Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Saipan 1944 - Piercing Japan's Pacific Defences" video.

  1. The Japanese had used small scale banzai charges as far back as the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and during the Sino-Japanese war in 1930's, but most of those were against troops armed with slow firing bolt action rifles and only a few machine guns. The first massed banzai charge against well armed modern forces was on Attu in the Aleutians in 1943. After all night repetitive charges by Japanese soldiers mostly using bayonets and swords, 2,600 of them were wiped out by massed machine gun and artillery fire, with only 29 soldiers too badly wounded to commit suicide captured. The US lost 549 killed and wounded, but the ratio demonstrated the futility of such tactics. Still, this last stand was in line with the Japanese bushido code of warfare, and the defense of Attu was romanticized in Japan as each soldier assuming the role of a samurai, something previously limited to officers and nobility. This set the stage for the tremendous waste of soldiers on Saipan. As the war grew ever closer to the home islands, banzai charges were discouraged, since it was possible to evacuate some surviving troops from doomed islands to others to fight again. There were still some smaller scale banzai charges, particularly on Okinawa, but the Japanese high command came to recognize that Americans weren't going to break and run under massed banzai charges. The bushido code really didn't work in modern warfare.
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