The US Marine Corps had been promised something simple: Iwo Jima would fall in five days. But the man waiting for them underground had no intention of honoring that timetable. Tadamichi Kuribayashi commanded the island’s garrison, and he had learned the bitter lessons of earlier battles. His men would not die in useless banzai charges, screaming into American machine guns.
Instead, they burrowed into the volcanic rock, building a labyrinth of tunnels and caves, turning the island into a fortress designed to bleed the enemy slowly. For thirty-six days, they held. The Marines bled for every yard of black sand. But attrition cut both ways, and eventually Kuribayashi’s ammunition ran dry.
His water ran dry. His men were starving in the dark. So, in the early morning hours of March 26, 1945, he ordered something desperate. A final, three-pronged assault.
His soldiers crept out of their holes under the cover of darkness and fell upon sleeping American forces. They bayoneted men in their tents. They hurled hand grenades into the confusion. The fight collapsed into brutal, close-quarters combat, men killing each other in the dark with knives and fists until there was no one left to kill.
No one knows exactly how Kuribayashi died. Some say he knelt in his headquarters and opened his stomach in seppuku. Most historians believe he was torn apart by an artillery barrage during that final charge, aged fifty-three. His body was never found.
He had stripped off his officer’s insignia before the attack, choosing to die as a common soldier. Before the battle, he had made a simple request: if he fell, his men should bury him immediately, without ceremony, without marking the grave. —
In Tokyo, Hideki Tojo held near-dictatorial power as prime minister and army minister. He was the man who authorized the attack on Pearl Harbor.
He oversaw a regime that sanctioned human experimentation and biological weapons. But by 1944, the war was turning. He launched a massive offensive into India that failed catastrophically, leaving around 150,000 Japanese soldiers dead in the jungle. The Americans crushed the Japanese fleet at the Philippine Sea and took Saipan.
The emperor’s faith in him shattered. Tojo was forced to resign, a once-feared dictator reduced to living quietly in his house. After Japan surrendered, General Douglas MacArthur ordered his arrest. When American soldiers surrounded his home in September 1945, Tojo put a pistol to his chest and fired.
The bullet tore through him but missed his heart. As he lay bleeding, reporters crowded around, and he was recorded saying, “I am very sorry it is taking me so long to die. ”
He survived. He was treated, imprisoned, and convicted of war crimes.
On December 23, 1948, he was hanged. He was sixty-three years old. His final words were an apology for Japan’s actions and a plea for compassion for his people, who had endured firebombing and two atomic bombs. —
Mitsuru Ushijima knew how to defend.
When the Americans launched the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific at Okinawa, he used the island’s terrain to slow them, pulling them into an attritional nightmare behind the Shuri Line. But American firepower was overwhelming. The line collapsed, and he was forced to retreat. General Bolivar Buckner Jr.
sent him a demand to surrender. Ushijima refused. As defeat became inevitable, he ordered his remaining troops to break into small guerrilla units and melt into the northern hills. He would not be joining them.
On the night of June 22, 1945, he held a final banquet with his staff in his cave command post, complimenting the captured whiskey they shared. In the early morning, dressed in full uniform, he stood on a ledge overlooking the ocean. He made a deep, vertical cut into his own abdomen. A captain standing behind him, Sakaguchi, completed the ritual with a single stroke of his sword, beheading him.
His deputy, Isamu Cho, did the same immediately after. Both were buried in shallow graves nearby. A staff officer named Hiromichi Yahara watched it all. He had begged for permission to die the same way, but Ushijima had refused.
He told the young man that someone had to survive, someone had to tell the world the truth about what happened on Okinawa. —
Isoroku Yamamoto had always been a naval man, but he had spent time in America and knew its industrial power. He planned a war he feared could not be won, and he built his strategy around a single, devastating surprise: Pearl Harbor. For six months after that attack, Japan was unstoppable.
Then came Midway. In one afternoon, four Japanese aircraft carriers were sent to the bottom. The tide turned, and never turned back. By April 1943, Yamamoto was planning a morale-boosting inspection tour of forward bases.
American intelligence intercepted and decoded his exact flight schedule. His officers warned him it was too dangerous. He ignored them. On April 18, 1943, he departed Rabaul aboard a Mitsubishi bomber with a fighter escort.
Sixteen American P-38 fighters intercepted the formation over Bougainville. Lieutenant Rex T. Barber sent a stream of bullets into Yamamoto’s aircraft, which smashed into the jungle. The wreckage was found the next day.
Yamamoto’s body had been thrown clear, still strapped to his seat. His white-gloved hand still gripped his katana. He had bullet wounds in his jaw and shoulder. He was given a state funeral, promoted to marshal admiral, and decorated with Japan’s highest honors—and a German Knight’s Cross.
His death broke something in the Japanese military. His loss was a blow from which morale never fully recovered. —
Tomoyuki Yamashita had earned the name “Tiger of Malaya” by doing the impossible. He captured the British fortress of Singapore in seventy days with only three divisions.
But his legend was stained with blood. Under his command, between 350,000 and 450,000 people died, victims of massacres like the Sook Ching in Singapore and the horrors of Manila. Assigned to defend the Philippines, he fought a losing battle against overwhelming Allied forces. Even with supplies cut off, he held parts of Luzon, remaining in the field even after Japan’s formal surrender.
Eventually, he surrendered to Major General Robert S. Beightler. At his trial, he was held responsible for atrocities committed by troops under his command. He swore he had never ordered them, never even known about them.
It made no difference. He was sentenced to death. On February 23, 1946, he was hanged at Los Baños. His last words were not bitterness.
He said he did not blame his executioners, that he prayed for them, and he thanked several American officers for treating him fairly. —
Shiro Ishii was a doctor. He was also the architect of Unit 731, the Imperial Army’s secret biological warfare program. He oversaw weapons tested on live humans and used in germ attacks that spread plague.
Thousands of civilians died in his experiments, which included vivisections on conscious prisoners who were referred to as “logs. ”
After the war, he staged a fake funeral and went into hiding. American forces found him anyway. But instead of prosecuting him, the US granted him full immunity in exchange for his research data.
He lectured American officers on biological warfare, then returned to Japan, where he opened a free clinic. His own health began to fail. Throat surgery cost him his voice. Before dying, he converted to Catholicism and took the name Joseph.
He died of throat cancer in Tokyo on October 9, 1959. He was sixty-seven years old. He was never tried for a single crime. —
Iwane Matsui commanded the Japanese forces that captured Nanjing in 1937.
More than 200,000 civilians were killed in the massacre that followed, and Matsui did not stop it. He did not punish those responsible. When reports of the atrocities reached Tokyo, he was blamed not for the killings, but for mishandling the situation and embarrassing Japan. He was dismissed and sent home.
He bought a new house and lived quietly, promoting ideas of Asian independence and an alliance against the Western Allies. He even toured Asia to spread his views. After the surrender, he was arrested. Sick with pneumonia, he was given time to recover before entering Sugamo Prison.
At his trial, he claimed Japan had acted in self-defense. He denied that any large-scale killings had happened in Nanjing. The court disagreed. He was sentenced to death for failing to prevent the massacre.
On December 22, 1948, he met the other condemned men—Hideki Tojo, Heitaro Kimura, Akira Muto, and Kenji Doihara—at the prison chapel. As the oldest among them, he led the group in a final, three-part banzai cheer to the emperor. Then they walked to the gallows. Shortly after midnight, they were hanged simultaneously.
Other generals followed later that night. —
Masaharu Homma commanded the 14th Army during the invasion of the Philippines. His name became linked to the Bataan Death March, where at least 5,500 Allied prisoners died. Yet the Japanese high command thought him too soft.
He was too slow in securing victory, too lenient toward Filipinos. In August 1943, they forced him into retirement. He lived in seclusion until American forces arrested him in September 1945 and sent him to the Philippines for trial. He claimed he had been so busy with other duties that he had forgotten about the treatment of prisoners, even though his headquarters stood close to the march route.
He was convicted and sentenced to death. On April 3, 1946, he was executed by firing squad. Some later argued his trial had been unfair and biased. —
Hitoshi Imamura took a different path.
Commanding the 16th Army during the invasion of the Dutch East Indies, he followed a relatively lenient occupation policy. It clashed with his superiors, but it earned him local support. In September 1945, he surrendered his forces to Australian troops. He was arrested for war crimes tied to atrocities, including the execution of prisoners of war.
An Australian court convicted him and sentenced him to ten years in prison. He served time at Sugamo Prison and was released in 1954. But Imamura believed his punishment was too light. So he built a small wooden replica of his prison cell in his own garden in Tokyo and moved into it, living there voluntarily in self-imposed atonement for the rest of his life.
He died of natural causes on October 28, 1968, at the age of eighty-two. He had donated the proceeds of his memoirs to the families of victims. —
Hisashi Terauchi commanded the Southern Expeditionary Army Group. Neither the Americans nor his own peers liked him.
In China in 1937, his troops looted and burned. He oversaw the Burma-Siam Railway, where around 50,000 Allied prisoners and many more Asian laborers died under brutal conditions. As the war turned, he gave an order: if the Japanese mainland were invaded, all Allied prisoners in Malaya were to be massacred. He surrendered to British Admiral Louis Mountbatten in November 1945, handing over his family heirloom sword.
Already severely ill, he was moved to a bungalow in Malaya under British care. On June 11, 1946, he heard a report that a Japanese officer might reveal war crimes to the Allies. He flew into a rage. The fury triggered a massive stroke.
He died the next morning, never facing trial. —
Hajime Sugiyama was a field marshal and chief of staff, one of Japan’s most senior commanders. After he fell out of favor with Tojo, he was removed from his post in February 1944. But he later returned as army minister.
In July 1945, with an Allied invasion of Japan expected at any moment, he was put in charge of defending the eastern part of the country. The invasion never came. Japan surrendered instead. On September 12, 1945, after completing preparations for the army’s dissolution as dictated by the Allies, he sat down at his desk in his office and shot himself four times in the chest.
Later that day, his wife hanged herself at home. —
Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was a member of the Imperial family, an uncle by marriage to Emperor Hirohito. He commanded forces during the 1937 invasion of China and played a key role in the Nanjing Massacre. He allegedly authorized the atrocities and issued the order to kill all captives.
He sat on the Supreme War Council until Japan surrendered. But he was never tried. General Douglas MacArthur granted immunity to the entire Imperial family. In 1947, Asaka and his family lost their imperial status.
His mansion was seized. He became an ordinary citizen. He moved to Atami, converted to Catholicism, and spent his days playing golf. He died at home of natural causes on April 12, 1981, at the age of ninety-three.
—
Yoshijiro Umezu was the final Chief of Staff of the Japanese Army. In August 1945, he opposed surrender, arguing that Japan should keep fighting to inflict heavy losses and win better terms. The emperor personally ordered him to sign the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, ending World War II. He was then arrested, tried for war crimes, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He died in prison in 1949 from rectal cancer, aged sixty-seven. The day before his death, he converted to Catholicism. —
Masaji Kitano was a lieutenant general and doctor who succeeded Shiro Ishii as head of Unit 731. He continued the human experiments, the vivisections, the plague weapon tests in China.
He referred to his human test subjects as “monkeys. ”
After Japan’s surrender, he was detained in Shanghai. He avoided prosecution by giving the Americans information on his experiments. He returned to Japan in 1946 a free man.
He went on to help found the pharmaceutical company Green Cross, which operated the first commercial blood bank in Japan. Decades later, the company became linked to the 1980s HIV-contaminated blood scandal that infected between 1,000 and 2,000 patients and caused over 500 deaths. Kitano died peacefully of natural causes in Tokyo on May 17, 1986. He was ninety-one years old.
—
Yasuji Okamura commanded the China Expeditionary Army. He was a key figure behind the “Three Alls Policy”—kill all, burn all, loot all. It was a scorched-earth campaign that destroyed villages, seized food, and used forced labor. Over 2.
4 million Chinese civilians died. He was also linked to the establishment of the “comfort women” system, forcing hundreds of thousands of women into sexual slavery. Many of them died from the brutal mistreatment. His forces were finally defeated by the Chinese at the Battle of West Hunan in 1945, and he formally signed the surrender for all Japanese forces in the China theater in Nanjing.
After the war, he was tried and found not guilty in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek then protected him, using him as a military advisor against the communists and blocking American efforts to make him testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Okamura returned to Japan in 1949.
He lived a quiet life and died of stomach cancer on September 2, 1966, aged eighty-two.
