By: Jim 'Twitch' Tittle
Date:
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER PART 2
BACK TO BIO
So what were Unit 731 and its counterparts cooking up? To name a few there was Bubonic Plague, Anthrax-including inhalation, skin and gastrointestinal types, Smallpox, Typhoid, Paratyphoid A and B, Tularemia, Cholera, Epidemic Hemorrhagic Fever, Botulism, Brucellosis, Infectious Jaundice, Undulant Fever, Tuberculosis, Yellow fever, Dysentery, Tetanus, Typhus, Glanders, Tularemia, Gas Gangrene, Songo, Brysipelas, Tick Encephalitis, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Salmonella, Epidemic Cerebrospinal Meningitis, plant diseases for crop destruction and dozens of other pathogens.
One kilogram of Bubonic Plague had the capacity to kill 500-1,000 people.
To dehumanize things further, the Japanese experimenters dubbed the Chinese subjects maruta (log). These were the poor souls that were the subjects of perverted medical experiments which rivaled, but were NOT exceeded, by Dr. Josef Mengele and others in Nazi Germany. 250,000-300,000 died at the hands of vicious Japanese experimenters, far more than Mengele’s ilk managed.
On a somewhat less than up-close and personal basis whole villages and towns were infected with the plague and cholera. Nobuo Kamada’s principle job at Pingfan was to breed plague bacteria. "We would inject the most powerful bacteria into rats. On a 500-gram rat, we would attach 3,000 fleas. When the rats were released, the fleas would transmit the disease. Infected rats and fleas were also loaded into special porcelain bombs designed to keep the rats alive as they descended on a parachute from an airplane.”
Exposing subjects to plague, for example, dictated that post mortem autopsies be performed. The fiends at Unit 731 didn’t have the time to wait for the poor bastards to die. They performed vivisections on living human beings. Kamada describes one such encounter aimed at retrieving plague-infected organs.
“I took a scalpel with no anesthetic, to a Chinese "log." I inserted the scalpel directly from the log's neck and opened the chest," he told a Japanese interviewer, at first anonymously. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
“Sometimes the logs had to be prepared. Unless you work with a healthy body, you can't get results. So if we had one who was unhealthy we would feed him good food and make him exercise. It was the height of cruelty."
"Everyone (the performers of the cruel experiments) was still alive. And the doctors were making contributions to medical studies. I thought it was best to stay silent for the sake of the nation," said the former Unit 731 member about post-war confessions.
This was true enough as Japanese leading medical schools had assigned doctors to Unit 731. They returned as luminaries of the postwar medical establishments. They headed pharmaceutical companies and became deans of medical schools. Lt. Gen. Masaji Kitano, who served as commander of Unit 731 near the end of the war became the director of the Green Cross Corporation, which was a prestigious maker of blood products and was founded by another Unit 731 veteran.
Yoshimura Hisato, who later became head of the Kyoto University of Medicine, was in charge of frostbite experiments. He was known as an outstanding scholar and researcher. One of his experiments was with a three-month-old baby. A temperature-sensing needle was injected into the baby’s hand and the infant was immersed in ice water, and the temperature changes were carefully recorded. After the war he issued a paper on this experiment and its results.
The live experiments were rationalized by four criteria:
1. For training newly employed army surgeons. These doctors performed appendectomies and tracheotomies on the prisoners, shot them then took bullets from their bodies, cut their arms and legs and sewed up the skin around the wounds, and finally killed them. This surgical practice was purportedly part of the training program of newly employed army surgeons to teach them how to treat wounded soldiers in combat areas.
2. Intentional infection of diseases. At the research facilities of the "Boeki Kyusui Bu," including Unit 731, researchers infected prisoners with many kinds of diseases, for example, plague, cholera, epidemic hemorrhagic fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, tetanus, anthrax, glanders, typhus, and dysentery. The purpose of the intentional infection was to seek the pathogen of the disease (for example in the case of epidemic hemorrhagic fever), to measure the infectiousness of the pathogen, to select more infectious strains, to investigate the effect of bacteriological weapons, etc. The subjects, including children, were dissected after their death or vivisected to death.
3. Trials of non-standardized treatments. Many prisoners were killed during trials of non-standardized, un-established, and unusual treatments. Many kinds of experimental vaccines were tried directly on prisoners, without prior trials on animal subjects. As another example, researching for treatment for severe frostbite, Dr. Hisato Yoshimura made the prisoners' arms or legs suffer severe frostbite and then warmed them with hot water. When the temperature of the water was over 50 degrees centigrade, the skin and muscles came off. Some other doctors tried horse blood transfusion, which was said to be developed for emergency transfusion to wounded soldiers at the front lines where there is no blood supply.
4 .Learning tolerance of the human body. Testing in sealed chambers at Unit 731 sound much like those conducted at the Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners were forced to breathe poison gas while others were killed by lowering the air pressure. Plus there were doctors who simply wanted to know how much air could be injected intravenously, how much bleeding it took for prisoners to die, how many days prisoners could live without food or water or only water without food, or how high electric current or voltage human beings could bear. There were also many trials of newly developed weapons with human subjects.
Flasks of disease-causing microbes – cholera, dysentery, typhoid, plague, anthrax, paratyphoid – were tossed into rivers, wells, reservoirs, and houses. The Japanese also regularly mixed food with deadly germs to infect the Chinese civilian and military population. Cakes laced with typhoid were scattered around sites to entice hungry peasants; rolls syringed with typhoid and paratyphoid were given to thousands of Chinese prisoners of war before they were freed.
OTHER PERVERSIONS
The Japanese also set up the Opium Monopoly Bureau in China during war. They used opiates to weaken Chinese resistance, and deliberately promoted drug addiction in the occupied areas of China. The huge profit from the opium was used to finance the war machine and created millions of drug addicts in China.
During war, at least 400,000 "comfort women" mostly Korea, but Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipinos, Dutch, and a few Americans, were conscripted to serve as sex slaves of the widely scattered Japanese army. Some were as young as ten years of age. Shanghai alone had about 50,000 enslaved women. When the war came to an end, "comfort women" suffered the worst: they were deserted by the Japanese army, as a very few of them managed to return home alive. Only about 40,000 survived.
Comfort stations came into being in 1932 allegedly to stop Japanese soldiers from raping Chinese women. Shiro Ishii’s name has been linked to the procurement of sex slaves for the comfort stations as well as his medical perversions. Unit 731 personnel did perform VD examinations on the women at these stations.
Slave labor was another hallmark of Imperial Japan’s savagery. While 10 million Asians were put under the yoke it is estimated that a mere 5,000 ultimately survived the war. Where the Nazis had a little over 1% of their slave laborers die the Japanese worked over 38% Caucasian POWs to death. The Bataan Death March saw 7,000 of 10,000 POWs die on a 70-mile trek and in Borneo just 6 of 1,800 Allied prisoners were alive after a similar trek.
As a final thought on the use of the atomic bombs, it must be noted that the Japanese had ordered all POWS to be disposed of in the waning days of the conflict. That order was not yet carried out when the Enola Gay opened her bomb bays on August 6th.
This author wrote of Operation Fu-Go, the launching of over 9,000 balloons each carrying four incendiary and one antipersonnel bomb across the Pacific on the jet stream to create forest fires and terror from Oregon to Michigan. One thought remained- “what if they’d put bio-weapons on the balloons?” Research into more of Unit 731’s debauchery proved that the Japs thought it was a good idea too. Proposals did include use of these weapons against the United States in a program code named Operation Pu. They proposed using the balloon bombs to carry disease to America and they had a plan in the summer of 1945 to use kamikaze pilots to dump plague infected fleas on San Diego.
Some Japanese generals proposed loading the balloons with weapons of biological warfare, to create epidemics of plague or anthrax in the United States. Other Army units wanted to send cattle plague virus to wipe out the American livestock industry or grain smut to wipe out the crops.
As the end of the war approached in 1945, Unit 731 embarked on its wildest scheme; codenamed Cherry Blossoms at Night. The plan was to use kamikaze pilots to infest California with the plague. Toshimi Mizobuchi, who was an instructor for new recruits in Unit 731, said the idea was to use 20 of the 500 new troops who arrived in Harbin in July 1945. A submarine such as the huge I-400 class boat was to take a few of them to the seas off Southern California, and then they were to fly in a plane carried on board the submarine and contaminate San Diego with plague-infected fleas. The target date was to be September 22, 1945. As it happened, the fleet of submarine seaplane carriers that assembled was assigned to launch torpedoes at the locks in the Panama Canal, but that was changed to attack the US fleet at Ulithi Harbor just as the war ended. See this Combatsim article for more- http://www.combatsim.com/review.php?id=671
On May 5, 1945, an American B-29 bomber was shot down over southern Japan. Eight American airmen prisoners were made available for medical experiments at Kyushu Imperial University. The eight were dissected organ by organ while still alive.
This is the only site where Americans were incontrovertibly used in dissections and the only known site where experiments were done in Japan. Kyushu University, Fukuoka, is midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atrocities on 1,485 Allied Caucasian POWs took place in China too. 1,175 were Americans. As many as 660 were killed via experimentation.
There were a minimum of 26 known Japanese killing laboratories in China.
IN RETROSPECT
What about the horrific Unit 731’s biological experiments led by General Shiro Ishii who was never tried for war crimes and died a free man from throat cancer in 1959? Those around him in Unit 731 saw their careers flourish in the postwar period, rising to positions that included Governor of Tokyo, president of the Japanese Medical Association and head of the Japan Olympic Committee.
Every vile and despicable thing that can be perpetrated to humans was done there paralleling and actually exceeding the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele of Nazi Germany. But unlike the Germans, who had biological weapons but never used them, the Japanese dropped poison gas and biological bombs in Manchuria and upon their fleeing 731 at the war’s end released thousands of plague-infested rats into China after already killing at least 30,000 civilians and POWs. More individuals were killed by Unit 731 than by the combined Mengele-style experiments in Germany and details seem to reveal an even greater level of horror.
The Japanese have deployed more biological and chemical agents than any combatant in the history of warfare on the planet.
Once again MacArthur championed the cause of these repulsive fiends telling Washington that Ishii and friends should be spared prosecution for war crimes in exchange for all his information on his perverted experiments. Being that he was virtually the American emperor of Japan, his recommendation carried weight.
Paradoxically, the conclusion reached by the Committee for the Far East was: "The value to the U.S. of Japanese bio-warfare data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes' prosecution."
Mengele should have been the German Surgeon General by that logic.
Some lesser-involved Unit 731 participants caught by the Soviets were tried and imprisoned but on the whole Ishii and his entire cast of willing players were exonerated by the U.S. government.
TODAY
What is curious is that there has never been a furor in regard to the lower Japanese officers’ and enlisted men’s role in atrocities. If 100 European Theater of Operations civilians were executed by an SS lieutenant and he is on a “most wanted” list why hasn’t the same held true for 100 Guam Island villagers? Certainly Nanking was not the responsibility of one person. Personal acts of barbarism by lesser-ranked Japanese continued throughout the war.
Unit 731 participants have described their and others’ acts of supreme degradation in chilling detail with absolutely no remorse. Their dialogues of sadistic debauchery actually seemed like proud statements. Why was there no organization interested in snatching them off the street like Adolf Eichmann was and bringing them before a tribunal? Was everyone else that ever committed war crimes of any type protected by the Committee for the Far East’s ruling too? While “watch lists” containing 60,000 Nazi’s names existed only 33 Japanese war criminals had finally been entered to the rolls in 1996.
Today Japanese school textbooks conveniently use word play and vague terminology in reference to WW II. Japan entered World War II out of "self-defense" and in an attempt to "free Asia from the rule of Europe and the U.S.," according to this new version of history. Words like "invasion" in earlier texts are replaced by expressions like "expansion" of the war. Earlier drafts had gone further saying Japan's annexation of Korea was "unopposed." The “expansion” in Nanking that left 370,000 dead was revised to say “a large number.”
Just last year a senior politician of the Japanese ruling party put his foot in his mouth when he blamed the U.S. for Japan's entry into the war and said “Japanese militarism had liberated Southeast Asia from European colonialism.” What revisionist tripe! We should assume that Pearl Harbor was mistaken for a Japanese practice bombing range too.
The Japanese have played the victim well for sixty years eliciting pity and sympathy for their suffering two atomic blasts. But when they have been confronted by their deeds, where Nanking’s dead alone far eclipsed those of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, then have the gall to say it never happened. Even in August 2005, as before, Japanese Prime Ministers have apologized for the country’s WW 2 activities but the act of contrition has never been passed by the cabinet making it anything more than one
man’s statement, not a nation’s. There are several ways in the Japanese language to make a “We’re sorry,” completely ambiguous and insincere also.
But in the last few years some of those still surviving who committed those monstrous acts against humanity while connected to biological, chemical and medical experiment units have come forward to reveal the graphic and revolting details of their extreme barbarism. The vivid details, as told by the participants in their own words, are chilling and repulsive.
Research for this topic took in endless, detailed narratives of the Japanese debauchery perpetrated against the peoples of Asia to the point of revulsion. Revulsion and disgust for a whole segment of a country- the Imperial Japanese Army were some of the most bestial entities to have ever shared the planet with human beings.
Finally, we must address the mind-boggling figures of death that are the direct responsibility of the savage Japanese, their willful lust and the attempted domination of Asia. In China as many as 20-35 million perished, 9 million in Korea, 4 million in Indonesia, 1.5 million in India, 2 million in Indo-China (Vietnam) alone and another 1 million over the remainder of Southeast Asia.
See Part 3 for what happened at the war trials and afterward.