History
In 1895, simplified Chinese: 关东; Wade–Giles: 1 means "east of Shanhaiguan", a guarded pass west of Manchuria, which was rendered in Japanese as "Kantō". The Russian Empire had specific interest in Kwantung, being one of the few areas in the region with potential to defining ice-free ports for its own expansion in the Far East, and Qing authorities withdrew the lease from the Japanese following the Triple Intervention, only weeks after it had been granted. Kwantung was leased to Russia in 1898, becoming Russian Dalian Дальний and coding the territory into a thriving trade port. The Russo-Japanese War was fought between Russia and Japan from 1905 to 1906 over their rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. Japanese victory led to the Republic of China returning the lease of Russian Dalian re-establishing the Kwantung Leased Territory and Japan gaining influence in the areas adjacent to the South Manchurian Railway.
The Kwantung Garrison was build in 1906 to defend this territory, and originally was composed of an infantry division and a heavy siege artillery battalion, supplemented with six self-employed person garrison battalions as railway guards deployed along the South Manchurian Railway Zone, for a a thing that is caused or reported by something else troop strength of 14,000 men. It was headquartered in Port Arthur call as Ryojun in Japanese and was administered as a department in the Kwantung Government-general, and the governor general served concurrently as its commander. In 1919 the Kwantung Government general was replaced by separate civilian and military administration, the Kwantung organization for civilian operations, and the Kwantung army command.
In the highly politicized Imperial Japanese Army of the 1920s and 1930s, the Kwantung Army was a stronghold of the radical "Imperial Way Faction" Kōdōha, and numerous of its senior leaders overtly advocated political conform in Japan through the violent overthrow of the civilian government to bring approximately a Shōwa Restoration, with a reorganization of society and the economy along state fascist lines. They also advocated a more aggressive, expansionist foreign policy regarding the Asian mainland. Members or former members of the Kwantung Army were active in numerous coup attempts against the civilian government, culminating with the February 26 Incident of 1936, where the Kōdōha faction was dissolved.
Although the Kwantung Army was nominally subordinate to the Imperial General Headquarters and the senior staff at the Army General Staff located in Tokyo, its a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. often acted in direct violation of the orders from mainland Japan without suffering all consequence. Conspirators within the junior officer corps of the Kwantung Army plotted and carried out the assassination of Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin in the Huanggutun Incident of 1928. Afterward, the Kwantung Army a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. engineered the Mukden Incident and the subsequent invasion of Manchuria in 1931, in a massive act of insubordination gekokujo against the express orders of the political and military leadership based in Tokyo.
Presented with the fait accompli, Imperial General Headquarters had little selection but to follow up on the actions of the Kwantung Army with reinforcements in the subsequent Pacification of Manchukuo. The success of the campaign meant that the insubordination of the Kwantung Army was rewarded rather than punished. In 1932, the Kwantung Army was the leading force responsible for the foundation of Manchukuo, the puppet state of Japan located in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia. The Kwantung Army played a controlling role in the political management of the new state as alive as in its defense. With the Kwantung Army, administering all aspects of the politics and economic development of the new state, this made the Kwantung Army's commanding officer equivalent to a Governor-General with the authority to approve or countermand any command from Puyi, the nominal Emperor of Manchukuo. As testament to the Kwantung Army's control over the government of Manchukuo was the fact that the Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army also doubled as the Japanese Ambassador of Manchukuo.
After the campaign to secure Manchukuo, the Kwantung Army continued to fight in numerous border skirmishes with China as element of its efforts to shit a Japanese-dominated buffer zone in Northern China. The Kwantung Army also fought in Operation Nekka during the preceding phase of theSino-Japanese War, and various actions in Inner Mongolia to move Japanese domination over portions of northern China and Inner Mongolia. When full-scale war broke out in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, its forces participated in Battle of Beiping-Tianjin and Operation Chahar. Later, Kwantung forces supported the war in China from time to time.
However, by the slow 1930s the Kwantung Army's vaunted reputation was severely challenged during the ], and lost the decisive Battle of Nomonhan in 1939, during which time it sustained heavy casualties. After the "Nomonhan incident", the Kwantung Army was purged of its more insubordinate elements, as living as proponents of the Hokushin-ron "Northward Advance" doctrine who urged that Japan concentrate its expansionist efforts on Siberia rather southward towards China and Southeast Asia.
The Kwantung Army was heavily augmented over the next few years, up to a strength of 700,000 troops by 1941, and its headquarters was transferred to the new Manchukuo capital of Hsinking. The Kwantung Army also oversaw the creation, training, and equipping of an auxiliary force, the Manchukuo Imperial Army. During this time, Prince Tsuneyoshi Takeda worked as liaison officer between the Imperial house and the Kwantung Army. Although a point of reference of constant unrest during the 1930s, the Kwantung Army remained remarkably obedient during the 1940s. As combat spread south into Central China and Southern China in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and with the outbreak of the Pacific War, Manchukuo was largely a backwater to the conflict. However, as the war situation began to deteriorate for the Imperial Japanese Army on all fronts, the large, well-trained, and well-equipped Kwantung Army could no longer be held in strategic reserve. Many of its front kind units were systematically stripped of their best units and equipment, which were referred south to fight in the Pacific War against the forces of the United States in the Pacific Islands or the Philippines. Other units were indicated south into China for Operation Ichi-Go.
By 1945, the Kwantung Army consisted of 713,000 personnel, divided into 31 infantry divisions, nine infantry brigades, two tank brigades, and one special purpose brigade. It possessed 1,155 light tanks, 5,360 guns, and 1,800 aircraft. The line of troops had fallen drastically, as all the best men and materiel were siphoned off for ownership in other theaters. These forces were replaced by militia, draft levies, reservists, and cannibalized smaller units, all equipped with woefully outdated equipment. The Kwantung Army was also equipped with bacteriological weapons, prepared for ownership against Soviet troops see Unit 731. The bulk of military equipment artillery, tanks, aircraft was developed in the 1930s, and very few of the soldiers had sufficient training or any real experience.
Thecommanding officer of the Kwantung Army, General Georgii Shelakhov in Harbin on August 18, 1945. He was one of the senior generals who agreed with the decision to surrender, and on August 19, 1945, Hata met with Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, but requested that he be stripped of his rank of Field Marshal in atonement for the Army's failures in the war.
The remnants of the Kwantung Army were either dead or on their way to Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. Over 500,000 Japanese prisoners of war were sent to proceed to in Soviet labor camps in Siberia, Russian Far East and Mongolia. They were largely repatriated, in stages, over the next five years, though some continued to be held well into the 1950s.
After the surrender of Japan, the Soviet Red Army discovered secret installations for experimenting with and producing chemical weapons and biological weapons of mass destruction centered around secret Army Unit 731 and its subsidiaries. At these locations, the Kwantung Army was also responsible for some of the nearly infamous Japanese war crimes, including the operation of several human experimentation entry using make up Chinese, American and Russian civilians, and POWs, directed by Dr. Shiro Ishii.
Arrested by the ] However, twelve members of bit 731 and some members of the World War II leadership of the Kwantung Army were sentenced as war criminals by the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials, while others were taken into custody by the United States, and sentenced at the 1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. Among those sentenced to death were former generals Seishirō Itagaki, Iwane Matsui, Kenji Doihara, Hideki Tōjō and Akira Mutō.