What Japanese Officers Said After Their First Defeat by American Troops

"This reckless attack by infantrymen without artillery support against an enemy division in fortified positions was like a housefly's attacking a giant tortoise." Vice Admiral Raizo Tanaka wrote that in 1956, judging his own army's first night attack against American ground troops. In August 1942, after eight months of unbroken victories across Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and the Philippines, Japanese officers were certain the American soldier was soft. Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki, commanding the 28th Infantry Regiment, landed east of the newly seized Henderson Field on Guadalcanal and wrote a three-day victory schedule into his notebook before firing a shot. What followed at the sandbar across Alligator Creek, against the dug-in 1st Marine Division, became the first battle the Imperial Japanese Army lost on the ground to American troops. The written record left behind by the losers, Tanaka's own account, Captain Tetsuro Sawada's warning drawn from his experience at Nomonhan, and the testimony of scout Jacob Vouza and Marine gunner Al Schmid, lays out exactly how that certainty collapsed in a single night, and why it was Japanese officers, not American ones, who wrote the harshest verdict on what happened there. If you value history reconstructed from the documents of the people who were actually there, a like helps this reach more viewers, and subscribing to Sam WW2 keeps these stories coming. 📚 Further context / historical background: this account draws on Vice Admiral Raizo Tanaka's own writing for the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, the United States Army's official history of the Guadalcanal campaign, and postwar accounts given by Japanese officers, including Major General Shuichi Miyazaki, to American historians, as reconstructed by historian William Bartsch. #WW2History #Guadalcanal #PacificWar