How We Sold Our Soul-Unit 731, The Asian Version of Operation Paper Clip?

photorandy2023

2 years ago

The Articles in the Category cover a vast range of history not only in our country but in the world as well. The category is entitled “How We Sold Our Soul”. In many cases our history has hinged on compromises being made by the powers at be. They say hind-sight is 20/20, which is why I am discussing these land mark decisions in this manner. The people that made these decisions in many cases thought they were doing the right thing. However in some instances they were made for expediency and little thought was given to the moral ramifications and the fallout that would result from them. I hope you enjoy these articles. The initial plan is to discuss 10 compromises, but as time progresses I am sure that number will increase.

During the occupation of Japan after WWII, the US had an important decision to make. Should they hold those responsible for atrocities during the war accountable or should they take the information to advance the national interest?

The researchers who worked at Unit 731, the biological and chemical warfare research and development unit, were given immunity in exchange for their research data. Unit 731 included factories filled with humans, tested with various diseases, as well as field tests on civilians of the Soviet Union and China. Imperial Japan had aspirations to develop operative tools of biological warfare, one that was prohibited after World War I. Using alive human captives, the Japanese scientists of the medical profession gathered data on the progression of the diseases until the “human guinea pigs” collapsed. Most of these scientists lived peacefully after WWII, with a few of them having to go through the Khabarovsk Trial, which was deemed by the West as communist propaganda.

Most of the horrors on Unit 731 had been hearsays and rumors until recently with the passing of the Freedom of Information Act. This book is based on documents found in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Russian archival documents, and translations of the Khabarovsk Trial to paint a complete picture of the cover-up of the atrocious act of Unit 731. Readers could expect to question themselves with this evidence: Should war crimes be covered up in the name of national interest?

Unlike Nazi Germany’s atrocities in WW2, Japan’s heinous wartime atrocities are not well discussed in the mainstream and even intentionally hidden to public. Japan’s atrocities in WW2 included factories where various diseases were tested on human captives, as well as field tests on Soviet Union and Chinese civilians. Japan aspired to develop effective tools for biological warfare, which was prohibited after WWI. Using human captives, the medically trained Japanese scientists gathered data on progression of the diseases until the “human guinea pigs” died.

Keeping the information secret, the United States secured this data with a price tag, i.e., not prosecuting those responsible for the operations, such as Emperor Hirohito. The Soviet Union later joined in hiding information, since the secrets of successful biological warfare provided both superpowers massive new weapons of destruction.

What is Unit 731?

Unit 731 was created in 1936 by the authorization of Emperor Hirohito in Japanese-occupied Manchuria with the aim of developing biological weapons. It was led by Ishii Shiro and had a partner unit, Unit 100. Unit 731 was supported by Japanese universities and medical schools which supplied doctors and research staff. Organized under the alias of The Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731 operated as a covert chemical and bacteriological warfare research and development unit, conducting and responsible for some of the most atrocious war crimes of imperial Japan.According to several former workers of Unit 731 and Unit 100, the laboratories were constructed for the purpose of manufacturing bacteriological weapons, which the Japanese Army would use against namely the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and China. While the units were not created with the sole purpose of preparing Japan for war against the USSR, there is evidence that proves the expected war was one of the major motivations.

On August 9, 1945 the Soviet Union officially declared war on Japan, and the Red Army moved into Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In response to the Soviets’ declaration of war, the Japanese government in Tokyo ordered that all the research facilities in Manchuria be destroyed to erase all incriminating material. Unit 100, located just south of Changchun, and Unit 731, located in the cluster of villages known as Ping Fan, had carried out some of Japan’s most horrific war crimes during World War Two.

August 15, 1945 marks the day when the Pacific side of WWII ended when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender and signed the peace agreement. This also meant an end to the ambitious projects of the Japanese biological warfare scientists that previously had the ability to perform a multitude of experiments on humans since the 1930s. However, and as shown in the post-war actions, the BW war criminals of the Japanese WWII era were allowed to walk free from their history, and most continued to work in medical positions. All of this was permitted by the United States, who took sole control once they occupied Japan in September 1945.

Tokyo War Crimes Trial without Ishii Shiro

Once in Tokyo, it is believed that Ishii hid the allegedly “destroyed” documents concerning BW tests and information — one location may have been his very own back yard. One final step to secure disappearance, he falsified his own death. This included a fake funeral with paid mourners, as well as newspaper announcements of his death. It is safe to say that a whole orchestra of people were on a mission to hide him. Ishii played dead until January 1946, and it was a reawakening that seemed not surprising to U.S. authorities. While being well-acknowledged as a major character in the Japanese offensive and defensive BW, the United States never arrested him but, instead, allowed him to stay at his private property.

Ishii’s fellow scientists were well recognized by the U.S. prior to the surrender, information which was gradually presented by the captured Japanese PWs. Additionally, the U.S. recognized many of 122 Japanese biology scientists in 1944 and in what kind of fields they were known to have worked or done research. Whatever reason may have dominated the decision the U.S. made not to capture the suspects of BW activity, it was deemed to be a weak one. Giving the suspects such as Ishii an opportunity to control the locations for interrogation enabled them to subsequently impact the outlines of interrogations. Even though interrogation documents and reports do display American dominance over questions asked, it is unmistakable that the Japanese BW scientists were given significantly much more allowance than their Nazi counterparts.

When pressing charges upon those who were finally to be the defendants in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the initial intention and suggestion of the U.S. was to incorporate it solely with the jurisdiction of ‘Crimes against Peace’ and, as a shocking contrast to the Nuremberg trials, enable the Japanese government itself to participate in the trial by providing its own prosecutors.

Instead of the Americans joining forces with the Soviets to properly search the ruins of the death factories destroyed by the Japanese, the price for the knowledge of BW was too alluring for both sides, especially when the pressure brought by the Cold War continued to separate the two countries. It is apparent, though, that the Soviet Union was quite eager to communicate and made multiple suggestions on the topic, and it outlines a theory that it was the United States first lingered over the information and further used the fear of Soviets to entitle its sole acquisition of the BW information.

Price over Justice – Trading Immunity for BW Data

At some point in the first interrogations, received information was secured more tightly. In November 1945, the Secretary of War sent a message to the Deputy Chief of Staff concerning MacArthur stating that from there on, all BW information must be handled as “secret” and only be distributed to the Scientific Branch, G-2 and the War Department. It had been prompted by the Scientific Intelligence Mission, one that included the American Camp Detrick scientists who had been confronting the Japanese medical personnel.

Various U.S. officials wanted to keep all of the data received hidden and saw increasing potential in the BW network Ishii and his companions had created. Oncethe Tokyo War Crimes Trial became public knowledge, it appears a break from the interrogations was needed for the U.S. to form plans on how to proceed on the Japanese BW matter. Measures were taken to restrict any access to the suspects and, by the end of 1946, the Legal Section was at a good stage of collecting new data.

SWNCC took a few months to decide its formal response to MacArthur’s request regarding immunity, and its Subcommittee for the Far East provided backup about the issue on August 1, 1947. The task force strongly urged that written immunity be given, since the Japanese had continued to provide the information without it — a certain kind of gesture that was probably seen as something to be respected. It was also assured that IPS could not intervene in the immunity project because it had already assured (in December 1946 and again in June 1947) that no action should be taken to bring the accusations of BW into the Tokyo War Crimes Trial due to the lack of evidence that could have supported the witnesses’ statements. IPS additionally continued to maintain that the Soviets could be expected to bring their information first into the trial. Hence, it was concluded that the secrecy of the immunity project would continue, and if further charges were made by anyone, SCAP’s June 6th evaluation of all data received about the alleged use of BW would serve as a protective shield. The SWNCC did not react to the task force’s conclusions, but recounted that Ishii and the BW personnel should continue giving more information.

Most of the horrors on Unit 731 had been hearsays and rumors until recently with the passing of the Freedom of Information Act. This book is based on documents found in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Russian archival documents, and translations of the Khabarovsk Trial to paint a complete picture of the cover-up of the atrocious act of Unit 731. Readers could expect to questions themselves with this evidence: Should war crimes be covered up in the name of national interest?

The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and Amnesty for Unit 731

Tsuneishi Keiichi of Kanagawa University had already been unearthing secrets about Japan’s biological warfare (BW) program for a quarter century when he made a vital discovery about Unit 731 in summer 2005. The two memoranda he discovered from July 1947 were written by Brig. Gen. Charles Willoughby, head of GHQ’s intelligence unit during the American Occupation, and found in the U.S. National Archives. The documents shed new light on GHQ’s carrot-and-stick method of obtaining BW data at the outset of the Cold War as the arms race against the Soviet Union heated up. The Americans offered the Japanese scientists far more carrots—in the form of cash payments and other rewards as well as immunity from prosecution—than was previously understood.

(Japan Focus is posting these declassified Willoughby memos online below. In future, we will make available Japanese translations.)

In exchange for cooperation from the Japanese side, the horrific war crimes of Unit 731 were suppressed by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Not only were the unit’s members not prosecuted for war crimes, they were rewarded and went on to occupy prestigious positions in postwar Japan’s medical and academic communities. More recently, as in other reparations movements stemming from Japanese war conduct, Japan’s courts have played the contradictory role of validating plaintiffs’ descriptions of historical events but rejecting their claims to compensation on legal grounds.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted by Reuters on April 19, 2006, as saying: “The government is not in possession of materials that tell us about the activities of this unit. If we do find some materials, we would accept it as a solemn fact of history.” The Japanese government, then, does not currently view Dr. Ishii Shiro’s atrocious programs as historical truth. The hypocrisy is striking: the Japanese state and military destroyed the very records it now says are necessary to prove Unit 731’s actions, while the issues were covered up with American complicity.

This characteristic attitude toward its war responsibility places Japan yet again on a collision course with China regarding history. China’s Unit 731 Exhibition Hall near Harbin announced in 2005 that it would seek UNESCO World Heritage status for the main BW and medical experimentation site. Last year 200,000 people visited the state-run museum, which is undergoing major expansion and restoration. “Our goal is to build it into a world-class war memorial and educate people all over the world,” the facility’s curator said in a Washington Post article last April 7. “This is not just a Chinese concern. It is a concern of humanity.”

Critics accuse the Chinese government of manipulating historical issues to foster nationalism and bolster the regime’s domestic legitimacy, while scoring easy points against Japan in the global arena of public opinion. But it was Japan, not China, which carried out the biological terror of Unit 731 and continues to evade accountability for it today—with more than a little help from its American ally.

We invite readers to examine ongoing Japan Focus coverage of the efforts by Chinese, Korean and other victims to secure justice through the courts and other venues in related cases involving forced labor, the military comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre among others. We thank Yasuhara Keiko for translation into Japanese of the US archival documents. –William Underwood ]

Everyone has heard of Auschwitz, but what about Pingfan? This Japanese germ warfare headquarters and laboratory in Manchuria, northern China, did not hold as many victims, but atrocities committed there were physically worse than in the Nazi concentration camp, and lasted much longer.

Many people know of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi SS “Angel of Death” and a physician (though not chief medical officer) at Auschwitz from 1943-45. There, he deliberately infected prisoners with deadly diseases and conducted fatal surgeries, often without anesthetic. He escaped and lived in South America undiscovered until after his death at 68 in 1979 in Brazil.

But what of Army General Dr. Ishii Shiro? He was the chief of Japan’s well financed, scientifically coordinated and government approved biological warfare program from 1932-45. Ishii rose to general and supervised deliberate infection of thousands of captives with deadly diseases. He also conducted grotesque surgeries, but the unique medical specialty of Ishii and his surgical team were dissections, without anesthetic, on an estimated 3,000 live, conscious humans. In 1959, Ishii, a wealthy man, died peacefully at home in Japan at the age of 67.

Why the discrepancy of knowledge about these two monsters? After so long, why does it still matter? The answer to both questions lies in policies of secrecy and complicity that continue today. They should concern Japanese, of course, but also Americans and many others.

It is because of U.S. connivance in Japanese secrecy that Tokyo’s biological war has yet to be fully disclosed. An estimated 400,000 disease deaths, almost all Chinese, remain uncompensated. Japan, unlike Germany with its commendable atonement and billions of dollars in reparations, has yet even to apologize specifically to biological war victims, let alone pay compensation for suffering from its nationally driven medical torture program.

On my desk are two documents previously marked Top Secret and dated July 1947. They show not only full U.S. participation in allowing the Japanese medical torturers who escaped to Tokyo to go free in exchange for information, but that the Pentagon actually paid them. As General Charles Willoughby, chief of U.S. Military Intelligence (known as G-2) gleefully noted to his headquarters, these pay-offs were “a mere pittance… netting the U.S. the fruit of 20 years’ laboratory tests and research” in this “critically serious form of warfare.”

Meanwhile, as Ishii and his cohort pocketed U.S. taxpayers’ money, the Soviet Union was preparing a criminal court hearing for 12 Japanese biowar scientists they caught at Pingfan, just after its demolition by Ishii’s men.

The trial in Khabarovsk resulted in all 12 being sentenced from 2-25 years. Three years earlier, in 1946, the Soviet prosecutor had given his U.S. equivalent in Tokyo the main evidence. But nothing happened. After the Khabarovsk verdict, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia demanded Ishii’s arrest and trial. General Douglas MacArthur, Japan’s occupation supremo, denounced Izvestia and the trial as “false communist propaganda”. Docile Western media ignored the Soviet charges. Silence then reigned for decades.
Then in 1981 American journalist John Powell, who had obtained the Khabarovsk transcript, published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists details of open-air germ tests on captured Chinese and Russian men, women and children. Some were bound to stakes in a large field and bombarded with anthrax. Others were subjected to germs of bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid, and women to syphilis.

And, in an excruciating irony, he told how Chinese captives had been killed by having their livers exposed to X-rays. The world’s first use of radiation against a wartime enemy was carried out by… Japan. Its biological warfare (BW) was also illegal, since all such experiments were banned by the 1925 Geneva Convention, which Japan signed but did not ratify.

The media then headlined what it called Unit 731. This was the name of the commanding Pingfan imperial army group, and the one that became best known. But at least nine units functioned with apparently random numbers, dotted all across China and Japanese-occupied Asia. All came under the Pingfan headquarters, which had been specially constructed near the town of Harbin. Occupying 65 square kilometers, it contained 150 buildings with cinema, a swimming pool, Shinto temple, lounge, bar, and laboratories, operating theaters, and prison cells. It was serviced by its own rail branch line and had fleets of vehicles and airplanes.
During the 1981 burst of publicity, Justice B.V.A Roling, a Dutchman and the only surviving judge from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo, Asia’s Nuremberg, complained that no word about biological warfare had been offered in evidence. He wrote: “It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the court by the U.S. government.”

General Willoughby and officials of MacArthur’s Supreme Command for the Allied Powers in Tokyo had succeeded in suppressing evidence from Ishii and colleagues, but separate inquiries were made by the International Prosecution Section (IPS). Its lawyers gathered evidence including detailed statements from defecting Japanese bio-scientists from Pingfan. The latter testified to human live vivisection, the dumping of lethal germs in Chinese water supplies and food stores, as well as aerial spraying. Yet all was silenced even though the information went to the top.

IPS documents stamped “to be read by the Commander-in-Chief U.S. forces” were sent to President Harry Truman in 1947. No word has ever emerged on what Truman thought or said about this evidence. It is one of many still unknown facts about the Japanese-American conspiracy to conceal the complete account of the Japanese bio-warfare horror.

At Fort Detrick, Maryland, the main U.S. installation for BW, records remain on file of the thousands of tissue slides, preserved organs (some labeled “American”) removed from living bodies, with medical schedules and reports on perverse surgical procedures on screaming and writhing human specimens.

General Willoughby listed the five most important items providing “the greatest value in future development of the United States BW program.” These included the Japanese scientists’ “complete report” of “BW against man” that Willoughby described as “the only information available in world”; “field trials against Chinese” such as Powell described; using animals as “deadly bacteria conveyors” (“U.S. has done little work in this field”); and a “summary of the human experiments.” The G-2 heard it all.

The general’s conclusion: “Data on human experiments may prove invaluable… and Japanese may now reveal research in chemical warfare [and] death rays.” Did they? We do not know.

Next came the self-praise and grumbles in which military men like to indulge. The results, said G-2, “were only obtainable through skillful psychological approach to top-flight pathologists bound by mutual oath not to incriminate each other in these disclosures. They were assisted by direct payments, payments in-kind (food, miscellaneous gift items, entertainment), hotel bills, and board (in areas of search for buried evidence, etc.). All of these actions did not amount to more than 150/200,000 Yen.” This amounted to only $2,000 at today’s exchange rates, but substantially more in terms of its value in the Japanese economy of the time.

Then came the grumbles. The “pittance” in funds came from the military intelligence department’s budget, but this was now restricted. Willoughby wrote to his boss in Washington D.C., General S.J. Chamberlin: “We shall find it successively more difficult to induce these people to disclose information” without more money. He mentioned “unanimous protests” from the spooks against “the absurdity of these restrictions.”

Today those crimes live on. Meanwhile, Japan continues to conceal other details of its wartime research. Masses of documents may have been destroyed. In 2002 in Japan, 180 Chinese victims and relatives from Hunan and Zhejiang provinces brought a court case. The Japanese judge agreed they had been infected by plague-carrying fleas dropped by Unit 731 planes during the Pacific War, but rejected their compensation claim on legal technicalities. The case continues on appeal.

Chinese anger against this and other unresolved Japanese war crimes increases as a new generation reviews the past. The issue will gain momentum so long as Japan continues to shunt aside its wrongs against Asian neighbors. The world should take notice. Why should Pingfan, Unit 731, and Dr. Shiro Ishii remain obscure names known mainly to historians?

Counterpunch editors’ note: Under the overall codename Project Paperclip US intelligence agencies made similarly diligent efforts to acquire the research records of Nazi doctors working in the death camps. They also brought over several of the Nazi medical experimenters and set them to work in US military research centers such as Ft. Detrick. The Nazi research was quickly put into play in the field. In 1950, the CIA’s Office of Security, headed at the time by Sheffield Edwards, opened a project called Bluebird whose object was to get an individual “to do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” The first Bluebird operations were conducted in Japan in October 1950 and were reportedly witnessed by Richard Helms, who would later run the Agency. Twenty-five North Korean POWs were given alternating doses of depressants and stimulants. The POWs were shot up with barbituates, putting them to sleep, then abruptly awoken with injections of amphetamines, put under hypnosis, then interrogated. The operation was, of course, in total contravention of international protocols. The Bluebird interrogations continued through the duration of the Korean War.

These six “experiments” by Unit 731 rank among some of the most horrifying war crimes ever committed — and they went virtually unpunished.

Xinhua via Getty ImagesUnit 731 personnel conduct a bacteriological trial upon a test subject in Nong’an County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

World War II devastated the lives of more than 100 million people around the world. And out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater. In fact, Japan arguably started the war by attacking Manchuria in 1931, and it inarguably waged war with China by invading in 1937.

The disturbances and upheavals that these invasions caused shook China to its very foundations, triggered a civil war and a famine that probably killed more people than currently live in Canada and Australia combined, and lasted until the country’s Soviet “liberation” in 1945.

And out of all the atrocities that Imperial Japan unleashed upon the Chinese people during this brutal occupation, probably none were as gratuitously hateful as the operations of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit that somehow plumbed new depths in what was already a genocidal war.

Despite innocent beginnings as a research and public health agency, Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. All this “progress” was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human captives, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 was shut down at the end of the war.

But before Unit 731 was broken up in 1945, it committed some of the most torturous human experiments in recorded history.

Unit 731 Experiments: Frostbite Testing

Xinhua via Getty ImagesThe frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how best to treat frostbite. Date unspecified.

Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist assigned to Unit 731, took a special interest in hypothermia. As part of Maruta’s study in limb injuries, Hisato routinely submerged captives’ limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin. According to one eyewitness account, the limbs made a sound like a plank of wood when struck with a cane.

Hisato then tried different methods for rapid rewarming of the frozen appendage. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the person’s own blood to thaw it out.

Vivisection Of Conscious Captives

Xinhua via Getty ImagesA Unit 731 doctor operates on a patient that is part of a bacteriological experiment. Date unspecified.

Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. One element of the unit, called “Maruta,” took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients.

At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian captives.

And as the concept of consent went out the window, so did the restraint of the researchers. It was around this time that Unit 731 began referring to confined research subjects as “logs,” or “Maruta” in Japanese.

Study methods in these experiments were barbaric.

Vivisection, for example, is the practice of mutilating human bodies, without anesthesia, to study the operations of living systems. Thousands of men and women, mostly Chinese communist captives as well as children and elderly farmers, were infected with diseases such as cholera and the plague, then had their organs removed for examination before they died in order to study the effects of the disease without the decomposition that occurs after death.

Subjects had limbs amputated and reattached to the other side of the body, while others had their limbs crushed or frozen, or had the circulation cut off to observe the progress of gangrene.

Finally, when a prisoner’s body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. None of the Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, or Russian captives assigned to Unit 731 survived their confinement.

Unit 731’s Horrifying Weapons Tests

Associated Press/LIFE via Wikimedia CommonsA Japanese soldier uses a Chinese man’s body for bayonet practice near Tianjin, China. September 1937.

The effectiveness of various weapons was of obvious interest to the Japanese Army. To determine effectiveness, Unit 731 herded captives together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges by multiple Japanese weapons, such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates.

Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in this way, though the victims were usually bound for these tests. Flamethrowers were also tested, on both covered and exposed skin. In addition, gas chambers were set up at unit facilities and test subjects exposed to nerve gas and blister agents.

Heavy objects were dropped onto bound victims to study crush injuries, subjects were locked up and deprived of food and water to learn how long humans could survive without them, and victims were allowed to drink only sea water, or were given injections of mismatched human or animal blood to study transfusions and the clotting process.

Meanwhile, prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of research participants, as well as inflicting horrible burns when the emitting plates were miscalibrated or held too close to the subjects’ nipples, genitals, or faces.

And to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers, Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died, which usually happened around 10 to 15 G’s, though young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces.

Syphilis Experiments On Unit 731 Captives

Wikimedia CommonsGeneral Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731.

Venereal disease has been the bane of organized militaries since ancient Egypt, and so it stands to reason that the Japanese military would take an interest in the symptoms and treatment of syphilis.

To learn what they needed to know, doctors assigned to Unit 731 infected victims with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects, however.

To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male victims were ordered to rape both female and male fellow captives, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.

Rape And Forced Pregnancy

Wikimedia CommonsUnit 731’s Harbin facility.

Beyond just the syphilis experiments, rape became a common feature of Unit 731’s experiments.

For example, female captives of childbearing age were sometimes forcibly impregnated so that weapon and trauma experiments could be done on them.

After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up and the effects on the fetuses studied.

The idea seems to have been to translate the teams’ findings into civilian medicine, but if Unit 731’s researchers ever published these results, the papers seem not to have survived the war years.

Germ Warfare On Chinese Civilians

Xinhua via Getty ImagesUnit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments with captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

The totality of Unit 731’s research was in support of their larger mission, which by 1939 was to develop horrific weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese population, and presumably American and Soviet forces, if the time ever came.

To this end, Unit 731 cycled through tens of thousands of captives at several facilities across Manchuria, which had been occupied by imperial forces for years. Inmates of these facilities were infected with several of the most lethal pathogens known to science, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, and typhus, which the Japanese hoped would spread from person to person after being deployed and depopulate disputed areas.

To breed the most lethal strains possible, doctors monitored patients for rapid onset of symptoms and quick progression. Victims who pulled through were shot, but those who got sickest fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table, and their blood was used to transfect other captives, the sickest of whom would themselves be bled to transfer the most virulent strain to yet another generation.

One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting captives would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. When most of the blood had been siphoned off and the heart was too weak to pump anymore, an officer in leather boots climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim’s chest with enough force to crush the ribcage, whereupon another dollop of blood would spurt into the container.

When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of victims to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis’ preferred vector of contagion. The fleas were then packed in dust and sealed inside clay bomb casings.

Xinhua via Getty ImagesJapanese personnel in protective suits carry a stretcher through Yiwu, China during Unit 731’s germ warfare tests. June 1942.

On October 4, 1940, Japanese bombers deployed these casings, each loaded with 30,000 fleas that had each sucked blood from a dying prisoner, over the Chinese village of Quzhou. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone.

From contemporary accounts, it is known that more than 2,000 civilians died of plague following this attack, and that another 1,000 or so died in nearby Yiwu after the plague was carried there by sick railway workers. Other attacks, using anthrax, killed approximately 6,000 more people in the area.

A few years later, as the war was nearing its end, Japan likewise planned to bomb America with plague-ridden fleas, but never got the chance. In August 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been bombed, the Soviet Army had invaded Manchuria and utterly annihilated the Japanese Army, and the emperor read his infamous surrender declaration over the radio, Unit 731 was officially disbanded.

Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty.

To this day, Japan has not apologized for, and China has not forgiven, the countless atrocities Japanese forces visited upon China between 1931 and 1945. As the last witnesses to this history grow old and die, it’s possible that the matter will never be addressed again.

Resources

pacificatrocities.org, “Unit 731 Cover-up : The Operation Paperclip of the East.” By Haddie Beckham and Merja Pyykkonen; apjif.org, “The United States and the Japanese Mengele: Payoffs and Amnesty for Unit 731.” By Christopher Reed; allthatsinteresting.com, “Inside Unit 731, Japan’s Disturbing Human Experiments Program During World War II.” By Richard Stockton;