TOKYO, Feb. 22, 2023—History proved that Hideki Tojo and his Imperial army bureaucracy cronies led to Japan’s spectacular World War II battle defeat by the U.S.-led allied forces. Tojo, who considered the Imperial Japanese Army invincible, prevailed in parliamentary debate and forced Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s Imperial Navy, which Tojo treated as an army unit, to the blitzkrieg Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Tojo’s war began and on Aug. 15, 1947, the war ended.
Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine differs in many dimensions from the war of 76 years ago. His is a war against a neighboring sovereign country of the same ethnicity that was a former Soviet Union satellite state, speaks the same and similar languages as Russian, and centuries earlier a part of the Romanov Empire. His is a war of redemption for a rebirth of the Russian empire by pulling Ukraine and later other states back to the former U.S.S.R. universe. The Japanese military’s Pacific theater expansion was for securing oil, coal and other resources that Japan lacked almost totally with the colonization and annexation of Asian countries, fro China and India, by establishing the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Tojo, as commander general, with approval of the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, was at the helm, firing orders and receiving strategies and ideas from his commanders for the policy, initiating the Japanese military expansion of China by instigating the Chinese Eight Route Army in the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the Imphal campaign in Burma (Myanmar).
Tojo carried out those and numerous other botched military campaigns with input from his cronies while giving deaf ears to opinions from Yamamoto and other cabinet and senior military officials. Putin is doing that increasingly visibly: He is ignoring Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary unit Wagner that has made meaningful assault in parts of Ukraine while Russian military proper units made little or no progress.
Prigozhin reportedly disdains bureaucracy and accused Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, of deliberately starving Wagner of supplies, according to the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/world/europe/wagner-russia-military-prigozhin.html).
The Feb. 21 Russian television footage showed the two Russian military officials among a dozen military officials at Putin’s state of the nation address, but not Prigozhin. Tojo did not send supplies to Iwo Jima, where more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers were defending the island from fierce U.S. bombings under the commander, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, known as a true samurai as illustrated in a Clint Eastwood film. Not a bureaucrat, Kuribayashi, who studied in the United States, knew Japan’s defeat.
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