Hatazo Adachi (17 June 1890 – 10 September 1947) was a Lieutenant-General in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
Biography[]
Hatazo Adachi was born in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan on 17 June 1890. He graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1910, and he graduated from the Army War College in 1922, avoiding involvement in the political factions of the 1930s. Adachi served in the Kwantung Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and he took part in the heavy fighting at the Battle of Shanghai in July 1937. In 1938, he was promoted to Major-General, and he was beloved by his men for living in the same miserable conditions as the rest of them. In August 1940, he was promoted to Lieutenant-General, and he served as Chief-of-Staff of the North China Area Army from 1941 to 1942, overseeing scorched earth campaigns in China. On 9 November 1942, he was sent to command the Japanese Eighteenth Army on New Britain, and his army was decimated by malaria, heat exhaustion, and malnutrition while fighting the Allied Powers on New Guinea. In August 1945, Adachi and his remaining 13,000 troops (out of an original 140,000) surrendered to Australia at Cape Wom in Wewak. Adachi was sentenced to life imprisonment after the war, so he committed suicide with a rusty parting knife in Rabaul in 1947.