Soldiers Guide To The Japanese Army

Washington: War Departament, 1944. — 182 p."Lack of information is a most fertile source of exaggeration, distortion, and legend which, if unrefuted, eventually assume the stature of accepted fact. For years the Japanese were taken lightly as military antagonists, and the confidence of the Western World in its disdainful appraisal of their military and naval capabilities seemed justified by the Japanese failure to achieve decisive victory in the Chinese war. Then, following the outbreak of the war with the United States and Britain, a succession of speedy and apparently easy victories stimulated the rise of the legend of the invincibility of the Japanese soldier. He allegedly was unconquerable in jungle terrain; his fanatical, death-courting charges and last-ditch defenses were broadcast until popular repute invested the Japanese soldier with almost superhuman attributes."