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)
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for ‘tis the only thing in this world that lasts.... ‘Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for.”
—Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949)
“There was nothing to equal it in the whole history of the Corps Diplomatique.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)