itself at the centre of the fighting at Lake Khasan, a dispute over two hills above the lake that Soviet border guards had occupied. The command in Tokyo and the Korea Army wanted to avoid escalation, but the divisional commander, Lieutenant General Kamezō Suetaka, and Satō believed that a Soviet attack had to be forestalled. On the night of 30–31 July 1938 Satō’s regiment took the summit of Zaozyornaya (Chōkohō in Japanese) in a night assault. The Japanese army regarded the attack as a model night action.

In August the Red Army counter-attacked with superior forces of infantry, tanks and aircraft. Satō’s regiment, which according to Japanese sources lost more than half its strength, held the hill until the ceasefire of 11 August. Satō later boasted that, being out of favour with Tōjō, he had been given the worst sector of the front – and that he would gladly take the worst sector in the next battle too. This reputation as a tough, unyielding line commander stayed with him in the years that followed.

General in Manchuria and China (1938–1943)

In December 1938 Satō became a sector commander in the 8th Border Guard Unit in Manchukuo, and in August 1939 – during the fighting at Khalkhin Gol – he was promoted to major general and took command of the infantry of the 23rd Division at Hailar. That division had just been shattered in the fighting with the Red Army at Khalkhin Gol and had to be rebuilt. In 1941 he moved to the 54th Division, and in October 1941 he took over the 67th Independent Infantry Brigade. In December 1942 he became a lieutenant general.

In March 1943 Satō took command of the newly formed 31st Division (codename Retsu), made up of the 58th, 124th and 138th Infantry Regiments and the 31st Mountain Artillery Regiment. The division was first employed on road-building in Thailand, and in the autumn of 1943 it moved to Burma, to the 15th Army. Since March 1943 that army had been commanded by Mutaguchi – Satō’s old adversary from the days of the factional disputes.

Kohima (March – May 1944)

In Operation U-Go, the 15th Army’s offensive against Imphal in Manipur, the 31st Division was given the most far-reaching task: it was to cross the wild country of the Naga Hills, take Kohima and cut the road from Dimapur to Imphal. Satō had no part in the planning and, like many officers, doubted that the operation could succeed without a supply base behind it. Before setting out he extracted from the army staff a promise of supplies – according to Japanese accounts, about 10 tons a day – and told his officers that they might all starve to death. At the same time, as Japanese historians stress, he publicly professed enthusiasm and announced that his division would go all the way to Dimapur.

On 15 March 1944 the division crossed the Chindwin and within three weeks reached Kohima, much faster than the British had expected. On 6 April the siege of Kohima began. Mutaguchi, seeing an opportunity, ordered Satō to push on to the weakly defended Dimapur, a large supply base on the Assam railway, but the commander of the Burma Area Army, Lieutenant General Masakazu Kawabe, countermanded the order. Satō concentrated on taking the Kohima ridge. Lieutenant General William Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, later called him the least enterprising of all the Japanese generals he had faced: in his view, instead of throwing attack after attack at Kohima, Satō could have left a small force there and struck at the railway with his whole division. Some historians consider this judgement unfair, since Satō was carrying out the task assigned to him in the operational plan.

The Kohima garrison held out, and the relief force from Dimapur broke through to it on 18 April. Over the following weeks Satō held the ridge and the Naga village against attacks by the British 2nd Division and the Indian 7th Division. The promised supplies did not arrive, the monsoon turned the tracks into mud, and the soldiers began to starve. In April Satō also refused to give up part of his force for the attack on Imphal, as Mutaguchi demanded. His signals to army headquarters grew ever more violent; according to Japanese studies he wrote of “three tiers of stupidity” above his division – the staffs of the 15th Army, the Burma Area Army and the Southern Army Group.

Retreat against orders (May – July 1944)

On 25 May Satō informed 15th Army headquarters that unless he received supplies he would withdraw on 1 June. Mutaguchi ordered him to hold his positions. On 31 May Satō began the retreat from Kohima: his units abandoned the Naga village and the positions north of the road, and the main body set off towards Ukhrul, where supplies were supposed to be waiting. In his last signal before leaving he wrote that the division had fought for sixty days “to the limit of human endurance”. On the road to Imphal he left the exhausted detachment of Major General Shigesaburō Miyazaki as a rearguard, which delayed the pursuit for nearly three weeks. On 2 June Mutaguchi approved the retreat after the event, demanding that the division resume the attack on Imphal once it had replenished its supplies; Satō did not carry out these orders. His critics were still returning after the war to the fact that his retreat had exposed neighbouring units of the 15th Division.

Ukhrul turned out to be empty, and the meagre supplies the division received at Humine at the end of June lasted only a few days. Satō, his soldiers recalled, marched with the column, stopped beside the exhausted and had the dead buried. At the beginning of July he was relieved of command of the division and placed at the disposal of the Burma Area Army. According to Japanese estimates, about 5,500 of the division’s soldiers came back from the retreat, which for the division lasted about a hundred days and stretched over some 600 kilometres – more than from any other division of the 15th Army.

The question of “insanity” (1944–1945)

According to English-language studies, Mutaguchi suggested to Satō that he should commit suicide; Satō refused and demanded a court martial, at which he intended to expose the errors of the 15th Army command. Mutaguchi’s staff accused him of failing to carry out orders, and Mutaguchi himself demanded severe punishment. The Burma Area Army command, however, did not want a trial. Bringing to court a divisional commander appointed by the emperor would have been an unprecedented scandal and would have exposed the responsibility of the higher staffs for the defeat. When Satō reported in Rangoon in the second half of July, Kawabe listened to his accusations against Mutaguchi and sent him for a psychiatric examination.

This episode is described in different ways. According to English-language studies, the doctors found that Satō had suffered a nervous breakdown and was unfit to stand trial. Japanese sources, based on the later account of one of the two army psychiatrists who examined him, maintain that the examination found no mental illness, and that after questioning by military lawyers the case was dropped without a trial. What is certain is that no court martial took place, and that in the public mind, after the war too, Satō remained “the general who went mad” – this was even the subtitle of two Japanese books about him, which the psychiatrist who had examined him publicly disputed.

In November 1944 Satō was transferred to the reserve and immediately recalled to service – as military adviser to the 16th Army in occupied Java, where the Japanese were training local volunteer units. In May 1945 he returned to Japan and was posted to the staff of the North-Eastern Military District in Sendai, which was preparing the defence of northern Honshu against the expected invasion. His service ended after the surrender, in October 1945.

After the war (1945–1959)

After the war Satō returned to his home region and visited the families of fallen soldiers; later he lived in Tokyo, in a rented house in the Setagaya district. In 1947 he was caught by the purge that barred former officers from public life. He lived modestly, in straitened circumstances. In the press and among some former military men he was portrayed as a coward and even as the man to blame for the defeat in Burma. Satō maintained that his decision had been necessary to save the soldiers from starving to death and that the charge of insanity was unjust, and to the end he sharply criticised Mutaguchi and the 15th Army staff. He supported the surviving soldiers of his division; on the initiative of veterans, many of whom came from Shikoku, memorials were erected to those who had fallen in the Imphal operation.

Kōtoku Satō died of cirrhosis of the liver on 26 February 1959. He was buried at the Shōkei-ji temple in the small town of Shōnai in Yamagata Prefecture. According to Japanese accounts, Mutaguchi came to his funeral and apologised to the family; a few years later, however, after reading British assessments that the Japanese could have taken Dimapur, he began publicly to blame the dead man for the defeat, claiming that Satō had thrown away the chance by halting at Kohima.

Significance

In 1944 Satō was an exception in an army whose doctrine made no provision for retreat and whose commanders sent starving soldiers into attack after attack rather than admit defeat. His decision at the end of May settled the outcome of the battle of Kohima and Imphal: it opened the way for the British to the encircled Imphal and stripped Mutaguchi of his last illusions, and Operation U-Go was called off at the beginning of July. The offensive that was meant to halt the Allies on the Indian frontier ended in the heaviest defeat the Japanese army had yet suffered on land and opened the way to the British reconquest of Burma in 1945.

Judgements of Satō remain divided. British commanders regarded him as an unimaginative general who had thrown away the chance of taking Dimapur. Some Japanese veterans reproached him for leaving Miyazaki’s rearguard and the neighbouring regiments without support. For the thousands of soldiers who survived thanks to his decision, he was a commander who preferred disgrace and a court martial to the pointless death of his men. Over time he became one of the symbols of the battle in both Japanese and British memory, and his grave is visited by participants in the Japanese–British reconciliation meetings of Burma campaign veterans.