Our next door neighbor, who died last summer, was in Operation Iceberg, Navy, the Okinawa invasion. Horrific bloodbath. He never wanted to talk about it until his last year, after his wife died, he shared some pictures of his ship, LST, acknowledged that he saw Kamikazes (and that was all he would say), the Kamikazes were never more numerous than at Okinawa.

John Masters, in his classic The Road Past Mandalay summed up fighting with the Indian Army and allies against the Japanese (in Burma - I previously copied this from his book, a masterpiece on the war):

There were Chins, Kachins, Karens, and Burmans, mostly light brown, small boned men in worn jungle green, doubly heroic because the Japanese held possession of their homes, often of their families, too; and until about now, how could they be sure which side would win? There were men from every state in the United States. They flew heavy bombers, they ran railroads, they drove titanic trucks at breakneck speeds through the narrow streets of primeval villages....Lastly, and in by far the greatest numbers, there were the men of the Indian Army, the largest volunteer Army the world has ever known. There were men from every caste and race-Sikhs, Dorgras, Pathans, Madrassis, Mahrattas, Rajputs, Assamese, Kumaonis, Punjabis, Garhwalis, Naga head-hunters-and from Nepal, the Gurkhas in all their tribes and subtribes, of Limba and Rai, Thakur and Chhetri, Magar and Gurung...There were men as purple black as the West Africans, and men as pale and gold wheat of skin as a lightly sun-tanned blond. They worshiped God according to the rites of the Mahayana and Hinayana, of Sunni and of Shiah, of Rome and Canterbury and Geneva, of the Vedas and the sages and the Mahabharatas, of the ten Gurus, of the secret shrines of the jungle....There were men who had never seen snow and men who seldom saw anything else. No one who saw the 14th Army in action, above all, no one who saw its dead on the field of battle, the black and the white, and the brown and the yellow, lying together in their indistinguishable blood on the rich soil of Burma, can ever doubt that there is a brotherhood of man; or fail to cry, what is Man, that he can give so much for war, so little for peace?

Lastly, there was our common, single enemy-the Japanese. They are the bravest people I have ever met.  In our armies, any of them, nearly every Japanese would have had a Congressional Medal of Honor or a Victoria Cross.  It is the fashion to dismiss their courage as fanaticism but this only begs the question. They believed in something, and they were willing to die for it, for any smallest detail that would help to achieve it.  What else is bravery?  They pressed home their attacks when no other troops in the world would have done so, when all hope of success was gone; except that it never really is, for who can know what the enemy has suffered, what is his state of mind?  The Japanese simply came on, using all their skill and rage, until they were stopped, by death. In defense they held their ground with a furious tenacity that never faltered.  They had to be killed, company by company, squad by squad, man by man, to the last.

By 1944 many scores of thousands of Allied soldiers had fallen unwounded into enemy hands as prisoners, because our philosophy and our history have taught us to accept the idea of surrender.  By 1944 the number of Japanese captured unwounded, in all theatres of war, probably did not total one hundred. On the Burma front it was about six.

For the rest, they wrote beautiful little poems in their diaries, and practiced bayonet work on their prisoners.  Frugal and bestial, barbarous and brave, artistic and brutal, they were the 'dushman', and we now set about, in all seriousness, the task of killing every one of them.