The Locusts

Japan still had close to 5,000,000 soldiers under arms. Until the Russians attacked, the majority of them had not yet been engaged by Allied troops. They had been defeated by air power and sea power, but they were still in physical possession of 2.500,000 or more square miles of Allied and mandated territory.

P: In the home islands were an estimated 2,500,000 troops.

P: In Manchukuo (the three provinces of Manchuria with Jehol added) was the well-trained Kwantung Army*(see THE WAR). Its known 900,000 (600,000 Japs and 300,000 puppet troops) had probably been increased to 1,000,000 by recent arrivals from China proper. Allied statesmen had long feared that the Kwantung Army would fight on, even after the home islands were conquered, had hoped that direct orders from the Emperor would persuade it to lay down its arms.

P:South of the Great Wall, in China proper, an army of 900,000 had been slightly reduced by withdrawals to the north. But the enemy still held the basins of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, the mouth of the West River, and most of the great ports fronting on the China seas--Canton, Hong Kong, Amoy,'Swatow and Hangchow--around to Shanghai and the Yellow Sea.

P:Cut off by a probing finger of Chinese columns, reaching to the Gulf of Tonkin, were 150,000 Japs in Indo-China and Thailand.

P:In Burma, a Jap army had been routed with 128,000 counted dead; only disease-ridden remnants were left (except on the Tenasserim coast) to surrender to Admiral Mountbatten's Twelfth and Fourteenth Armies and to the Burmese National Army.

P:Spread along the ultimate peninsula, of Southeast Asia, from southern Burma through the Kra Isthmus to Malaya, were perhaps 100,000 Japanese, including two divisions for the defense of Singapore.

P:Scattered through the great islands of Indonesia and Melanesia were 300,000 enemy troops, some already heavily engaged by the Australians, some just trying to live. It was a question how clearly the voice of surrender would be heard on the jungled slopes of the Prince Alexander Range in New Guinea, or on the Gazelle Peninsula around Rabaul.

P:By-passed (and supposedly withering on the vine) were 75,000 Japs in the Carolines (two-thirds of them on Truk), 25,000 in the Philippines, 13,000 on four atolls in the Marshalls, 3,500 on Wake, 3,500 on Marcus, 2,500 on Rota in the Marianas, 20,000 in the Bonins.

Somehow, after an indeterminate confinement, perhaps at forced labor to repair some of the damage they had wrought, these millions who had swarmed out like locusts must be shipped home--and somehow squeezed into teeming Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu and Hokkaido. Not one of the countries which they had plagued would keep them a day longer than necessary.

*Virtually independent of the Tokyo Army Ministry, it had set off the 1931 Mukden incident which led to establishment of the puppet state Manchukuo.

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