By: Jim 'Twitch' Tittle
Date: 2005-08-30
Getting Away With Murder Part 1
It began, perhaps, innocently enough at the end of WW I in 1918. The medical bureau of Japanese Army set out to study biological agents that could be used as weapons. Remember, this was at a time when the first war in history had just seen the use of chemical weapons so it was not perceived as some sinister undertaking. Later Japan refused to sign the 1925 Geneva Convention governing wartime bans of biological weapons.
Origins Of The Macabre
Major Terunobu Hasebe first headed the research team, but was soon succeeded by Dr. Ito with a team of some 40 scientists. Things heated up in 1927 when Shiro Ishii, then 35, came on board. He was a 1920 graduate of Kyoto University. He had joined the army after graduation. In 1924 he returned to Kyoto University for graduate studies. At this time he married the daughter of the President of the University, Torasaburo Akira. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1927 and rejoined the army then began to propagate biological warfare agents.
Ishii was sent to Europe in 1928 as a military attaché. For two years in Europe and America he surveyed biological research in Western countries. His concept was that devoting himself to the research and manufacture of biological weapons that modem wars could only be won by science and technology and that producing biological weapons was very economical, especially for a country like Japan which is poor in natural resources. He was promoted to major in 1928.
If some people aren’t all bad we must assume that his water filter invention that halted the spread of meningitis-like illness and increased his stature with the public and the military.
By 1931 Japan occupied all of Manchuria after the manufacture of the “Manchurian Incident” that opened the door to military action.
The Imperial Army's Medical College was born in 1931 in northern Manchuria for experimentation with the idea of making the Soviet Union a theoretic enemy. An advantage was that the Kuantung Army could freely kill Chinese in experiments and had a near unlimited supply of them. Since Chinese lives could be used at no cost, Japan could lead the world in biological warfare.
Ishii had developed powerful contacts and supporters in the army: They were Colonel Ryuiji Kajitsuka of medical bureau of the army; Col. Yoriniichi Suzuki, chief of 1st tactical section of Army General Staff Headquarters, Col. Tetsuzan Nagata, chief of military affairs; and Col. Chikahiko Koizumi, the Army's surgeon general. After the war he served as Minister of Public Health but committed suicide for fear of being prosecuted for war crimes. He was also known as the "father of Japanese chemical warfare. Sadao Araki was the Minister of the Army, later Education Minister and leader of the "Imperial Way" faction in the Japanese Army.
By August 1932, Ishii led a group of 10 scientists from the Army's Medical College on a tour of Manchuria. They returned with the idea of making Harbin the center biological research, while choosing a site at Peiyin River, 20 kilometers south to build a factory for human experiments.
To mask the operation, Ishii's facilities were inaugurated at the end of 1932 and were sometimes called Kamo Unit and at other times Togo Unit. A promotion to lieutenant colonel followed and the 1933 budget of Kamo Unit was the awesome sum of 200,000 yen.
We can assume that for the next two years the facility continued experimentation. In 1936, by order of Emperor Hirohito, two units were established. One was Ishii's unit with 150 buildings covering four square miles. To the outside world it was disguised as the Epidemic Prevention and Water purification Department of the Kuantung Army. The name was not changed to the infamous Unit 731 until 1941. It was relocated to Pingfan, 20 kilometers southwest of Harbin.
The other unit was the Wakamatsu Unit after the commander’s name, Yujiro Wakamatsu. This would be changed later to Unit 100. It was to be built at Mengchiatun. Its cover name was the Department of Veterinary Disease Prevention of the Kuantung Army.
1938 saw Unit 731 moved to its new location at Pingfang. It covered an area of 32 square kilometers that was marked off as "no man's land." Ishii was now a full colonel with 3,000 men working under him.
So from 1931 on Japan was exploiting China for human experiment material and the Emperor knew all about it. Actually from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, Japan was responsible for despicable war crimes against China. After the Sino-Japanese War of1894-95 Japan seized China's territory of Taiwan. The Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895, seen as a treaty containing unfair terms, forced China to pay Japan a huge war indemnity.
Just a few massacres-
The 1894 Lüshunkou (Port Arthur) Massacre saw the Japanese Army seize Lüshunkou. First Division Commander Motoharu Yamaji was in charge. The Japanese went on a four-day killing rampage slaughtering more than 20,000 Chinese civilians.
The Jinan Incident from May 3 to 11, 1928 saw the Japanese Army once more carrying out the extermination of Chinese diplomats and civilians. Over 6,000 people were killed and 1,700 injured.
The Pingdingshan Massacre, on September 16, 1932, saw Japanese soldiers avenging their comrades' deaths at the hands of an anti-Japanese militia and killed over 3,000 villagers in the village of Pingdingshan, site of the Fushun coalmine.
The infamous horror of the Nanking Massacre on December 13, 1937 saw the Japanese Army seize the city. Commander Iwane Matsui and the Commander Tani Hisao of the 6th division led the Japanese army to the brutal mass murder of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers over a six week period, killing 370,000. The Japanese army followed their extermination policy of "burn all, kill all, loot all" throughout their military campaign. Under this policy, they conducted the most unspeakable atrocities in human history.
The Nomonhan Incident of 1939 saw Japanese use poison on the Soviet water supply with intestinal typhoid bacteria at former Mongolian border. It was the first use of biological weapons by Japanese but would not the last.
In 1940 the Japanese dropped rice and wheat infested with plague-carrying fleas over China and Manchuria.
These are some of the better known atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese against humanity. There are more, to be sure.
After the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan occupied Dalian and Lushunkou. In 1931 Manchuria was occupied. From 1937 onwards, their military campaign took them to the four corners of China. It is possible that as many as 35 million Chinese were killed from 1931-1945. The country suffered economic losses totaling some $600 billion as a result of Japan's wanton war campaign. This obviously exceeds the official time span of 1941-1945’s figures but the Chinese were the victims of Japanese expansionism for ten years before the Americans were involved.
Nanking
The loss of face at taking three months to subdue the city of Nanking in 1937 whipped the Japanese into a frenzy of vengeful hate and murderous perversion. For three more months the Japanese displayed the most horrific behavior in the history of the world committed against defenseless civilians.
While under the direct command of Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, The Emperor’s uncle, the soldiers of the Empire embarked on an orgy of bloodlust. It is often called the “Rape of Nanking” correctly enough in that some 80-100,000 women and girls as young as three years of age were raped.
Thousands of civilians were buried or burned alive, or used as targets for bayonet practice, shot in large groups and thrown into the Yangtze River. Others were victims of stabbing, disemboweling, excavating the heart, decapitation, drowning, and gouging out of eyes with knives. There were live burials. The carving out of organs and the roasting of people become routine. Castration and more perverted tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by dogs. Babies were disemboweled and fetuses were torn from their mothers and both were mutilated after the mother was raped. Some died as they were raped with foreign objects.
They invented games with diabolical ways to kill people that went on from sunrise to sunset. Samurai swords got worked out as Chinese were beheaded in rows. Those in the second row were forced to dump the headless bodies into the river before they themselves were beheaded. Killing competitions were won when participants reached 100 before others.
At one point 30,000 Chinese were driven to the foot of the city wall. Machine guns then raked the crowd as grenades were thrown from the wall. The 30,000 people were all killed. Most of them were women, children, and old folks.
Soldiers actually got tired of endless bayonet drills with live subjects. When they became bored with that they clubbed them to death, buried them alive, or threw them into a fire. Groups were thrown into freezing ponds where they soon died from hypothermia. It was a competition to see who could throw the most babies into fires “just for laughs” remembered a one-time Japanese soldier. Another described how he chopped up a gang rape victim, cooked her flesh and fed it to his hungry comrades! This was not an isolated incident. While cannibalism was not epidemic in Nanking it was not unheard of either. Girls and their grandmothers were gang raped to death alongside one another. Age was irrelevant. Corpse and genital mutilation, the final indignity, was widespread and greatly practiced on rape victims as the participants roared with hysterical laughter at their handiwork. It was always the bestial laughter that every inhuman act performed seemed to stimulate.
Unlikely heroes arise at unlikely times. First there was the Episcopal Reverend John McGee who shot many of the above-described atrocities on 16 mm film. He was in charge of the so-called Nanking International Safety Zone created when Japanese Army captured the city. It was the sole proof of the dastardly crimes.
Even the Germans couldn’t stomach the Japanese perversion. Next angered by the Japanese atrocities was German diplomat George Rosen who sent a copy of Magee's film to Berlin. He also included a long report which claimed that the entire Japanese Army was a "Violent Killing Machine". He requested that the film be shown to Hitler.
In later times when the film couldn’t be located the Japanese countered with the logic that since there was no proof, it never occurred. But by the late 1990s Japanese veterans were coming forth to admit and describe their acts in chilling detail.
When the German Archives in Botsdam were opened in 1990 after the Berlin Wall came down, the Rosen report surfaced, but the film's whereabouts were still unknown. After a long search of the archives four rolls of the film and the diaries came to the light of day. Of course the four rolls captured just a few total minutes of the perversion and evil that unfolded in Nanking for two solid months.
John Rabe was the chairman of that 2.5 square mile International Safety Zone. He recorded the Japanese atrocities in his 2,117 page Diary of War. Like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved so many Jews, Mr. Rabe and few other western foreigners risked their lives to help save 250,000 Chinese refugees from being killed.
But a different fate of disarmed Chinese soldiers awaited them and led Rabe to regret his persuasion of them to lay down their arms and go to the Safety Zone. He figured they’d be taken prisoner. But “every one of these disarmed troops, and thousands more who later sought refuge in the safety zone, were singled out and immediately taken to be executed. Thousands and thousands were executed by machine gun fire or hand grenades.”
As the leader of local Chinese Nazi Party and Safety Zone Chairman in Nanking, he appealed in a letter to Hitler about the Japanese War Crimes and asked Hitler to persuade Japan to stop the atrocities. His granddaughter from Berlin, Ursula Reinhardt, showed the 8 volumes of diary the very first time to the public in New York on December 12, 1996. They have never been disputed as other than authentic.
It is now estimated from official Chinese records concerning corpse disposal and census records before and after that 369,366 people lost their lives in Nanking Massacre. This well exceeds casualties from atomic bombs and in fact tips an iceberg of dead that the Holocaust can’t match either. By comparison death by gas in concentration camp chambers seems far preferable than any means of killing meted out by the Japanese.
In Singapore the Japanese ordered 70,000 inhabitants between 18 and 55 years of age to be trucked out of the city. All were massacred.
All this was done with the full consent of Tokyo as normal policy in China. It was a high point of the conscious act of genocide against the Chinese people. Yes of course, Emperor Hirohito knew. The same Hirohito that General MacArthur would later emphasize that President Truman should allow not only live but continue his leadership, albeit limited, of Japan. Yes this was the same Emperor that sanctioned and encouraged demented psychopaths to perform unspeakable acts in Nanking.
Meanwhile…
It is difficult to say whether the Japanese chemical warfare activities were more heinous than biological weapons and experiments. Less has been detailed about the day to day killing with chemicals. Certainly the lingering, decaying weapons in China pose a very real hazard whereas the bio-toxins have long ago ceased to kill.
Japan started a chemical weapons factory in Okunojima in 1927 for the research and development of gas bombs and chemical-based munitions. By 1933 they had set up the Chemical Warfare Military Office and organized Unit 516, the chemical warfare unit, as well as a school to train troops in the handling of chemical weapons.
The use of chemical warfare against China lasted eight years from 1937 to 1945 and covered 18 provinces. They were in use almost daily during this period. Chinese records show that there were some 2,000 incidents in which chemical weapons were deployed killing more than 80,000 Chinese army personnel. Japanese records have revealed a much higher number of such incidents. All this was going on seemingly hidden from the outside world.
Phosgene, Hydrogen cyanide, Bromobenzyl cyanide, Chloroacetophenon, Diphenyl-cyanoarsine, Diphenylchloroarsine, Arsenic trichloride, Sulfur Mustard and Lewisite were just some of the deadly chemical formulas that were produced.
These toxins were used by a variety of means from artillery shells to mortar rounds and grenades. China has found some 670,000 toxic artillery shells in twelve provinces throughout the country. An estimated 2 million mustard gas shells are decaying and leaking throughout China.
In July 1938, when attacking Quwo, Shanxi, the Japanese army used nearly 1,000 gas bomb cylinders against the Chinese army. During the Battle of Wuhan the Japanese army used chemical weapons 375 times and detonated 48,000 gas bombs. In March 1939 Japan attacked the Kuomintang army stationed in Nanchang with airborne chemical agents that suffocated officers and men in two barracks. Between August to December 1940 Japan launched eleven chemical weapons attacks along the North China Railway. The poison killed over 10,000 Chinese soldiers. In August 1941, when attacking the Chahaer, Shanxi, and Hebei bases the Japanese killed over 5,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians with their chemical weapons. On October 8, 1941, they used airborne poison gas to kill over 1,600 Chinese army personnel. Over 600 died from mustard gas deployed in Yichang, Hubei. In May 1942 in Hebei Province, the Japanese gassed villagers and militia holed up in tunnels, killing over 1,000. In May 1943 in the Battle of Changteh in Hunan Province the Japanese used mustard gas or lewisite artillery shells that inflicted massive civilian casualties.
Documents indicate that Japan had produced 5.18 million poison gas shells from 6,100 tons of poison gas between 1931 and 1945 on Okuno Island in the Hiroshima Prefecture and a total of 7.5 million chemical weapons. Beyond that the mystery of Unit 516’s sordid history is unknown. A few, occasional Japanese eyewitnesses that were stationed there have given a few details. From their perspectives it is relative to what enlisted soldiers would know which is nothing concerning organizational data or scientific facts.
Information on Unit 731, on the other hand, has survived almost in an ad nauseum manner.