Chosen Army

Chosen Army
active	March 11, 1904 to January 22, 1945
Country	Japan
Armed forces	Japanese armed forces
Armed forces	Japanese army
Branch of service	infantry
Type	corps
Location	Keijō

Chosen Army
Japanese name
Kanji	朝鮮 軍
Rōmaji after Hepburn	Chosen gun
Korean name
Hangeul	조선군
Hanja	朝鮮 軍
Revised Romanization	Joseon gun
McCune-Reischauer	Choson-gun

The Chosen Army ( dt. "Korean Army") was an army of the Imperial Japanese Army , which initially served as a protective force, from 1910 as a colonial army in the Japanese province of Chosen . It existed from March 11, 1904 to January 22, 1945 and was formed from the 19th and 20th Japanese divisions . Her successor was the 17th Regional Army .

history

During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 occupied until 1905, the Imperial Japanese Army much of the Empire of Korea and established on 11 March 1904 a so-called "Korean Garrison Army" ( Jap. 韓国駐剳軍 , Kankoku Chūsatsugun ) in the capital Hanseong to to protect the Japanese embassy and civilians there. At the beginning this consisted only of Japanese military police and only after the annexation of Korea by Japan on August 22, 1910, a first division was stationed in what is now called Keijō in protest of the population. Korea was incorporated as a province with the name Chosen in the Empire of Japan and accordingly the Korean garrison army was renamed Chōsen Chūsatsugun , "Chōsen Garrison Army ". From 1915, the 20th Japanese Division strengthened the 19th Division in Chosen. On June 1, 1918, the name was again changed to Chōsen-gun ("Chōsen Army") to make it clear that the Chōsen Province did not need a garrison army, as it was regarded as an integral part of the Japanese Empire, even if its citizens were not yet had full Japanese civil rights. The main task of the Chosen Army was to protect Chosen from external threats from the Republic of China and the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union . However, it was also used there against Korean nationalist uprisings and other political unrest. During the Siberian intervention of the Japanese army from 1918 to 1922, the Chosen Army served as backing for the Japanese soldiers stationed on Russian territory. It also assisted the Kwantung Army in its unauthorized action in Manchuria in the run-up to the Japanese invasion of 1931. In 1941 it was placed under the command of the new Central Defense Command to better coordinate its actions with those of other units in the Pacific War .

When the war situation in the Pacific War turned more and more against Japan and from 1945 the possibility of an invasion of the Japanese main islands became more and more apparent, the Chosen Army was integrated into the newly formed 17th Regional Army on January 22, 1945 and placed under the command of the Kwantung- Army posed. This was done to make operations outside the province possible in an emergency without making it clear to the public that troops were being withdrawn from the heartland. However, it was no longer used outside of Chōsen, as the Soviet Union from August 9th in Operation August Storm overran both the Japanese-controlled Manchuria and, by landings on the east coast of Chōsen, brought a small, northern part of it under their control. The few, thinned out troops could no longer offer the Red Army any effective resistance and quickly surrendered.

Final withdrawal of the remaining Japanese soldiers from Chosen under the supervision of the US military

After the capitulation of Japan , the successor to the Chosen Army, the 17th Regional Army, was officially dissolved on August 15, 1945. Since the first units of the 7th US Infantry Division landed in the American occupation zone, south of the 38th parallel, on September 8, 1945 and their commander John R. Hodge landed on the following day , the Japanese colonial administration and the military structures remained full until this date intact. Since Hodge had few American troops and the Koreans were not to be given broad self-government, many Japanese soldiers continued to be kept under arms and remained in the country. Only when, fueled by the anti-Japanese policies of the Soviet-occupied north, the Korean protests against the former colonial rulers remaining in the country became increasingly violent in the course of 1946, Hodge was ordered to expel all Japanese from the country. After their demilitarization , this also included the soldiers of the former Chosen Army.

literature

• Richard B Frank: Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire . Random House, New York 1999, ISBN 0-679-41424-X .
• Bernard Jowett: The Japanese Army 1931-45 (Volume 2, 1942-45) . Osprey Publishing, 1999, ISBN 1841763543 .
• Victor Madej: Japanese Armed Forces Order of Battle, 1937-1945 . Game Publishing Company, 1981.
• Daniel Marston: The Pacific War Companion: From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima . Osprey Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1841768820 .

Web links

• Japanese Forces Korean Army January 1938. http://usacac.army.mil , accessed December 19, 2017 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ US Forces Korea / 8th US Army 1984 Annual History Report p. 28. (PDF; 5.1 MB)
2. ↑ Jörg Friedrich: Yalu - On the banks of the third world war . 1st edition, List Taschenbuch, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-548-60857-0 , pp. 198 f. and p. 203

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