Posted on 01/30/2021 10:18:48 PM PST by nickcarraway
Unit 731 didn’t prevent epidemics—it spread them.
Japan has gone down in popular memory as the original victim of weapons of mass destruction, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
But it was China that was the real first victim of WMDs in World War II—and the perpetrator was Japan itself. Tokyo’s biological weapons killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese. And their murders still matter today.
It’s true that other nations—including Germany, America and Britain—maintained their own chemical and bio-weapons programs during the war. Mussolini’s Italy even employed mustard gas in Ethiopia in 1935. Yet fear of retaliation deterred the major powers from using chemical or biological weapons against each other.
But Imperial Japan had no such fear because backward China had no WMDs and no other means of massive retaliation. Moreover, Tokyo viewed the Chinese as a racially inferior enemy—one that foolishly resisted a massive Japanese army that tried for nearly a decade to subdue China.
Bio-warfare seemed one way out of China’s unseemly quagmire.
Unit 731, Japan’s biological warfare program, was formed in 1932 under the leadership of the notorious Gen. Shiro Ishii, chief medical officer of the Japanese army. Based in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Unit 731 operated under the cover name “Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.”
But Unit 731 didn’t prevent epidemics—it spread them. Nazi medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, performed by monsters such as Josef Mengele, have been thoroughly documented.
Less well known are the experiments that Japan performed on adult male Chinese prisoners of war and political prisoners, as well as women and children. The captives were injected with diseases such as cholera and gonorrhea, or chained to stakes while aircraft dropped plague bombs.
There was also the vivisection. “Human experimentation gave researchers their first chance to actually examine the organs of a living person at will to see the progress of a disease,” according to Hal Gold’s book Unit 731 Testimony.
“Vivisection was a new experience for the doctors of Japan,” Gold writes. “One former unit member explained that ‘the results of the effects of infection cannot be obtained accurately once the person dies because putrefactive bacteria set in. Putrefactive bacteria are stronger than plague germs. So, for obtaining accurate results, it is important whether the subject is alive or not.’”
As atrocities go, or as much as sane human beings can rank them, this doesn’t sound any worse than Nazi experiments. But unlike the Nazis, Imperial Japan actually weaponized its biological horrors.
Cholera was dumped into wells used by the Chinese populace. Fleas were carefully collected, infected with plague and then dropped in aerial bombs over Chinese cities and villages.
“The air team and those who knew how to handle bacteria would get into a plane together and spread germs over a village or other areas of population concentration,” said a Unit 731 member cited in Gold's book. “After that, the area would be examined for the effectiveness of the attack.”
“With plague, fleas were used as a carrier and transported in a ceramic bomb,” the unit member added. “At first, glass bombs were tried, but they did not work well. Rats weigh about 600 grams. They were infected with plague, then they were infested with 3,000 to 6,000 fleas each and loaded into the ceramic bomb. When the bomb is dropped and breaks, the fleas scatter.”
Half a million or more Chinese died in these attacks.
It would be satisfying to say that the perpetrators of Unit 731 were punished for their crimes. But there’s no happy ending here. In 1945, Ishii and the other members of Unit 731 made a deal with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. government: they would turn over their research to the Americans—not the Soviets—in return for immunity from prosecution.
Even compared to the sordid dealings that allowed Nazi scientists and spies to trade their expertise for immunity from war crimes trials, this was repugnant.
Some might dismiss Japan’s bio-war against China as history from a past century. But that history still resonates. Memories of Japanese atrocities still linger in Asia. And as China and Japan appear on the brink of conflict over disputed islands in the East China Sea, it’s worth remembering that this time, it’s China and not Japan that has weapons of mass destruction.
Should Chinese ever contemplate the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, you can be sure the ghosts of Unit 731 will be at their side.
I’ve got a rather interesting DVD. THE MEN BEHIND THE SUN about camp Manchu 731.
Don’t know how accurate it is but it is brutal.
Later reference
there is a special place in hell for the human right violators who committed atrocities like this against other human beings- Hell has a special place for folks like them and Nazis- and any number of other brutal people- Folks like Saddam and sons will find that out when they are judged- He and his sons were also very very brutal- skinning people alive, hanging them from meat hooks and beating their legs till they broke, boiling them alive, putting them through shredders alive- setting their faces on fire alive- on and on it goes- The brutal experiments the nazi doctors did on Jews- horrible horrible experiments- Eternity is gonna suck big time for folks like the nazis who did crap like that-
Leopold II, Pol Pot, unfortunately, there are way too many.
There was a prisoner of war camp for American and Australian soldiers literally right to the site of Unit 731
I knew one man who was there
Yup- far too many- certain nations have had to endure the most horrible dictators one could imagine- Even back in the times of the first Christians in Rome- they endured horrible things too for sport- they would get roasted over pits- boiled alive in oil, forced to fight wild animals in an arena-
There have been Some truly evil people in history—
A certain nation sold its a portion of its soul after WW II. Giving safe haven for some in exchange for the results of experiments and knowledge. Even by some reports bringing Joseph Mengele and other Nazis into the West to counter Soviet Nazis. Rocket scientists for sure.
What kind of stain does this place on our CIA and other intelligence operations when this was at the seminal event of their founding?
That was like Auschwitz with zero survivors, not a single one. They murdered every last one in gruesome medical experiments, including some POWs. They made a effort to include white people as a control group. They wanted to make sure their disease weapons did not only work on Chinese or something.
That is -one- brutal movie.
But hRosHima!! was wEaPoN mass destruction too...
I read an interesting article that thinks it bit us back during the Korean war. When Ishii was protected from war crimes trials and simply released back to normal life in exchange for the information, the USSR noted that.
North Korea was pounded from the air and the war went the length of the peninsula... as would be expected in Asia, disease broke out everywhere.
The communists realized that the head of Japanese biological warfare was protected by us and they put 2 and 2 together to decide that the man who unleashed bioweapons on them 5 years before had done it again with us.
So they started widely torturing our pilots to “prove” it.
It was a massive communist propaganda effort, but they likely believed it themselves to varying degrees.
We experimented on civilians too, even going to Guatemala and infecting people with VD and letting them infect their spouses and die.
We also fed radiation to kids and, of course, there were the Tuskegee experiments.
I’d love to give back to each researcher and government official four times worse for each of the crimes they committed through these grotesque “studies.”
This also very nearly led us to war with the Soviet Union and USA. Stalin was so infuriated with MacArther keeping the medical research and protecting the Japanese doctors Stalin nearly declared war over it. Many Red Army POWs were experimented on and Stalin wanted the Japanese held accountable. Who could blame him? I was never able to find out who or how war was avoided. Probably classified. My theory is he was given US nuclear secrets because Europe was already sliced and diced after VE day.
Men behind the sun was very accurate according to some of the people that actually worked there and comparing eyewitnesses accounts (what few there were) . The director managed to get himself actual cadaver hands for the frostbite scene. Those were human arms.
Horrible stuff but I hate virtue signaling articles.
Yes. Leopold is a lot less known than 731.
Call the whambulance.
If ever a nation deserved getting nuked it was Imperial Japan. Those bombs saved my father-in-laws life. He was a US Marine who had been wounded on Iwo Jima and was recovering in a hospital when the bombs were dropped.
His live was spared and because of that today I’m married to one of his daughters. Tough s*** for the Japs.
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