The Kwantung Army was an army group of the Empire of Japan that was based in Manchuria in northern China from April 1906 to August 1945, taking part in the Second Sino-Japanese War, Soviet-Japanese War, and World War II. The most prestigious command for Japanese generals to have, the Kwantung Army was the largest command of the Imperial Japanese Army and had 1,320,000 troops at one point.
History[]
Japanese troop in Zhejiang, 1942
The Kwantung Army was formed in April 1906 in the Kwantung Leased Territory (present-day Liaodong Peninsula, China) of the Empire of Japan. The army group was initially a battalion of 10,000 troops, but the troop strengths were increased in the 1920s. In 1931, following the Mukden Incident, the Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria and annexed it as the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo; however, in 1937 the Japanese returned to war with Nationalist China and invaded Hong Kong and the coastal areas of China. The Kwantung Army fought against the Chinese Kuomintang and engaged in several massacres, including the Rape of Nanking in 1938. It had a total of 1,320,000 troops at one point, and it was led by the finest generals that the Imperial Japanese Army had to offer. The Kwantung Army's atrocities and victories concerned the United States, which sent the "Flying Tigers" air volunteers to assist in fighting against the Japanese forces in China. From 1941 to 1945, it engaged in many offensives against Nationalist China, Communist China, and the Guangxi Clique, and their war ended only with the surrender to the United States in September 1945. Some Kwantung Army units helped the nationalists in the early stages of the Chinese Civil War, but almost all of the rest were returned to Japan.