6th Regional Army

6th Regional Army
active	August 25, 1944 to August 15, 1945
Country	Japanese Empire
Armed forces	Japanese armed forces
Armed forces	Japanese army
Branch of service	infantry
Type	army
Strength	approx. 300,000
Insinuation	China Expeditionary Army
Location	Hankou
Nickname	Tō ( 統 , "unity")
Butcher	Second Sino-Japanese War Operation Ichi-gō
Supreme command
list of	Commander in chief

The 6th Regional Army ( Japanese 第 6 方面軍 , Dai-roku hōmengun ) was one of the regional armies of the Imperial Japanese Army from 1944 to 1945 . Your Tsūshōgō code (military code name) was unity ( 統 , Tō ).

history

Overview of the Japanese attack movements during Operation Ichi-gō

On August 25, 1944, the 6th Regional Army was set up under the command of General Okamura Yasuji in Hankou in southern China as part of the China Expeditionary Army. It consisted of the 11th , 23rd and 34th Army with a total of twelve infantry divisions and nine independent mixed brigades with around 300,000 men. Immediately after its founding, the 6th Regional Army took part in Operation Ichi-gō , the largest company in the Imperial Japanese Army, where it encircled and destroyed large parts of the Chinese army in the three southern provinces of Guangxi, Hunan and Henan within a few months . The 11th Army formed the spearhead of the attack and had taken several important cities by December 1944, when the advance of the armies involved came to a standstill in front of the heavily defended city of Nanning . The Imperial Headquarters therefore considered the tactical objectives of the operation to have largely been achieved. In the long term, the operation proved to be almost worthless, as despite the capture of the important southern Chinese airfields from where the American B-29 bombers flew air strikes against Japan , the bombing of mainland Japan by the recently captured Mariana Islands was able to continue. The additional direct land connection between the Japanese-occupied areas in northeast China and those in Indochina and Burma also proved to be significantly less effective than planned due to extensive partisan activity.

After the operation, in which 50,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, the 6th Regional Army secured the occupied territories. The most powerful divisions were withdrawn to reinforce threatened theaters of war in the Pacific .

The 6th Regional Army was disbanded by the Daihon'ei on August 15, 1945.

Commander in chief

Commanders

	Surname	From	To
1.	General Okamura Yasuji	August 25, 1944	November 22, 1944
2.	General Okabe Nosaburō	November 22, 1944	August 15, 1945

Chiefs of Staff

	Surname	From	To
1.	Major General Miyazaki Shuichi	August 25, 1944	February 12, 1945
2.	Major General Karakawa Yasuo	February 12, 1945	April 23, 1945
3.	Lieutenant General Nakayama Sadatake	April 23, 1945	August 15, 1945

Subordinate units

When the 6th Regional Army was set up, it consisted of the following units:

• Subordinated directly to the 6th Regional Army:
  • 40th division
  • 64th division
  • 68th Division
• 11th Army (approx. 160,000 men)
  • 3rd division
  • 13th division
  • 27th Division
  • 34th division
  • 37th division
  • 58th Division
  • 16th division
• 23rd Army (approx. 60,000 men)
  • 22nd division
  • 104th Division
• 34th Army (approx. 30,000 men)
  • 39th division

literature

• Victor Madej: Japanese Armed Forces Order of Battle, 1937-1945. Game Publishing, 1981, OCLC 833591372 , OCLC 833591376 .
• Leland Ness: Rikugun: Guide to Japanese Ground Forces 1937-1945. Helion & Company, 2014, ISBN 978-1-909982-00-0 .
• Philip Jowett: The Japanese Army 1931-45 (2) Osprey Publishing, 2002, ISBN 978-1-8417-6354-5
• Charles Pettibone: The organization and order or battle of militaries in World War II: Volume VII: Germany's and Imperial Japan's allies & puppet states Trafford, 2012

Web links

• 総 軍 ・ 方面軍 . Organization of IJA,accessed January 2, 2015(Japanese). 
• List of Higher Echeron Army Headquarters. Organizations of IJA & N, accessed January 1, 2015 . 
• War in the Pacific: Strategy and Command. Louis Morton, accessed April 21, 2015 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Ness, p. 39
2. ↑ Madej, p. 2
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Japanese 6th Area Army 26 August 1944, Japanese Army Studies, Monograph No. 130, China Area Operations Record, 6th Area Army Operations, Prepared for Military History Section, HQ, Army Forces Far East. (No longer available online.) United States Army Combined Arms Center, formerly the original ; accessed on June 1, 2015 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Okamura is the family name, Yasuji the first name.