Volunteer Fighting Corps (国民義勇戦闘隊, Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai?) were armed civil defense units planned in 1945 in the Empire of Japan as a last desperate measure to defend the Japanese home islands against the projected Allied invasion during Operation Downfall (Ketsugo Sakusen) in the final stages of World War II.
They were the Japanese equivalent of the German Volkssturm. Its Commander-in-Chief was former Prime Minister General Koiso Kuniaki.
Read more about Volunteer Fighting Corps: Equipment
Famous quotes containing the words volunteer, fighting and/or corps:
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one, a savage city, yet it had such tenderness, a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.”
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938)
“L’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde!”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)