Interesting bit of trivia, there’s a temple in Tainan dedicated to a WW2 Japanese pilot who lost his life during the war.
I hear they play the Japanese national anthem regularly.
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This is an interesting and rather scholarly look at Ichigo and the overall war, I’ll have to watch more of these guys’ videos
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Don’t know what kind of “scholars” they are, but the map that’s on display the whole time shows “Mongolia” in the upper righthand corner when it should be Manchuria.
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Ha, good point. They may or may not be “scholars”, but their work is definitely a couple of cuts above the typical Youtube video.
That’s interesting. There must be a reason for that, because they wouldn’t make such a basic error. Was it Japanese maps during WW2?
Inner Mongolia covers part of it, but it’s not right. Very odd. There must be a reason.
I’ve only done a cursory search, but was inner Mongolia a puppet state of Japan during WW2? This included Manchuria.
I think it’s just an error. It was Manchukuo at the time
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It’s an odd error to make.
They say in the comments
Note on the map:
I know it is geographically challenged in parts. I wanted to use one from Hans van de Ven’s book, but that might have brought up usage/copyright issues so we had to go with the open source wiki map. It does the job, but with a few bizarre errors.
Yeah they pulled it from here
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Just to show how weird WW2 was I’ve been watching some German defence battles during Operation Bagration. There were hardly any Germans involved presumably due to lack of manpower.
Dutch battalions, Danish, Ukrainian ,Norwegian…
The last battalion that held out to the last man at Hitler’s bunker were French.
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The Chinese have always made fun of the fact that Japan said it could conquer all of China in 3 months, and yet they didn’t manage to do so over 8 years.
However, Ichi-go demonstrated that Japan probably didn’t steam roll over China because it had other priorities, and not because it lacked the capability to do so.
Ichi-go aimed to establish a overland route to supply Japan with South East Asian materials, and the IJA completed the task in 8 month. They didn’t need that route prior to 1944, so the Japanese probably deemed occupying those Chinese territories as a waste of resources. If they were winning in the Pacific, they could get those land whenever they want.
I read Taiwanese were not trusted by Japan to send them to fight against the Chinese
That just seems like common sense. There were other theaters where that wouldn’t have been an issue.
I don’t think that statement is entirely true. I don’t think the Japanese trusted them enough to send Taiwanese armies en masse to China, however, they did send a considerable amount of Taiwanese troops to China. Many of them were stranded in China post war, often forced to fight for the KMT or CCP. Most of those who helped the CCP would never see Taiwan again. Many Taiwanese were “volunteered” to fight in the Korean war, and a few of those captured by the Americans made it back to Taiwan.
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