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by dfsegoat 2858 days ago
>> who do not want to try anything by themselves, because they want to be taught everything

Anecdotally, from a recent podcast on military history, I heard this same explanation for why the Japanese Army did very poorly in some WWII battles where they lost commanding officers early in the fight: The footsoldiers were unable to think for themselves, unable to adapt/improvise, and unable to organize anything other than suicide charges.
1 comments
ethbro 2858 days ago
Source? Because that's distilling a lot of complicated history down to a simple motivation.

Given that glorification of suicide was specifically taught to military recruits, and that various commanders promoted or dissuaded it to their subordinates, it would fair to say that many times Japanese suicide charges were ordered in-spite-of better ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzai_charge#In_World_War_II

Better support for overly rigid, hierarchical structures would come from the performance of upper echelon commanders during the war, and an inability to adapt doctrine to rapidly improving technology (e.g. mixed air-ground-sea task forces, carrier tactics, and radar).

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dfsegoat 2858 days ago
In-spite-of better ideas was my point - they were unable to improvise and adapt to a dynamic situation, and fell back on frontal assaults:

A reference - not the one i mentioned - which was a firsthand anecdote from a veteran of the Pacific theater:

https://books.google.com/books?id=abx_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA123&lpg=...

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ethbro 2858 days ago
You misunderstand. My point was that your attribution of motivation...

> The footsoldiers were unable to think for themselves, unable to adapt/improvise, and unable to organize anything other than suicide charges.

... is overly simplistic.

The soldiers were not necessarily unable to think of alternatives: they were doctrinally taught to reject those alternatives in favor of frontal assaults. They, their superiors, their superiors' superiors.

So "Japanese soldiers were unable to innovate" does not follow from "Japanese soldiers were prone to conducting frontal assaults."

"Japanese military doctrine in the 1930s strongly discouraged lower-level innovation" would be a more accurate statement, without attempting to tie it to capability.

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