Banzai Charge - in World War II

In World War II

It was first reported during the invasion of China where banzai charges worked extremely well, possibly because the Chinese had slow-loading bolt action rifles and were unable to put up enough firepower to stop the charges.

During the war period, the Japanese militarist government began disseminating propaganda that romanticized suicide attack, using one of the virtues of Bushido as the basis for the campaign. The Japanese government presented war as purifying, with death defined as a duty. By the end of 1944, the government announced the last protocol, unofficially named ichioku gyokusai (Japanese: 一億玉砕, literally "100 million shattered jewels"), for the purpose of resisting opposition forces until August, 1945.

There are accounts from Malaya, Burma, Hong Kong and the Philippines of Japanese commanders throwing everything they had at a British or American key point, especially if it put up fierce resistance, to overrun the position by sheer brute force.

During the Battle of Guadalcanal, on 21 August 1942, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki led 800 soldiers to launch a direct attack against the American base on the seashore. After small-scale combat engagement in the jungle, Ichiki's army launched its banzai charge on the enemy; however, with an organized American defense line already in place, most of the Japanese soldiers were killed before the commencement of fighting and Ichiki subsequently committed suicide during the battle. Despite the failure of the banzai charge, the generals greatly exaggerated its success in their reports to the Japanese government, giving the false impression to those in charge that their human wave attacks were effective against the Americans — if not with victory, then at least decimating enemy troop numbers.

The last and largest Banzai attack of the war took place in the Battle of Saipan in 1944 where, at the cost of almost 4,300 dead Japanese soldiers, it almost destroyed the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th U.S. Infantry who lost almost 650 men.

It is to be noted that asides from the maneuver itself, the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pacific War suffered from conditions that made Banzai attacks much less efficient than they could potentially be. Supply lines were often stretched or nonexistent in their isolation; poorly fed and ill-equipped soldiers with unreliably prematurely exploding grenades and heavy-triggered, hand-made Arisaka rifles made for less than its potential efficiency. At the time, the Japanese industry was inefficient and products were manufactured with poor quality. One notable example is that some officers preferred to swap out their Nambu and Type 94 pistols, known for their instability to the point of going off during holstering and running, for the hand-loaded FP-Liberators, the product of a classified project to make the crudest of pistols as cheap as possible to be dropped in enemy territory to arm the local resistance, but was given misleading designation as a "Flare Projector" to fool German spies but even ended up convincing uninformed American logistics officers as they were considered too weak to have any possibility of being weapons under serious consideration. Liberators had a range of 8 meters and had a "magazine" of 10 rounds in the butt,

A banzai charge could have been more successful if it had an element of surprise that overpowered the target and if it faced enemies lacking in heavy artillery and machine gun defenses. But after many a "scheduled" periodic nocturnal ambushes, the Americans in the Pacific War soon found themselves ready and expecting nightly banzai charges. Familiarity soon encouraged Americans to imitate the ruthless charges themselves with commendable results, as Americans soldiers in general were burlier and comparably well-fed (some records point to a private's ration containing more calories than the average meal of the middle-class citizen of the country with the wealthiest middle-class at the time, which was Great Britain). Thanks to their world's greatest wartime industrial mobilization, American soldiers had much freer access to a multitude of reliable grenades, mines, semi-auto rifles, pistols, and submachineguns ideal for short-ranged combat where Banzai charges (or counter-charges) lead to.