Brief History of the IJA forces

The Imperial Japanese Army was at war continuously for over 14 years. There war began in September 1931 and ended with the Allied victory in September 1945.

The War in China began with the Mukden incident, a plot by Japanese officers to provoke the Chinese Manchurian garrison is launched when the Japanese dynamite a stertch of the South Manchurian railway. Japanese forces quickly occupy Manchuria including previously Russian dominated areas.

Over the next 10 years Japan and China are at war, with the Japanese slowly invading south into China and out into Mongolia.

December 7th, 1941. The Japanese launch a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet as it lies at anchor at Pearl Harbour. The American fleet is taken completely by surprise by the first wave of Japanese dive and torpedoe bombers. Less than an hour later a second wave hit the fleet. nine ships were sunk and 21 severely damaged.

On the same day the US Far East Air Force on the island of Luzon is largely destroyed by Japanese air attacks

On the 8th of December the Japanese start launching air attacks on Midway, Wake, Guam, Hong Kong and the Phillipines. They also make there first advances into Malaya. Over the next 2 days Tarawa and Makin islands are invaded and the British Battleships HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse are sunk off the coast of Malaya by Japanese aircraft.

The next few months will see the Japanese making advances on all there fronts, February will see Britain suffer its greatest ever defeat with the fall of Singapore, March will see the Japanese taking control of the Dutch East Indies and May will see the Americans defeated in the Phillipines.

After capturing Singapore the Japanese would take the war into Burma, pushing the Allied forces all the way back to India just before the Monsoons broke in May 1942. Even though the Japanese didn't renew there offensive after the monsoons the Allies were'nt able to immedietly counter attack, the resources to mount such a campaign were not ready.

From December 1943 the balance of power in the far East war shifted decisively, the Allies would spend the rest of the war steadily pushing the Japanese back through the whole of Burma.

In the pacific the Allies launched there first offensive at Guadalcanal exactly 8 months after Pearl Harbour on August 7th 1942. By February 1943 the battle was all but over on Guadalcanal. The Japanese had managed to evacuate about 13000 of its troops, 14 800 had been killed or listed as missing, 9000 had died of disease and 1000 had been taken prisoner.

This battle set the scene for the rest of the war in the Pacific with the Americans pushing the Japanese back from Island to Island, through the phillipines and ever closer to the home Islands.

As the Allied forces got closer to Japan, the resistence they met grew stronger as the Japanese got more and more determined to stop them, coming up with new and desperate tactics to do so.

By the time the Americans reached Iwo Jima and Okinawa the Japanese had committed to using any method to slow the advance. The most famous being the Kamikaze suicide planes. But the Japanese had developed the Kamikaze tactics to also involve submarines, attack boats and frogmen.

The final action of the war was the dropping of 2 atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These 2 bombs were the turning point for the Japanese. The Emperor himself read out the Japanese surrender statement bringing an end to the war in the Far East, the Pacific and China.