Kwantung Army
The elite, fiercely independent Japanese army in Manchuria that repeatedly dragged Japan into wider war by acting on its own.
The Kwantung Army was the most dangerous armed force in the Japanese empire, and part of what made it dangerous was that it often did not take orders. Formed in 1919 to guard Japan's leasehold on the tip of Manchuria and the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway, it grew into a state within the state: an elite command posted thousands of miles from Tokyo and run by radical young officers who were convinced they understood Japan's destiny better than the politicians did. Again and again it made national policy at gunpoint, and again and again the government in Tokyo was left to follow.
Insubordination as a habit
The army's officers practiced what the Japanese called gekokujo, the lower overruling the higher. In 1928 its officers assassinated the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin by blowing up his train, gambling that the chaos would let Japan seize the region. The gamble failed and Tokyo hushed the affair up, but the officers were not seriously punished. In 1931 two of its staff officers, Ishiwara Kanji and Itagaki Seishiro, went much further: they staged the Mukden Incident, detonating explosives on the very railway they were meant to protect and using the fake attack as a pretext to overrun all of Manchuria. Tokyo had authorized none of it. But the conquest succeeded and proved wildly popular at home, the civilian government proved unable to rein the army in, and the plotters were promoted rather than punished. That failure to control its own soldiers helped push Japan down the road to full-scale war in China and, in time, to the Pacific.
Kingmaker and its end
Having seized Manchuria, the Kwantung Army ran the puppet state of Manchukuo that it built there, and its command became a proving ground for the men who would run the empire. Hideki Tojo, the future wartime prime minister, served as its chief of staff; so did other architects of the war, who carried the army's contempt for civilian control back to Tokyo. But the army's swagger outran its record. When it probed the Soviet frontier at Nomonhan in 1939, Soviet forces under Georgy Zhukov crushed it in a border war that helped steer Japan south toward the United States and Britain rather than north against the USSR. By 1945 its best divisions had been stripped away to feed the losing fight in the Pacific, leaving a hollow shell behind an intimidating name. When roughly 1.5 million Soviet troops stormed into Manchuria on 9 August 1945, the once-feared Kwantung Army collapsed in a matter of days, and hundreds of thousands of its men were marched off into years of Soviet captivity. The force that had so often dragged Japan into war did not get to choose the terms of its own end.