Why were the Japanese soldiers in WW II so hesitant to surrender in battle?
07.06.2025 11:27
With the Old Breed : At Peleliu and Okinawa
Western Allied soldiers often viewed Japanese soldiers as subhuman and undeserving of mercy, similar to how Germans viewed Soviets and Slavs.
Moreover, the murderous treatment meted out to Japanese prisoners was not morally acceptable to all. Here's an example: Captain J.J. May was responsible for the loading of wounded men on air transports from the Wau airfield during the heavy fighting there in January 1943. He was approached one day to make room for six Japanese prisoners who would soon arrive, bound together, and who were to be taken to Port Moresby for questioning. The Japanese did not come at the expected time, but eventually:
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Many Australian soldiers who were interviewed after the war – such as former major general Paul Cullen – confirmed captured Japanese were sometimes illegally bayoneted or shot rather than imprisoned.
source: Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities
On July 24, he visited a battle site where Japanese corpses had been ransacked for gold teeth, others had been dumped in garbage pits, and a cave was filled with dead Japanese who had tried to surrender but been told to "get the hell back in and fight it out.
The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh
War Without Mercy by John Dower
Additionally, many Japanese soldiers frequently feigned surrender, only to detonate explosives or launch surprise attacks with hidden weapons when American soldiers approached, aiming to kill both themselves and their captors. This made taking Japanese prisoners very dangerous and led American soldiers to distrust surrendering Japanese soldiers.
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Since Allied soldiers often shot surrendering Japanese soldiers, either out of revenge or for their own safety, those who genuinely wanted to surrender and escape the hellish war would remove all their clothes, even stripping naked, to prove they didn't have any hidden weapons or grenades, as shown by the Japanese prisoners pictured below.
He reported the slaughter of all inmates of a Japanese hospital, and went on to mention that the Australians often threw Japanese out of airplanes on their way to prison compounds and then reported that they had committed hara-kiri.
Tsuneo Watanabe, a former IJA(Imperial Guard) soldier, describing Kamikaze pilots (渡邉恒雄)
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source: Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities
たいがい お母さんの名前
You often hear anecdotes and documented cases where U.S. soldiers shot captured SS soldiers in revenge after discovering they had shot U.S. POWs or liberated concentration camps. However, few are aware that similar acts of revenge frequently occurred on the Pacific front as well, as the examples below demonstrate.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
We should also remember that the living conditions and climate of the Pacific Islands were very harsh and inhospitable. Allied soldiers were often short on supplies and struggled to take care of themselves. In this situation, taking care of enemy POWs and safely escorting them to the rear, especially those they viewed as subhuman, was not a tempting idea to most Allied soldiers.
Other footage from Hell in the Pacific shows American soldiers using bayonets to hack at Japanese corpses while looting them. Former servicemen interviewed by researchers spoke of the widespread practice of looting gold teeth from the dead - and sometimes from the living.
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The killing of unarmed, sleeping, sick or wounded Japanese was common. Although official pressure was put on troops to take prisoners, the Australian front-line soldiers - like their American counterparts - had little desire to do so.
Yes, it's well known that the Japanese soldiers were determined to fight bitterly and avoid surrender. U.S. Marines Eugene Sledge and Romus Burgin, who saw action in the Pacific, admitted that they appeared eager to die for the emperor. However, the reasons for their refusal to surrender are more nuanced than just the Japanese concept of surrender being considered dishonorable.
Others spoke of units throwing away their bayonets to avoid being ordered by 'over-enthusiastic' officers to charge, and of machine-gunning villages full of civilians and clubbing wounded Japanese soldiers to death as they tried to surrender.
source: Australian War Memorial - AJRP Essays
I was honestly shocked to learn that there were many instances of captured Japanese soldiers being tortured or murdered. This contradicts the common belief that Japanese soldiers never surrendered and that the Allied forces always treated their prisoners properly according to the Geneva Conventions, despite the many atrocities committed by the Japanese that tested the Allies' restraint.
Without Mercy by John Dower
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In the diary of a seaman, published after the war, we find tucked away in an entry in July 1944 the casual mention of a Marine who had already collected seventeen gold teeth, the last from a Japanese soldier on Saipan who was wounded and still moving his hands.
Thus, Time, in a good example of Old Testament fervor, informed its readers on March 15, 1943, that “low-flying fighters turned lifeboats towed by motor barges, and packed with Jap survivors, into bloody sieves. Loosed on the Japs was the same ferocity which they had often displayed. This time few, if any, Japs in battle green reached shore.”
source: Australia has never been good at acknowledging its troops have been guilty of acts of inhumanity | Paul Daley
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They were shot.
Japanese soldiers who displayed cowardice were executed as examples, and those who surrendered were branded as 'unpatriotic citizens' (非国民, hikokumin), with their entire families also being shunned and shamed.
Without Mercy by John Dower
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There's another interesting point to consider. British historian Niall Ferguson mentioned that "a secret [U.S.] intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days leave would induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese." This might suggest that more Japanese soldiers surrendered than commonly believed, but American soldiers were less likely to accept their surrender, leading high command to put pressure on them to take prisoners.
Japan's future is bleak if it is forced to kill one of its best pilots. I am not going on this mission for the Emperor or for the Empire ... I am going because I was ordered to!
Taking everything mentioned into account, Japanese soldiers were put in these situations:
Brainwashing and Fear: Japanese soldiers were heavily brainwashed into believing that Allied soldiers were evil and would brutally kill captured Japanese soldiers. They were also made to believe that if Japan were to be captured, their sisters, mothers, and daughters would all be raped and killed. Therefore, Japanese soldiers were convinced that they must fight until the very end to prevent this. (The Japanese propaganda was similar to Goebbels' portrayal of the Red Army, depicting them as Asian hordes intent on raping and killing the German people. It used gory depictions and exaggerations to encourage German soldiers to fight to the death to defend their land.)
A Marine interviewed almost four decades after the event, for example, recalled the fate of a Japanese soldier on Guadalcanal who responded to an appeal to surrender and emerged from a pillbox with his hands over his head: ‘Now, I’m ashamed to say this, but one of our men shot him down. Not only was this a vicious thing to do but it was asinine. You can bet your life that none of the others are going to come out.
On July 13, Lindbergh wrote, "It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Japs with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone.
Of several thousand (Japanese) prisoners taken at a certain place, Lindbergh was informed, "only a hundred or two were turned in. They had an accident with the rest. It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when they hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine guns turned loose upon them. "The Japanese deserved such treatment", it was explained to Lindbergh, for they mutilated prisoners and shot airmen in their parachutes.
The Americans expected the diaries to be full of expressions of loyalty to the emperor and the empire or desires to die honorably on the battlefield, but what they found was quite the opposite. The Japanese soldiers wrote much more about very human concerns than about loyalty or fanaticism. They wrote about how much they missed home and family, how they longed for their mother's cooking instead of rotten rice and coconuts, how many of their comrades were suffering from terrible tropical diseases and hunger, and how they didn’t want to die young, with their whole lives ahead of them.
“But sir, they are wounded and want to surrender,” a colonel protested to [a major general] at the edge of the cleared perimeter after a massive and unsuccessful Japanese attack.
The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh
Take the 1943 diary entry of Eddie Stanton, an Australian posted to Goodenough Island off Papua New Guinea. “Japanese are still being shot all over the place,” he wrote. “The necessity for capturing them has ceased to worry anyone. From now on, Nippo survivors are just so much machine-gun practice. Too many of our soldiers are tied up guarding them.”
Shooting a surrendering enemy soldier was considered a war crime on the European battlefield, but in the Pacific theater, it was more often seen as 'better safe than sorry' than a war crime.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
source: Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities
“On one occasion, the leading platoon captured five or seven Japanese and moved on to the next battle. The next platoon came along and bayoneted these Japanese,” Cullen said in a 2001 documentary.
source: Anzacs behaving badly: Scott McIntyre and contested history
Judd described how he was ordered to clear some caves. Aware of the Japanese tactic of pretending to surrender before blowing themselves and their captors up with a hidden grenade, he and his team decided to be indiscriminate. 'We just blew it all up. We don't know if there were women and children or whatever, we just blew them up,' he said.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
War Without Mercy by John Dower
He summarized the conversation of an American general who told how an unsuspecting Japanese prisoner was given a cigarette and then seized from behind and had his throat "slit from ear to ear" as a demonstration of how to kill Japanese.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
War Without Mercy by John Dower also mentions an interesting point about why Japanese soldiers were so hesitant to surrender.
In this video, a WWII Marine named Walter Filipek spoke about a Japanese soldier who had willingly surrendered to his unit and was cooperative enough to let him search his body but was later killed because they couldn't take him with them.
The Anguish Of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II
Execution for Attempted Surrender: If caught attempting to surrender to the Allies, a soldier would be executed for cowardice and dishonor. To desert his post and surrender, he had to be extremely careful not to be caught, risking his own life. In many cases, even if a Japanese soldier wanted to surrender, it was incredibly difficult for him because he was often forced into mass suicide or suicide charges by his superiors.
He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath. The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer's lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier's mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.
かわいそうだっつうか 「天皇陛下万歳」と言う人は少ないですから
An Australian soldier is depicted executing a wounded Japanese soldier.
Several times [there on Gavutu], two or three Japs tried to surrender, but we cut them down. We had a battle cry, "Remember Wake Island." As far as we knew all Marines were killed on Wake [and we] were not going to take any prisoners.
A U.S. submarine commander who sank a Japanese transport and then spent upwards of an hour killing the hundreds and possibly thousands of Japanese survivors with his deck guns, for example, was commended and publicly honored by his superiors even though he included an account of the slaughter in his official report.
The military historian Denis Warner, in a book about Japanese suicide units published in 1982, introduced in passing his own firsthand experience on Bougainville, where wounded Japanese attempting to surrender were ordered shot by the American commander.
A report came in on the area bombed this morning. The infantry moved in following the artillery bombardment after the bombing. They occupied the area "without firing a shot-found about forty dead Japs in one cave and "parts of quite a few more" scattered about. The few who were living were sitting and lying around in a dazed condition and made no move as they saw our soldiers. One prisoner was taken, according to the first report, but an infantry colonel told me later that no prisoners were taken at all. "Our boys just don't take prisoners."
source: Remembering the war in New Guinea
On August 30, Lindbergh visited Tarawa, recalled the terrible casualties there, and told of a naval officer who lined up the few Japanese captured, kept those who could speak English for questioning, and had the rest killed.
To doubt the ideals of the nation's leadership
"I do not want to die!... I want to live. No, I don't want to die.... I feel lonely," wrote Hayashi Tadao, a scout pilot who perished in the air in 1945, just weeks before the Japanese surrender.
And despite many of their cruel war crimes, which are not justifiable under any circumstances, Japanese soldiers were more human than irrational beasts.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
It should also be noted that many Kamikaze pilots, often seen as the epitome of Japanese fanaticism, were often forced into their roles and were in despair because they did not want to die so futilely as 'human bullets.' In fact, the concept of Kamikaze was so extreme that even many Japanese soldiers questioned its value.
source: American troops 'murdered Japanese PoWs'
War Without Mercy by John Dower
To fight a hopeless war
The entry for June 28 spoke of kicking in the teeth of Japanese, sometimes before and sometimes after executing them.
Japanese soldiers often found themselves in extremely desperate and hopeless situations where there seemed to be no choice. Many continued to fight or chose to kill themselves because they believed that the Allies would not take prisoners or that surrendering would bring dishonor to their families.
One might ask, "If they are still human and want to live, then why don’t they just surrender?"
It's pitful. There were few people who said "Long live the Emperor.' Usually, they called out their mother's name, and those without a mother called out their father's name as they died.
“You heard me, Colonel,” replied [the major general], who was only yards away from upstretched Japanese hands. “I want no prisoners. Shoot them all.”
Additionally, the Japanese brought many forced laborers from Korea, Okinawa, and other occupied Asian nations who were most likely unwilling to die for Japan or its emperor.
On the Allied side, some forms of battlefield degeneracy were in fact fairly well publicized while the war was going on. This was especially true of the practice of collecting grisly battlefield trophies from the Japanese dead or near dead, in the form of gold teeth, ears, bones, scalps, and skulls. For some servicemen, gold teeth and severed ears became a fetish even before they had engaged in combat.
Based on these instances, one can assume that Japanese soldiers may have surrendered or been captured more often than the myth suggests, and that Allied soldiers frequently sought revenge, ensuring Japanese atrocities didn’t go unanswered—similar to how American soldiers in Europe took revenge against captured SS soldiers.
国家の指導者層の理念に疑いを抱く
“The soldiers may not have known that the Japanese had surrendered and it was all in the heat of the battle. But I do believe it was a transgression.”
僕はもう、お母さんの顔を見られなくなるかもしれない。お母さん、良く顔を見せて下さい。しかし、僕は何もカタミを残したくないんです。十年も二十年も過ぎてからカタミを見てお母さんを泣かせるからです。お母さん、僕が郡山を去る日、自分の家の上空を飛びます。それが、僕の別れの挨拶です。
source: Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities
What common Japanese soldiers actually wrote in their farewell letters to their loved ones, or what they said, didn't often mention the emperor or express gladness to die honorably for their country.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
An IJA veteran describing his comrades' final moments
In another scene on the Japanese island of Okinawa a year later, a US soldier is filmed dragging a wounded enemy from a hiding place. Although the man has his ankles tied together, two bullets are fired into his knees and then, while he is still moving, shots are fired into his chest and head.
"It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when they hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine-guns turned loose on them."
War Without Mercy by John Dower
お 母さんいない人は
It is said that, in the end (when they faced death), they(Japanese pilots) shouted 'Long live the Emperor!' or 'Long live the Great Japanese Empire!' and then died, but there wasn't a single person who ever said that.
Contrary to widely held beliefs, many Japanese soldiers, particularly young boys and middle-aged men forced into the war near its end, did not want to die.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
I stand looking at the patch of scorched jungle, at the dark spots in the cliffs which mark the caves where the Japanese troops have taken cover. In that burned area, hidden under the surface of the ground, is the utmost suffering - hunger, despair, men dead and dying of wounds, carrying on for a country they love and for a cause in which they believe, not daring to surrender even if they wished to, because they know only too well that our soldiers would shoot them on sight even if they came out with their hands above their heads. We must bomb them out, those Jap soldiers, because this is war, and if we do not kill them, they will kill us now that we have removed the possibility of Surrender. But I would have more respect for the character of our people if we could give them a decent burial instead of kicking in the teeth of their corpses, and pushing their bodies into hollows in the ground, scooped out and covered up by bulldozers. After that, we will leave their graves unmarked and say, "That's the only way to handle the yellow sons of bitches."
This is an example of the propaganda that Japanese soldiers were fed.
In any war, surrender entails risk, but for a Japanese soldier in the Pacific War, the risk was much greater.
An IJA veteran who survived the Battle of Imphal
War Without Mercy by John Dower
The U.S. military distributed these translated diaries to American soldiers to help them understand that Japanese soldiers were also human, with fears and desires, and therefore should not be overly demonized or considered subhuman.
While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn't in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn't dead.
世にこれほどの悲惨時があろうか
Allied soldiers were well aware of Japanese war crimes against Allied POWs and civilians from early on, particularly the infamous Bataan Death March, which left American soldiers extremely angry towards the Japanese. As Eugene Sledge described in his book With the Old Breed, his fellow Marines were often so driven by hatred that they were reluctant to take Japanese prisoners.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
Some of the rumors concerning Allied atrocities which circulated among Japanese servicemen and civilians were sensational and quite imaginary. The Chinese were reported to roast their captives and cut out their hearts. Young American men, it was said, qualified for the Marine Corps by murdering their parents, and routinely raped and killed women in Asia (this was one of the rumors behind the mass suicides by Japanese civilians on Saipan and Okinawa). The Allies killed prisoners on the battlefields by laying them on the ground and running them over with tanks and bulldozers, and intended to drastically depopulate Japan itself if they won.
Yukio Seki, a kamikaze pilot (關行男)
Countless thousands of Japanese perished because they saw no alternative. In a report dated June 1945, the U.S. Office of War Information noted that 84 percent of one group of interrogated Japanese prisoners (many of them injured or unconscious when captured) stated that they had expected to be killed or tortured by the Allies if taken prisoner. The OWI analysts described this as being typical, and concluded that fear of the consequences of surrender,"rather than Bushido," was the motivation for many Japanese battle deaths in hopeless circumstances-as much as, and probably more than, the other two major considerations: fear of disgrace at home, and "the positive desire to die for one's nation, ancestors, and god-emperor." Even those Japanese who were willing to risk surrendering anyway found it difficult to do so. A summary report prepared for the OWI immediately after the war ended, for example, noted that documents pertaining to Japanese prisoners were "full of accounts of ingenious schemes devised by POW s to avoid being shot while trying to give themselves up," due to the fact of "surrender being made difficult by the unwillingness to take prisoners" on the part of Allied fighting men.
An equally grim butchery took place on March 4, 1943, the day after the three-day battle of the Bismarck Sea, when U.S. and Australian aircraft systematically searched the seas for Japanese survivors and strafed every raft and lifeboat they found.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
He quotes the diaries of Charles Lindbergh, the American aviation pioneer, who toured the Far East visiting United States units. On one occasion he commented to a group of senior officers that very few Japanese seemed to be taken prisoner.
Kaname Harada (原田要), a Japanese zero-sen pilot
The film, shot in colour, was taken by an unknown combat cameraman in 1944 during fighting on the Pacific Island of Peleliu. It includes scenes of American soldiers shooting Japanese wounded as they lie prone on the ground.
The soldiers found his movements uproariously funny and were prevented by their laughter from making an early end of the unfortunate man. Finally, however, they succeeded in killing him, and the incident cheered the whole platoon, giving them something to talk and joke about for days afterward. In relating this story to the class, the veteran emphasized the similarity of the enemy soldier to an animal. None of the American soldiers apparently even considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and the wish to be spared. What puzzled the veteran in retrospect was why his comrades and he found the incident so humorous. Now, a few years later, it appeared to him grisly and cruel enough; at the time, he had had no conscience about it whatever.
It's all a lie that they left filled with braveness and joy, crying, "Long live the emperor!" They were sheep at a slaughterhouse. Everybody was looking down and tottering. Some were unable to stand up and were carried and pushed into their aircraft by maintenance soldiers.
"Oh, we could take more if we wanted to," one of the officers replied. "But our boys don't like to take prisoners.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
最期は「天皇陛下万歳」とか「大日本帝国万歳」とか言って死んでいったとか言われますが、そんな人は一人もいません
source: 戦慄の記録 インパール
As the war situation became increasingly hopeless and desperate for the Japanese, individual soldiers were well aware that they could not win, and many were frustrated and saddened by the prospect of dying in vain. I don't know how many Japanese soldiers were truly willing to die for the emperor when faced with extreme situations—no food, no water, and no hope of survival—even though they were admittedly die-hard fighters.
source: Film exposes Allies' Pacific war atrocities
The reputation of not taking prisoners also became associated with Australian troops in general. In many instances, moreover, Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to the prisoner compounds.
source: 戦慄の記録 インパール
Hell's Islands: The Untold Story of Guadalcanal
War Without Mercy by John Dower
'Some people today will tell you it was cruel and inhumane, but you weren't there - we were.'
War Without Mercy by John Dower
望みなき戦を戦う
Surrender is Prohibited: Surrender was not just discouraged but outright prohibited. If a Japanese soldier surrendered, he would bring immense shame to himself and his family, who would be treated as 'unpatriotic citizens' and shunned. Nobody wanted their family to bear the shame because of them.
source: Death missions
With the Old Breed
Additionally, Japanese officers often 'forced' their subordinates to commit mass suicides when they were completely surrounded or out of supplies, with those who refused being killed by other soldiers or officers. While this certainly discouraged many Japanese soldiers from surrendering, as I mentioned earlier, there is more to it than just Japanese military culture or the Bushido code.
Captain Burden also wrote a lengthy report on his experiences. It was remarkable in that it blamed the American officers he had encountered for the paucity of Japanese POWs. In one instance, Burden noted, a regimental commander censured a lower unit for bringing in prisoners, saying, "Don't bother to take prisoners; shoot the sons of bitches."
Jones went on to speak of such practices as adjusting Flamethrowers so that they did not kill their Japanese targets instantly.
The popular American writer William Manchester, in Goodbye, Darkness, his 1980 memoir of fighting in the Pacific, recalled a young American soldier on Okinawa, crazed by the death of a revered commander, who “snatched up a submachine gun and unforgivably massacred a line of unarmed Japanese soldiers who had just surrendered.
The Anguish Of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II
A few Japs (airmen) parachuted when they were hit,” a young seaman wrote in his diary late in 1943, “but a few sailors and Marines on the 20 mm opened up on the ones in the chutes and when they hit the water they were nothing but a piece of meat cut to ribbons.
"I may no longer be able to see your face, Mother. Please show me your face well. However, I don't want to leave any keepsakes behind. It would make you cry when you see them ten or twenty years from now. Mother, on the day I leave Koriyama(郡山), I will fly over our house. That will be my farewell greeting."
This was tit-for-tat killing. Anzac and American troops systematically shot Japanese prisoners in the Pacific.
It is a well-established fact that Japanese military culture branded surrender as an incredibly shameful act and officially prohibited their soldiers from surrendering under any circumstances.
Edgar L. Jones, a former American war correspondent in the Pacific, in the February 1946 issue of Atlantic Monthly. ‘“We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
Is there any greater tragedy in the world than this?
The Marine battle cry on Tarawa made no bones about this: "Kill the Jap bastards! Take no prisoners!" and certain U.S. units became legendary for living up to this motto wherever they fought.
J. Glenn Gray, in his reflective 1959 study The Warriors, recalled how a few years earlier a veteran reminisced before a class of students about how his unit had unexpectedly “flushed” an isolated Japanese soldier on an island that had already been secured, and amused themselves by shooting at him as he dashed frantically about the clearing in search of safety:
Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman's war.
"In disbelief I stared at the face as I realize that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine's penis and stuffed it into his mouth. My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances."
War Without Mercy by John Dower
After the Battle of Guadalcanal, the first thing the Americans did was translate the captured diaries kept by the Japanese soldiers. To the Americans, the Japanese soldiers' tendency to commit suicide rather than surrender or waste their lives in suicide missions was incomprehensible. They found it so baffling that they began to view Japanese soldiers more as fanatical brutes than as sane men. They hoped to find clues in the diaries to understand why the Japanese soldiers appeared so fanatical.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
Risk of Being Shot by Allied Soldiers: Even if a Japanese soldier reached the Allied soldiers or found himself in a situation where he could surrender (such as if his unit was decimated except for him or he was isolated in the jungle alone), there was a significant probability that U.S. or Australian soldiers would just shoot him before he could reach a POW camp.
"a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew."
Nevertheless, there seemed to be a considerable number of cases in which individual Japanese soldiers surrendered.
War Without Mercy by John Dower
Australian soldiers killed Japanese prisoners in Papua, including on at least one occasion wounded Japanese soldiers in hospital.
A soldier appeared with his rifle slung over his shoulder and looking at the ground told me that they would not be coming. I blew off what the bloody hell do you mean you ask us to make room for you and now you don't want it. One could sense something was wrong and it very shamefacedly came out, they had been killed, a soldier had opened up on them with a Tommy gun and shot the lot. The boys and I were pretty aghast at this and we said they had been tied up; the poor messenger was also rather stricken and tried to explain how it happened. A soldier that opened up had his mate killed alongside him during the night. It somehow cast a dark shadow over us including the poor B who had to tell us.
My conclusion is that Japanese soldiers surrendered more often than the myth suggests. However, mass surrenders like those of the Germans in Europe were rare, except for the Takenaga incident, as Japanese soldiers were often decimated in combat or attempted suicide charges.
Of course, the official Allied policy was never to take no Japanese prisoners. They made considerable efforts to encourage Allied soldiers to take Japanese prisoners alive with rewards like ice cream and leave, but many soldiers were still unwilling, often asking, “The Japs treat our prisoners horribly, so why should we treat them well?”
In his report on the Guadalcanal POW interrogations, (Captain) Burden also noted that on “several occasions word was telephoned in from the front line that a prisoner had been taken, only to find after hours of waiting that the prisoner had ‘died’ en route to the rear. In more than one instance there was strong evidence that the prisoner had been shot and buried because it was too much bother to take him in.
お 父さんの名前を呼んで死んでいきますね
Saburo Motegi, a kamikaze pilot, in his farewell letter to his mother (茂木三郎)