US Bomber Crew Shot Down Over Japan Dissected While ALIVE In Horrific WW2 Experiments

UK Daily Mail ^ | 13:11 EST, 7 April 2015 | By ELAINE O'FLYNN FOR MAILONLINE

[drewh]

A Japanese university has opened a museum acknowledging that its staff dissected downed American airmen while they were still alive during World War Two. The move is a striking step in a society where war crimes are still taboo and rarely discussed, although the incident has been extensively documented in books and by US officials.

A gruesome display at the newly-opened museum at Kyushu University explains how eight US POWs were taken to the centre’s medical school in Fukuoka after their plane was shot down over the skies of Japan in May 1945. There, they were subjected to horrific medical experiments - as doctors dissected one soldier’s brain to see if epilepsy could be controlled by surgery, and removed parts of the livers of other prisoners as part of tests to see if they would survive.

Another soldier was injected with seawater, in an experiment to see if it could be used instead of sterile saline solution to help dehydration. All of the soldiers died from their ordeal. The horrific episode has been described in previous books, one by a Japanese doctor who took part in the experiments, but the museum represents an official acknowledgement of the atrocity

After the prisoners were killed, Japanese doctors preserved their remains in formaldehyde until the end of the war. Evidence of the experiments was heard at an Allied War Crimes tribunal in 1948 against 30 doctors and university staff, by which time the body parts had been destroyed. In total 23 people were found guilty of vivisection – dissecting and performing surgery on a living thing – and five were sentenced to death. General Douglas MacArthur later commuted all death sentences when he was military governor of Japan.

[laplata]

Thank you.

[henkster]

And now the japs make the best automobiles on earth.

Mandrake: Ah... yes, they did. I was tortured by the Japanese, Jack, if you must know. Not a pretty story.

Ripper: Well what happened?

Mandrake: Oh... well... I don't know, Jack. Difficult to think of under these conditions. But, well, what happened was they got me on the old Rangoon HNRR railway. I was laying train mines for the bloody Japanese puff puffs.

Ripper: No, I mean when they tortured you, did you talk?

Mandrake: Ah, oh no, I ah... I don't think they wanted me to talk, really. I don't think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having... a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.

[henkster]

MacArthur did expedite the trial and execution of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who led the Japanese defense of the Philippines. In my opinion, Yamashita didn’t deserve the death penalty any more than any other Japanese officer or soldier who did not get a death sentence after the war. There were atrocities aplenty committed by the Japanese Army in World War II. The mistreatment of POWs, the deliberate targeting of combat medics, the murder of wounded are just example. One that sticks out was some Australian soldiers in New Guinea found one of their comrades bound to a tree. He appeared to have been used for bayonet practice. A sign hung around his neck said “He took a long time to die.” That was the way they fought.

There are other examples of Japanese not behaving this way, such as the skipper of a Japanese cruiser saluting the surviving crew of USS Johnston as she sank in the Battle Off Samar in October 1944. I guess our treatment of the Japanese after the surrender was not a model of consistency either.

[MacNaughton]

4 My late Dad was a WWII Navy veteran and would not buy or ride in a jap (as he called them until his death) automobile.

25 My Dad was the same way. He was at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Hated the Japanese and anything associated with them till the day he died.

28 My uncle is 92. He fought on Okinawa. To this day he still despises Japanese. He went to Hawaii for his 25th anniversary with his wife and said he’d never go back again because there were “too damn many Japs.”

These books should be compulsory reading for all Americans. To be a Christian, you must forgive, but sic vis pacem parabellum!

by Eugene Sledge, 1981

Introduction to E.B. Sledge’s ‘With the Old Breed’
7/25/2007 - Our favorite Hoover Institute fellow, Victor Davis Hanson, was asked to do an introduction for a new edition of E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed, a memoir from the Pacific theater of WWII.

The book above was 1 of the 2 primary sources used for the 2010 HBO mini-series, "The Pacific".

by Eugene Sledge, 2002

[Sherman Logan]

920 Japanese war criminals were executed.

Oddly, I haven’t been able to find a reliable total for Germans executed for war crimes. Possibly because there were multiple trials by various countries.

[jag.drafting]

Brilliant!

[MacNaughton]

by James Bradley, 2003

I was surprized to learn in his book that 900+ Japanese war criminals were executed after tribunals in the years after WWII.

And the allies executed less than 20 Nazis from all of the tribunals in Europe!

[henkster]

You won't get accurate records from the Soviet archives, but you could count every German POW who died in captivity as an execution for war crimes. The Soviets themselves looked at it that way.

How many of these guys do you think ever saw Germany again?

[TexasGator]

MacArthur was responsible for confirming and enforcing the sentences for war crimes handed down by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.[238] In late 1945, Allied military commissions in various cities of the Orient tried 5,700 Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans for war crimes. About 4,300 were convicted, almost 1,000 sentenced to death, and hundreds given life imprisonment. The charges arose from incidents that included the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March and Manila massacre.[239] The trial in Manila of Yamashita was criticized because he was hanged for Iwabuchi’s Manila massacre, which he had not ordered and of which he was probably unaware.[240] Iwabuchi had killed himself as the battle for Manila was ending.[241]

MacArthur gave immunity to Shiro Ishii and other members of the bacteriological research units in exchange for germ warfare data based on human experimentation.[242] He also exempted the Emperor and all members of the imperial family implicated in war crimes, including Princes Chichibu, Asaka, Takeda, Higashikuni and Fushimi, from criminal prosecutions. MacArthur confirmed that the emperor’s abdication would not be necessary.[243] In doing so, he ignored the advice of many members of the imperial family and Japanese intellectuals who publicly called for the abdication of the Emperor and the implementation of a regency.[244]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_MacArthur#War_crimes_trials

[Sherman Logan]

I was speaking of individuals executed for specific crimes after a reasonably fair trial. Not POWs murdered for the crime of fighting for their country.

[MacNaughton]

43 ... I guess our treatment of the Japanese after the surrender was not a model of consistency either.

Hindsight is a bitch. In Flyboys Bradley found a quote by USAAF Gen. Curtis LeMay, who directed the XXth Air Force fire bombings and nuking of Japan, that essentially said if the U.S. had lost WWII, he/LeMay, would have been tried for war crimes.

[NorthMountain]

Wikipedia (ha ha) lists about 100 National Socialists sentenced to death (and not commuted).

[NorthMountain]

if the U.S. had lost WWII, he/LeMay, would have been tried for war crimes.

Arthur Harris would have likely also faced war-crimes trial.

[MacNaughton]

I used Flyboys as a starting point. I did the Wikipedia search also. I stand by the <20 number. Apparently many others were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in absentia.

[henkster]

Well, many Russians of the day would have disagreed with you. The Wehrmacht wasn’t exactly innocent in terms of their occupation of the Soviet Union. And the Red Army took out their revenge on the eastern half of Germany. And having read the accounts of the prosecution of General Yamashita, I’m not sure his trial was “reasonably fair.” Maybe in terms of the apparent process, but not in terms of a prejudged result.

War crimes trials are pretty sketchy things, as are the notions of “war crimes.” War in itself is a crime. It is a horribly nasty business that naturally lends itself to an increasing spiral of brutality. The American Civil War is no exception, where Union armies decided that corn cribs and smokehouses were legitimate military targets. It is the nature of war. It’s very hard to avoid a sense of “victor’s vengeance” in the proceedings. And the lines become blurred. Did the Germans who directed the “Final Solution” deserve to hang? That seems self evident. So did the camp directors. And the bosses. The guards? The people who pushed the victims into the gas chambers? All of them who can be located are still prosecuted today.

But how far do you go? What about the railway workers of the Reichsbahn who delivered the victims to the camps? I’m pretty certain that the railway workers were pretty well aware what the Auschwitz run was all about. What about the factory workers who built the ovens for the crematoria? That indeed was one of the central philosophical issues at Nuremburg. The Nazi leadership was more or less tried collectively under an American RICO theory. But how do you do that without indicting every single German citizen?

I have the same issues with war crimes trials of the Armed Forces. I don’t have a problem with a trial of a civilian national command authority, but for the military, when indicted for “waging war of aggression,” I do think “I was just following orders” is a defense. It’s what the military is there to do. For example, Raeder and Donitz were tried for carrying out “unrestricted submarine warfare.” And yet, the very first order issued by the United States Navy on December 7, 1941, was “Execute Unrestricted Air and Submarine Warfare against Japan.”

So maybe it’s like pornography. It’s hard to come up with a definition of “war crimes,” but I know them when I see them. The problem is either you see a lot of them, turn a blind eye to them, or run the risk of being a hypocrite. In the end, war is nasty and brutal. There is only one yardstick by which it is measured:

Victory.

[originalbuckeye]

The Great Raid is the true story of the rescue of many American POWs at a Japanese camp in the Philipines. It is heartbreaking, but ‘those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’.

[sport]

“War Crimes” trials were not about justice. War crimes were about paying back old scores. The Doctors, Scientists, and founders of Unit 731 were never prosecuted. Very few of the NAZIs were prosecuted, even fewer of them served their full sentences. The only true justice was that handed out on the battlefield by the GIs and Russian troops.

[DuncanWaring]

I’ve read “With The Old Breed”; it was truly grim.

[DuncanWaring]

Regarding the LeMay quote ... as I recall, it’s in his autobiography “Mission With LeMay”.

[skimbell]

The same thing happened in Europe. The Americans German scientists were better that the Soviets German scientists. That’s how we won the space race.