Was japanese fanaticism in WW2 just a meme or was it grounded in reality?

>You had a basic rifle, a bayonet, maybe a few grenades, and that's about it
That's true for almost every soldier to fight in ww2 on any front.

Basic riflemen were the majority.

On top of that, the Japanese had machine guns of their own.

>Charging positions with huge numbers of dudes was about your only option.
So germans avoided this.... why, exactly?
Why not the Italians?

You have a rifle that will kill 1000 yards out and fucking hand grenades, charging into close combat with people who are larger than you and equipped with better weapons that were often meant SPECIFICALLY to kill people getting too close for comfort is patently fucking retarded.

>MUH SEMI-AUTOS
Marines started the wear going into battle with fucking springfields and were no better armed than the japanese.

They still fucking charged them.

Insofar as discussion of the IJA is concerned people here are underestimating how intangibles affect doctrine just as much as practical realities.

Seishin/elan was a legitimate concept in the IJA, and not just because they had to make do with shit tanks.

Meijified bushido played a huge part in the Army's mindset.

Alot of this was due to Sadao Araki and the Kodoha faction.

Yes, there is a Japanese guy who says that because Japanese were buddhist and therefore vegetarian, they weren't accostumed with blood, so when they fought the war and saw the carnage they became crazy and blood-frenzied.

>random bullshit

that's bullshit but i believe it

I never understood why Kamikaze attacks are still popular topic today. If you're doing a "once more unto the breech men" that's basically a kamikaze attack. Why did the Japanese version become so popular?

I heard some of their drafts were Koreans and some of them are war freak than the Japs

Koreans are batshit. Culturally insane. Look up korean warcrimes in Vietnam.

>SAME THING[Citation needed]

>If you're doing a "once more unto the breech men" that's basically a kamikaze attack.
No. No it is not.

This. Being a young soldier seduced by a cult of personality, under fear of divine judgement, under societal pressure, pushed by the notion of "honour" and fed propaganda constantly was what led the japanese troops to such acts.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Gabaldon#The_Pied_Piper_of_Saipan
Literally all you needed to do was talk to them.

Kamikaze attacks do make a sort of logic.
>German suicide bomber: best case scenario knock out a bridge
>Japanese suicide bomber: best case scenario knock out an aircraft carrier
More value for your high explosive.

>I heard some of their drafts were Koreans and some of them are war freak than the Japs

This is a common trait among all Asian militaries, the Vietnamese for example (both sides) were needlessly brutal by default.

japanese were insane from at least 1500-1945. I think the insanity got bred out of them in the forties and they just make anime girls now, but the NIPPONSTRONK meme goes back to at least mongolian expansion times when they were writing about how japan's divine winds fucked up the mongols an shiet.

Actually I remember reading something about how the USMC gave something like 2 or 3 BARs to every rifle squad, so there were some exceptions to that rule. Plus even without that the average US infantryman had a serious advantage over his adversaries in europe and the pacific because his basic rifle was semi-automatic and the side's weren't.

>japanese
>vegetarians
>have one of the highest consumption rates of fish on earth
they should've kept you back a few years in school

Yes.

The Japanese had a revival of warrior culture that was long dying. Rather than reserve it to a certain small, land holding class of people like before it was extended to everyone. Any man willing to join up in the expansion of his homeland, to defend it from filthy foreigners and invaders, and to revive the long dying spirit of the samurai could both learn and live Bushido.

The Russo-Japanese war really accelerated this growth of militant Bushido among the Japanese people. A European, Western giant could not defeat an Eastern nation like it had for centuries... that was big fucking news. It was also fantastic propaganda.

The amount of "banzai" charges we see in media is a little overdone, but the scale and ferocity of them are no meme. They would rush the fuck out of enemy positions. Sometimes with mild success... most of the time with utter death and failure. This was not the first time human wave tactics were used, like says. But also like says... it was foolish to keep trying it. Then again, look at Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. The Basij would receive a single order "Go." They kept charging until Saddam's forces ran out of bullets... and they did. There was a minimum age of 12 years old for these charges and many kids and teens could be found among the field of corpses these charges would produce.

Japan did the same near the end as desperation for numbers became a real issue. Nazi Germany did it too. The Confederate Army did it as well.

tl;dr it was very, very real with elements of meme in modern media

Their neighbors were sub-humans... fodder for execution, rape victims for "comfort houses", and slaves to be extorted into starvation

If you were old enough to be considered a man, you could join up in the glory of Bushido

None were safe, none were exempt

And they met for some ball on the weekends

You haven't read Ernst Juenger I assume.

>Actually I remember reading something about how the USMC gave something like 2 or 3 BARs to every rifle squad,
And in early engagements, you were seeing them use nothing but fucking spring fields, because that's what they had and marines were low priority for equipment.

>Plus even without that the average US infantryman had a serious advantage over his adversaries in europe and the pacific because his basic rifle was semi-automatic and the side's weren't.

Then why weren't German and Italian light infantry mounting mass charges, see as it would have logically been their "only option"?

Because it wasn't. Because the banzai charge was not rooted in logic or reality, but in an idiotic ideology, and trying to explain it as logical just outs the person doing it as fucking stupid.

Difference being one wanted to, the other was forced to

>There was a minimum age of 12 years old for these charges and many kids and teens could be found among the field of corpses
Have you ever read the handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood? She partly wrote it in response to the Iranian revolution and the fact that Iranian women were being forced into traditionally feminine roles. It was quite a hot topic among western liberals in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the corpses of boys as young as 12 were pilling up along the front lines in the Iran-Iraq war, and curiously none of the western liberals saw reason to write polemics about this.

and people wonder why I celebrated that narcissistic asshole Trump's victory.

Exaggerated. You can read accounts given by the college kids/grads who signed up to be holy wind pilots. They were generally uninterested, quite a few were anti-war, some felt mildly compelled to fight for their country. Some were lost with what to do with their lives after college. Others had no real job prospects and wanted to get out of their parents' house.

>(especially the English)

Ernst is the exception, not the rule. WW1 literature is overwhelmingly bleak & bitter and not just novels & poems either, but in the memoirs & diaries too.

There's not a strong comparison to be made between the fanaticism of the IJA and the attitudes of the Europeans in the trenches of WW1.

>genociding communists
>"crimes"

>Difference being one wanted to, the other was forced to
how fucking thick are you?

No I have not... those poor women. Being forced into the safety of homes while thousands of young lives were ended because Iran couldn't think of a better way to uproot Iraqi machine gun positions. Lives are cheaper than bullets and bombs I guess

>curiously none of the western liberals saw reason to write polemics about this.
They did, it was just the standard antiwar stuff that not many really care about. The same thing happened with Syria.

I'm sure they complained ineffectually, but my point was that none of them were inspired to write a major novel about it.

Also, I guaran-fucking-tee you that none of them said anything about the fact that young boys were being sent to the battlefield because of their gender, and that young girls got to escape the carnage simply because vagina - not to mention the adult women.

>She partly wrote it in response to the Iranian revolution and the fact that Iranian women were being forced into traditionally feminine roles. It was quite a hot topic among western liberals in the 1980s.

Except it was about the Christian Right.

>Was japanese fanaticism in WW2 just a meme or was it grounded in reality?

It was an excuse for the terrible performance of the US military after they got BTFO during the Philippines Campaign.

Losing to a endless horde of fanaticar bushido warriarus is easier than explaining why your garrison that outnumbers the enemy gets totally whupped while MacArthur scurries to the safety of 'straya

>these japs sure are retarded, arent they?

Ernst was merely the most literary figure of the disenfranchised veteran writers that saturated Weimar. It was them and freikorps authors that helped undermine the delusion of Germany's position

reality

they were nuts

Yes. And it was responsible for several decades of stupid racist ideas and military doctrine regarding wars fought against an Asiatic enemy, eventually evolving into the concept of 'body count' used in Korea and Vietnam.

...

Did anyone see Hacksaw Ridge? That part where they get counter attacked by a banzai charge was pretty fucking terrifying.

Kek. This is literally US Propaganda. Like, you are all proper legitimate morons. It's actually hilarious how much of modern thought about Japanese are still shaped by these lies created in 1945.

>youtube.com/watch?v=I-lQ3BrzQO4&t

Holy shit you cunts make me laugh, it's actually hilarious.

>sino-japanese wars
>not the end result of china dicking around and choosing west over east

You cunts really, really need to learn your history. America was aiming at Japan long before WWII. They had been trying to get there interests in the east for a very fucking long time. I mean when we have all this against Japan, but when you see their reasoning for war being to kick out the western influence in the east.

"Asia for Asians".

I mean there is a reason why everyone pretty much just looked on as China got it's shit kicked in by the Japanese.

I don't mean to troll but this is pretty accurate, especially the bit about britain's treachery.

it was about the christian right as well, but as you'd know if you'd studied it (or actually read it properly) it's also about the regression in women's right's after the Iranian revolution.

It's also about as subtle as a sledgehammer. The only reason it's taught in schools is because schools never miss an opportunity to cram feminist dogma down kids' throats.

you don't survive kamikaze attacks, it a terrible strategic decision, and a poor tactical one

you might survive risky "once more unto the breach, dear friends" attacks, it's a necessary strategic and tactical decision

can you help me locate some of these? sounds interesting.

WHEN I WAS

even though the largest banzai attack was during the battle of Attu which took place in 1943

This can't possibly be a real photograph can it?

Why does literally no one ever mention the Aleutian Islands Campaign?