Hideki Tojo was Supreme Military Leader of Japan from 1936 until 1944 and Prime Minister of Japan from 1941 until 1944.
Minister of War in the second cabinet of Fumimaro Konoe, he was chosen as Prime Minister by the Emperor in October 1941.
He was a strong supporter of the Tripartite Pact between Japan, Germany and Italy.
He was Chief of Staff (1937–40) in Manchuria, and Minister of War (1940–41).
Tôjô built up a personal power base and used his position as head of the military police of Japan’s garrison force,
in Manchuria to rein in their influence before he became the Kwantung Army’s chief of staff in 1937.
He played a key role in opening hostilities against China in July.
As Prime Minister, Tojo approved the attack on Pearl Harbor and was responsible for all aspects of the war effort.
Though Hawaii was not yet a US state, it was in US Territory , and held high value American assets.
The Japanese attack had several major aims:
- First, it intended to destroy important American fleet units, thereby preventing the Pacific Fleet from interfering with Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and to enable Japan to conquer Southeast Asia without interference.
- Second, it was hoped to buy time for Japan to consolidate its position and increase its naval strength before shipbuilding authorized by the 1940 Vinson-Walsh Act erased any chance of victory.
- Third, to deliver a blow to America’s ability to mobilize its forces in the Pacific, battleships were chosen as the main targets, since they were the prestige ships of any navy at the time.
- Finally, it was hoped that the attack would undermine American morale such that the U.S. government would drop its demands contrary to Japanese interests, and would seek a compromise peace with Japan.
Striking the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor carried two distinct disadvantages:
- The targeted ships would be in very shallow water, so it would be relatively easy to salvage and possibly repair them; and most of the crews would survive the attack, since many would be on shore leave or would be rescued from the harbor.
- A further important disadvantage—this of timing, and known to the Japanese—was the absence from Pearl Harbor of all three of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga).
- IJN top command was attached to Admiral Mahan‘s “decisive battle” doctrine, especially that of destroying the maximum number of battleships.
Despite these concerns, Yamamoto decided to press ahead.
- Navy members put leis on the graves of their fallen comrades on the beach in Hawaii
Japanese confidence in their ability to achieve a short, victorious war also meant other targets in the harbor,
especially the navy yard, oil tank farms, and submarine base, were ignored, since—by their thinking—
the war would be over before the influence of these facilities would be felt.
The Battle of Midway was a decisive naval battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II,
which occurred in June 1942, only six months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea.
The United States Navy under Admirals Chester Nimitz, Frank Jack Fletcher,
and Raymond A. Spruance defeated an attacking fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy ,
under Admirals Isoroku Yamamoto, Chūichi Nagumo, and Nobutake Kondō near Midway Atoll,
inflicting devastating damage on the Japanese fleet that proved irreparable.
Military historian John Keegan called it “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare”.
The Japanese operation, like the earlier attack on Pearl Harbor, sought to eliminate the United States
as a strategic power in the Pacific, thereby giving Japan a free hand in establishing its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The Japanese hoped another demoralizing defeat would force the U.S. to capitulate in the Pacific War and thus ensure Japanese dominance in the Pacific.
Luring the American aircraft carriers into a trap and occupying Midway
was part of an overall “barrier” strategy to extend Japan’s defensive perimeter,
in response to the his concern was intensified by the Doolittle Raid
or the Tokyo Raid, which was the first air raid to strike Mainland Japan
and launched from U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Hornet.
This operation was also considered preparation for further attacks against Fiji, Samoa, and Hawaii itself.
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Japan lost more than 3000 men in the battle compared to America’s 300 The Japanese losses in the Battle of Midway included 4 aircraft carriers, 1 heavy cruiser and 248 aircraft. 3,057 Japanese were killed in the battle while 37 were captured. 307 Americans were killed in the battle while 3 were captured and put to death. The purpose of Japan’s attack was thus completely defeated and it also had to suffer heavy losses. The battle was a major victory for the Allied forces.
The plan was handicapped by faulty Japanese assumptions of the American reaction and poor initial dispositions.
Most significantly, American cryptographers were able to determine the date
and location of the planned attack, enabling the forewarned U.S. Navy to prepare its own ambush.
Four Japanese and three American aircraft carriers participated in the battle.
All four of Japan’s large fleet carriers—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū and Hiryū,
part of the six-carrier force that had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier—
and a heavy cruiser were sunk, while the U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown and a destroyer.
- PHOTO: The deck of the U.S.S. Yorktown aircraft carrier listing badly after she had been hit
Another attack on Pearl Harbor was considered too perilous by Yamamoto,
due to the increased strength of land-based air power of U.S. on the Hawaiian Islands.
Midway Atoll or Midway Island is one of United States Minor Outlying Islands.
It was chosen as the point of attack as it fell outside the effective range of nearly
all American aircraft stationed on the main Hawaiian Islands..
Also, Yamamoto knew that Midway was important to America as it was a vital outpost of Pearl Harbor.
America would thus be compelled to defend it giving Japan an opportunity to crush their fleet when it would be drawn out.
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
in August 1945 forced the Japanese government into unconditional surrender and the country,
which was in a state of collapse, was occupied by Allied forces under an eleven-nation commission
headed by the United States, the Soviet Union, China and Britain.
In practice, however, Japan was ruled by the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur who,
so far as he took orders at all, took them from Washington.
His authoritarian style would cause far more resentment in Washington than it did in Japan.
The main purposes of the occupation, achieved in remarkably short order:
- Disarming of the Japanese armed forces, the introduction of democratic institutions and the repair of the devastated Japanese economy.
- Meanwhile, there was the question of the prosecution of Japanese war criminals, headed by Tojo Hideki,nicknamed ‘Razor’, a high-ranking army officer from a military family. He had been minister for war from 1940 to 1941 and then prime minister until 1944.
- Regarded as a personification of ruthless Japanese militarism, he was held responsible for the murder of millions of civilians in China and the Far East and of thousands of Allied prisoners of war.
When his arrest was ordered in September, Tojo tried to commit suicide.
According to one story, he got a doctor to put a charcoal mark on his chest to indicate the right place to shoot himself in the heart and fired a shot into his body, but somehow the bullet missed his heart and ended up in his stomach.
According to another, he fired four shots at himself without success.
Lying bleeding profusely when the military police and accompanying journalists burst in, he was heard to murmur a polite apology for taking so long to die.
The press photographers put the gun back in his hand and told him to hold on to it before snapping their pictures of him.
He was taken to hospital and patched up, before being moved to the Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.
He was bitterly condemned by some Japanese for failing to kill himself as honor demanded.
The trial of twenty-five ‘Class A’ war criminals by an international tribunal,
with judges from eleven countries began in Tokyo in May 1946.
The chief prosecutor for the US, Joseph Keenan, issued a statement:
‘treaty-breakers should be stripped of the glamor of national heroes and exposed as what they really are – plain, ordinary murderers’.
Hideki Tojo was the Prime Minister of Japan during World War II.
After Japan surrendered, the Allies tried him for war crimes.
During his trial in 1946, he requested a set of dentures so that he could speak clearly.
E.J. Mallory, an American dentist, was responsible for providing dental care to the accused war criminals awaiting trial at the Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.
- Dr. George Foster (left) examines Tojo’s teeth. Photo via the Chico News
Remembering that it was Tojo who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,
Mallory decided mock Tojo in his own way.
He wrote “Remember Pearl Harbor” in Morse code on the false teeth that he made for Tojo.
It was, alas, too hard to keep secret. Mallory told a colleague, who told other people,
and soon word reached the American news media. Mallory and another dentist knew they could get in trouble for the engraving.
So they drove to the prison in the middle of the night, woke up Tojo, took his teeth, and ground the marks out.
You can read more about Mallory’s teeth for Tojo in a 1995 article from the Associated Press.
In November 1948, all the accused were found guilty.
There were misgivings at the time about whether all the right people had been tried.
Some thought that Emperor Hirohito should have been in the dock
, but MacArthur considered it essential to protect him, so that the changes the Americans were introducing, in Japan would enjoy the imperial blessing.
With hindsight he was surely right, but the decision was distinctly controversial.
There were other notorious figures who were not prosecuted.
One of them was Ishii Shiro, who had been head of Japanese bacteriological and chemical warfare research.
His notorious Unit 731 in Manchuria had carried out vicious experiments on captive:
Mongolians, Koreans, Russians and Americans, prisoners of war, civilians, and Japanese criminals.
The experiments included injecting American prisoners with bubonic plague.
The Americans have since been accused of protecting Shiro and his subordinates in return for getting the results of the experiments.
On the whole, MacArthur and the Americans were agreeably surprised by Japanese acceptance of the trials.
Indeed, there were some who were horrified by the atrocities the trials revealed.
In December 1947 the monthly magazine Van caustically commented:
‘When those war advocates now called “war criminals” first appeared on the stage, we welcomed them with loud applause.
When they fell, we followed along and spat on them. And now we have virtually forgotten about them.’
In the end, Tojo was found guilty on various counts of waging wars of aggression,
in violation of international law and of ordering inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and others.
He and six other defendants were sentenced to death and the rest to prison sentences.
Many others were tried in other proceedings and either executed or imprisoned.
MacArthur declined to commute the death sentences, a decision he found very difficult to make,
and Tojo and the six others were hanged in the Sugamo Prison.
On the scaffold they wore American army work clothes with no insignia of any sort.
It was a few days before Tojo’s sixty-fourth birthday.
His remains were buried in the Yasukuni Shrine with those of more than two million Japanese war dead,
including more than 1,000 convicted war criminals.
Visits to the shrine by Japanese Prime Ministers and leading politicians still cause controversy.
The Sugamo Prison was demolished in the 1970s and all that is left of it is a stone inscribed in Japanese with the words, ‘Pray for eternal peace’.
