JAPANESE MENTALITY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 65, 18 March 1943, Page 5

JAPANESE MENTALITY

PUZZLE TO ALLIES

NEW YORK, March 16. Military leaders in the Pacific have just about given up trying to figure out what the Japanese will do in any given set of circumstances. This is the conclusion of Frank Bartholomew, vice-president of the United Press of America, who is convinced after a 22,000----mile tour of the Pacific battle areas that the "more you study at first hand the battle psychology of the Japanese soldier, the more you realise that you know nothing about it."

Mr. Bartholomew says: "Sometimes a Japanese will keep fighting when he is hopelessly cornered. At other times, he will suddenly quit when there is no apparent reason." He quotes General Herring, the Australian commanding the Allied ground forces in New Guinea, as saying, concerning the mental and physical makeup of the individual Japanese soldier, that "he is a strong, stupid little beast. He has no imagination and does exactly as he is told. "All his military schooling is along the positive side—how to advance, but nobody has told him what to do when he finds he cannot advance. Japanese field commanders send nothing but optimistic reports to Tokio. If an officer were -in a dangerous position and sent a realistic report in order to get help to extricate his men, he would be told that he had failed the Emperor and to do away with himself. "Few commanders seem willing to risk that disgrace, so they fight on stubbornly in completely hopeless situations and unit by unit we wipe them out."

Another senior A.I.F. officer told Mr. Bartholomew that a Japanese unit never surrendered as such. The largest group captured was 50 or 60 at Buna, and they were mostly Korean labour troops.

Lieutenant-General Eichelberger, American commander in Papua, is credited with exclaiming: "Why do they hang on—the little animals—and make this war unnecessarily bloody? Because they have no instructions to the contrary. Their position is hopeless, yet we must kill every man."