- 208 - Special General Kanji Ishiwara part 4: Ishiwara vs Hideki Tojo

Hey guys before you listen to this one, do realize this is part 4 on a series about General Kanji Ishiwara, so if you have not already done so I would recommend listening to Part 1-2-3.

This episode is General Kanji Ishiwara part 4: Ishiwara vs Hideki Tojo

So I promised this would be the last one and it is, rest assured. Sheesh what started as a suggested episode turned into an entire series, but then again Ishiwara Kanji was quite a figure. I recently did a podcast with Cody from AlternateHistoryHub, and at the end of the podcast he poked at me for some alternate history ideas related to the Pacific War. My first thought was what if the Triple Intervention after the Russo-Japanese War never occurred, but then I thought….hell what if Ishiwara Kanji never existed or I dunno got hit by a car. Imagine how different things would have been if not for this one, I am just gonna say it, instigator haha. Now I think when one looks at this mans life, we attribute much of the story towards the Mukden Incident and the eventual full scale China war, but thats not where it ends of course. Ishiwara did a lot during the war and after, so to close it all up lets jump back into it.

Ishiwara is now a Major General , chief of the most powerful office on the general staff. He was fighting tooth and nail to limit operations in what was the new China War. A month before everything hit the fan he declared in front of the General staff “I shall never send a single soldier to China as long as I live”. But in mid-June of 1937 rumors emerged that the China garrison was planning another incident in the Beijing area, similar to Ishiwara’s famous Mukden incident of September 1931. Two weeks later the Marco Polo Bridge incident occurred on July 7th. The Japanese army were divided on the issue. There was the expansionists who sought to smash China in a single blow and the non-expansionists who sought to settle everything between their nations before the conflict became too large. Ishiwara was on the side of the non-expansionists and from the earliest hours of the war he directed a losing fight to try and localize the conflict. Fight as he must to stop mobilization of further forces, he was forced to relent multiple times and to his horror the conflict grew and grew. Ishiwara’s efforts or some would say meddling, ironically made things worse for the non-expansionists. Some of the expansionists would go on the record to state Ishiwara bungled the situation, years after the China incident, Colonel Shibayama would say with bitterness “The idea that Ishiawara Kanji opposed the expansion of the China incident is nonsense. If he really had opposed it he wouldn’t have agreed to the mobilization. There were certainly other ways of solving the problem” Ishiwara was stuck between a rock and a hard place. While he wanted to stop the mobilization of more forces to China, the men at the front kept sending reports that Japanese citizens were underthreat in areas like Beijing, his wrists were turned as they say. Ishiwara did not cave in without a fight however, as I said in the last episode he turned to Prime Minister Konoe to strike a deal with Chiang Kai-shek, and Konoe nearly did, but at the last minute he canceled his flight to Nanking.

When the North China incident saw action spring up in Shanghai, it then became officially the China incident and Ishiwara attempted once more to push for a peace settlement in September. However by that point Ishiwara’s influence had dropped considerably, few in the Operations division were still following his lead. Many of the expansionists began to bemoan Ishiwara as nothing more than a nuisance. Prince Sainji would go on the record telling Konoe “Ishiwara is like a candly in the wind ready to be snuffed out at any moment”. By late september Ishiwara was removed from the General staff by General Tada. The expansionists had won the day. There were other non-expansionists like Horiba Kazuo and Imai Takeo who carried on