page_title: Hisaichi Terauchi
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Hisaichi Terauchi / Biography / World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: Japanese General Count Terauchi Hisaichi commanding officer of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group. Singapore 1942
context_page_description: Count Hisaichi Terauchi was a Gensui in the Imperial Japanese Army, commander of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group during World War II, and a war criminal.
context_section_description: In February 1937, Terauchi was appointed head of the Inspectorate General of Military Training, the third-most prestigious post in the military. With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Terauchi was assigned combat duty and was given command of the North China Area Army in August 1937. He was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1938.
  In November 1941, Terauchi was transferred to command of the Southern Expeditionary Army Group and soon afterward began coordinating war plans with Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku for the Pacific War. After leading the conquest of Southeast Asia, Terauchi established his headquarters in Singapore. he received the  Order of the Golden Kite, 1st class, in March 1942. Promoted to Gensui (Field Marshal) on 6 June 1943, he relocated to the Philippines in May 1944. When this area came under threat from the Allied attack, he retreated to Saigon in French Indochina. Soon after receiving word of the loss of Burma by Japan, he suffered a stroke on 10 May 1945. 
  As the war in the Pacific drew to a close, a British Intelligence Liaison Officer, Major Richard Holbrook McGregor, was sent by General Mountbatten to Saigon to verify that Count Terauchi was indeed in a hospital and unable to make the flight to RAF Mingaladon Airfield to personally discuss terms of a cease-fire. Instead, the remaining 680,000 Japanese soldiers in Southeast Asia were surrendered on his behalf in Singapore on 12 September 1945 by General Seishirō Itagaki. Terauchi personally surrendered to Mountbatten on 30 November 1945 in Saigon.  On 12 June 1946, he suffered from another stroke at Renggam, Johor Bahru, Malaya  while being transferred to a prisoner of war camp and died. He was buried at the Japanese cemetery in Singapore.
  The 2nd Count Terauchi surrendered his family heirloom wakizashi short sword to the then Lord Louis Mountbatten in Saigon in 1945. The sword dates from 1413, and is now kept at Windsor Castle. It was almost the subject of a diplomatic incident in the mid-1980s, when Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother wanted to place it on prominent display during a dinner held for Crown Prince Naruhito of Japan. However, her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, vetoed the idea.
caption: Terauchi Hisaichi in Singapore, 1942
exif: {}