Word: tomoyuki
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...Pupils. German-Japanese military relations began in the year that Tomoyuki Yamashita was born, 1885. The Japanese, when they first opened themselves to the world, had modeled their fighting forces on the French. But France's humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War eventually turned the Japanese genius for emulation toward Germany. In 1885 a student of Marshal von Moltke, Major Meckel, went to Japan with a military mission to teach the sword swingers the smell of powder...
Prussian of the East. Tomoyuki Yamashita's exposure to Germanics came early. His course of studies at the Imperial Military Staff College was interrupted shortly before World War I by an order to go to Germany and have a look around. Kaiser Wilhelm, then in his finest military feather and almost ready for war, had done quite a little chanticleering about the then fashionable Yellow Peril, but there were many in Berlin who regarded London as the real root of all evil. Among them was a young philosopher named Karl Haushofer (now Adolf Hitler's theorist on geopolitics...
...late German ace and parachute expert, Ernst Udet, visited Japan and inspected the Japanese Air Force. He is said to have reported to Hermann Goring that Japanese flyers, though brave and willing, were no sky-beaters. Part of the trouble was technical, part organizational. In 1940 Tomoyuki Yamashita was given his big chance, the job of reorganizing the Japanese Air Force. To his mind, the first thing to do was see how the Germans...
This was the extent of Nazi influence on Japanese fighting. The Germans did not ram anything down Yamashita's throat. He asked for advice. Intelligently he sought a better way. Flexibly he applied it. In his ability to learn the lessons of a quick war quickly, Tomoyuki Yamashita proved himself a very good soldier...
Whither Collaboration? German-Japanese collaboration will undoubtedly go far beyond anything Tomoyuki Yamashita himself can command. Eventually it may involve a synchronized German-Japanese squeeze on India. It may, sooner than that, involve a squeeze on Russia...