Renya Mutaguchi

Renya Mutaguchi was an officer whose name is linked with both ends of Japan’s war in Asia. In July 1937, as a regimental commander near Beijing, he authorised opening fire at the Marco Polo Bridge, which started the war with China. In 1942 his 18th Division took part in the capture of Singapore and Burma. In 1944, as commander of the 15th Army, he pushed through and led Operation U-Go – the offensive against Imphal and Kohima in north-eastern India – which ended in the greatest defeat the Japanese army had yet suffered on land. Tens of thousands of his soldiers died of hunger and disease in the mountains on the border between Burma and India. After the war he spent years apologising to the families of the fallen, and towards the end of his life he tried to prove that his plan had been sound.

Staff officer (1888–1936)

He was born on 7 October 1888 in Saga on Kyushu, into the Fukuchi family, descended from samurai of the old Saga domain. As a child he was adopted by the related Mutaguchi family and took its name. He passed through the military cadet schools, graduated from the Military Academy in 1910 (22nd class) and from the Army War College in 1917 – with an average result, 25th out of 57 graduates. He spent many years on the General Staff and in the War Ministry as a typical desk officer, first in the maritime transport section. During the Siberian intervention in 1920 he prepared, as a staff officer, the expedition to Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, where partisans had massacred the Japanese garrison and some of the inhabitants; the force arrived only after the massacre. In 1929 he was in France.

At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s he became involved in the army’s factional disputes. He belonged to the circle of the Sakurakai, a society of younger officers that plotted coups in 1931, and then to the Kōdō-ha, the “Imperial Way” faction. From December 1933 he headed the General Staff department responsible for the postings of staff officers. After the 26 February 1936 mutiny, in which he took no part, he was sent to China in the purge of the Kōdō-ha ranks: in March 1936 he took command of the infantry of the Japanese garrison in Beijing, soon reorganised as the 1st Infantry Regiment of the China Garrison Army.

The Marco Polo Bridge (1937)

On the night of 7–8 July 1937 a company of the 3rd Battalion of his regiment was exercising near Wanping and the Lugou Bridge, known to Europeans as the Marco Polo Bridge. After shots out of the darkness and the disappearance of one soldier, the battalion commander, Major Kiyonao Ichiki, telephoned Mutaguchi, who, in the absence of the brigade commander, Major General Masakazu Kawabe, was responsible for Japanese troops in the Beijing area. Mutaguchi ordered the hill opposite Wanping to be occupied and, towards dawn, when more shots were fired, authorised opening fire. When fighting flared up again on 10 July, he once more ordered an attack on the Chinese, even though Kawabe wanted to avoid widening the conflict; his superior accepted the decision after the event. Within a few weeks the Marco Polo Bridge Incident had turned into open war, and at the end of July the Japanese occupied Beijing.

The Japanese press made Mutaguchi a hero, “the brave commander of the Lugou Bridge”. He himself was convinced that he had fired the first shot of the war and often said so – also as a justification for his later ambitions: whoever had started it ought to be the one to settle it. In 1938 he was promoted to major general and was chief of staff of the 4th Army in Manchuria, and from December 1939 commandant of the army’s preparatory officers’ school in Tokyo. In August 1940 he became a lieutenant general.

Malaya and Singapore (1941–1942)

In April 1941 he took over the 18th Division, one of the army’s best formations, stationed in southern China. In December it formed part of the 25th Army of Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, which attacked Malaya. A detachment of the division under Major General Hiroshi Takumi landed at Kota Bharu on 8 December, opening the Malayan campaign; the main body of the division reached the front only at the end of January 1942. On the night of 8–9 February the division crossed the Johor Strait onto Singapore Island. Mutaguchi commanded from the front line, was wounded in the arm and stayed at his post. His soldiers fought for the Bukit Timah and Pasir Panjang heights. According to the accepted findings, it was soldiers of the 18th Division who on 14 February burst into the British Alexandra military hospital and massacred staff and patients. After the surrender of Singapore the division also took part in executions of Chinese inhabitants of Johor in the so-called Sook Ching. Mutaguchi was never brought to court for any of these crimes. The press in Japan now called him “the invincible general”, although his division had suffered the heaviest losses in the whole 25th Army.

In April 1942 the 18th Division arrived in Burma via Rangoon and, in a rapid march north, took part in the capture of Mandalay in the final phase of the Burma campaign. In the autumn of 1942, when Tokyo was considering an expedition into Assam, Mutaguchi, together with the 15th Army commander Shōjirō Iida, opposed it, pointing to the lack of roads and supplies. He later regretted this. In the spring of 1943 his division pursued the columns of the first Chindit expedition; the fact that the British had crossed mountains and jungle considered impassable convinced him that the Japanese army could do the same.

Commander of the 15th Army and the U-Go plan (1943–1944)

On 18 March 1943 Mutaguchi took over the 15th Army, subordinate to the new Burma Area Army of Lieutenant General Masakazu Kawabe – the same man who had been his superior at the Marco Polo Bridge. From the very first days he pressed for an offensive across the Chindwin against Imphal and, in the longer term, against Assam and the Brahmaputra valley. The army’s chief of staff, Major General Nobuyoshi Obata, who warned that the troops could not be supplied, was removed in May 1943. The staffs in Rangoon, Singapore and Tokyo had doubts, but pressure from above worked in Mutaguchi’s favour: Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō needed a success, and Subhas Chandra Bose gave assurances that an entry into India would spark an uprising. Bose, to whom Japan had handed over the Andaman Islands in December 1943, insisted on the Indian National Army taking part in the offensive. The Imperial General Headquarters order approving the operation was issued on 7 January 1944. His superiors saw it as a limited “defence by attack”; Mutaguchi talked to war correspondents of a march on Delhi.

The plan rested on a gamble. Mutaguchi expected to take Imphal in three weeks and issued food for that long, counting thereafter on captured British stocks. He meant to make up for the lack of transport with the so-called Operation Genghis Khan – herds of cattle that were to carry loads and then be slaughtered; most of the animals died in the mountains. He underestimated an enemy he knew from the British defeats of 1941–1942 and did not take into account that the British had learnt to supply encircled units from the air. The commanders of his three divisions – Kōtoku Satō, Masafumi Yamauchi and Genzō Yanagida – had serious reservations about the plan.

Imphal and Kohima (1944)

Operation U-Go began on the night of 7–8 March 1944 with an advance by the 33rd Division, and on 15 March the main forces crossed the Chindwin. Mutaguchi brushed aside warnings that the Chindits landed behind his lines in Operation Thursday threatened his supply routes, and until the end of April he directed the battle from his headquarters at Maymyo, several hundred kilometres from the front. The first weeks brought success: the Japanese divisions entered Manipur and cut off Imphal, and at the beginning of April the 31st Division took part of Kohima. Mutaguchi then ordered Satō to push on to the weakly defended base at Dimapur, but Kawabe countermanded the order as going beyond the operation’s objective. The British, supplied from the air, held the Kohima ridge and the Imphal plain, and from May the Japanese divisions, without food or ammunition, began to starve in the monsoon rains.

Mutaguchi’s responsibility for what followed is beyond dispute. Despite the hopeless situation he kept ordering fresh attacks, regardless of the state of his troops. In May he relieved Yanagida, in June the sick Yamauchi. At the end of May Satō withdrew the 31st Division from Kohima on his own authority, accusing army headquarters of leaving the soldiers without supplies, and in July he was removed; the case of a divisional commander who had refused to obey orders was hushed up without a court martial – according to some accounts by declaring him mentally unfit, according to others after an examination that did not confirm this. Mutaguchi called off the operation only on 3 July. The retreat through the mountains turned into a catastrophe – the soldiers called the road to the Chindwin “the road of white bones”. According to the most commonly cited estimates, the 15th Army lost more than 50,000 men, including about 30,000 killed or dead, mostly of hunger and disease. On 30 August 1944 Mutaguchi and Kawabe were relieved of their commands, and in December Mutaguchi was placed on the retired list.

After the war (1945–1966)

In January 1945 the army recalled him and again put him in charge of the preparatory officers’ school – a decision that astonished some of the officers who had fought in Burma. After Japan’s surrender, in December 1945, he was arrested by the occupation authorities and held in Sugamo prison. In 1946 he was taken to Singapore as a suspect in British investigations into war crimes in Malaya and was imprisoned in Changi. According to Japanese studies no charges were brought against him – the investigation into the Alexandra Hospital stalled after the death of the British officer conducting it – and in March 1948 he returned to Japan; some English-language sources state that he was convicted, but this is not borne out by detailed accounts.

In the following years he lived in seclusion in Chōfu near Tokyo. He avoided talking about Burma, attended ceremonies honouring the fallen at Yasukuni, and – according to accounts – bowed to the ground and apologised to relatives of dead soldiers who came to see him. The turning point came in 1962, when a British officer, Arthur Barker, formerly on the staff of IV Corps, wrote to him claiming that had the 31st Division marched on Dimapur in April 1944, the British would have been in serious trouble. Mutaguchi took this as proof that his plan had been good and that the defeat had been caused by Kawabe, who stopped the march on Dimapur, and by Satō, who withdrew. He propounded this thesis in interviews, at meetings with veterans and in a pamphlet based on testimony he recorded in 1965 for the National Diet Library, which he handed out to journalists and former officers. Most historians and veterans saw it as an attempt at self-justification: even if Dimapur was weakly defended, the expedition across the mountains without supplies and the contempt for the enemy were Mutaguchi’s own decisions. He died on 2 August 1966 in Chōfu.

Significance

Mutaguchi belonged to a generation of officers who dragged Japan into one war after another through decisions taken on the spot and then accepted by their superiors as faits accomplis. At the Marco Polo Bridge his insubordination helped turn a local exchange of fire into a war with China; in Burma his obstinacy, backed by Tōjō and tolerated by Kawabe, led to the destruction of the 15th Army. In Japan his name became a byword for a commander who sends soldiers to their deaths against all reason and will not admit a mistake. The Battle of Imphal and Kohima was the turning point in Burma for the British: the destruction of the 15th Army opened the way for General William Slim’s Fourteenth Army to retake the country in 1945.