Hideki Tojo (30 December 1884 – 23 December 1948) was Prime Minister of Japan from 17 October 1941 to 22 July 1944, succeeding Fumimaro Konoe and preceding Kuniaki Koiso. He led Japan into World War II as a member of the Axis Powers, and he was executed for war crimes in 1948.
Biography[]
Hideki Tojo was born on 30 December 1884 in Tokyo, Japan. In 1905, he graduated from the Japanese Military Academy, and in 1928 he was promoted to Colonel, believing in militarism and Japanese nationalism. In September 1935, having been promoted to Major-General, he took command of the Kwantung Army's military police during the Second Sino-Japanese War and was one of the nationalist officers who put down the February 1936 coup by radical political factions within the Imperial Japanese Army, and he united the Toseiha faction with the patriotic (albeit anti-political) factions of the Japanese army.
Militaristic leader[]
Tojo in 1939.
In 1937, he became chief-of-staff of the Kwantung Army, and his only real combat experience was during Operation Chahar in 1937. As Minister of War from 1940 under Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, he was a proponent of the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Italy, and he oversaw the Japanese occupation of French Indochina. As the Dutch, French, and British troops withdrew their troops from Southeast Asia to reinforce their armies in Europe in 1939, Tojo advocated invading Indochina to bypass the United States' trade embargo against Japan and to secure much-needed raw materials.
Prime Minister[]
In October 1941, he became the new Prime Minister under Emperor Hirohito. Tojo became the face of fascism in Japan and ordered the Attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December, and despite a great series of campaigns that took over much of East Asia, Japan began to lose the war by 1943, and after the Battle of Saipan he was dismissed as Prime Minister and Chief of Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army. It is said that Fumimaro Konoe had a part in his downfall. At the war's end, he was arrested by the United States as a war criminal, and he was hanged in 1948.