Posted on 03/04/2007 2:53:43 AM PST by LibWhacker
After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die.
Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials.
Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during the four months before Japan's defeat in March 1945, he dissected ten Filipino prisoners of war, including two teenage girls. He cut out their livers, kidneys and wombs while they were still alive. Only when he cut open their hearts did they finally perish.
These barbaric acts were, he said this week, "educational", to improve his knowledge of anatomy. "We removed some of the organs and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education."
Why did he do it? "It was the order of the emperor, and the emperor was a god. I had no choice. If I had disobeyed I would have been killed." But the vivisections were also a revenge on the "enemy" - Filipino tribespeople whom the Japanese suspected of spying for the Americans.
Mr Makino's prisoners seem to have been luckier than some: he anaesthetised them before cutting them up. But the secret government department which organised such experiments in Japanese-occupied China took delight in experimenting on their subjects while they were still alive.
A jovial old Japanese farmer who in the war had been a medical assistant in a Japanese army unit in China described to a U.S. reporter recently what it was like to dissect a Chinese prisoner who was still alive.
Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.
"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have distorted the experiment.
The place where these atrocities occurred was an undercover medical experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was known officially as the Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau - but all the Japanese who worked there knew it simply as Unit 731.
It had been set up as a biological warfare unit in 1936 by a physician and army officer, Shiro Ishii. A graduate of Kyoto Imperial University, Ishii had been attracted to germ warfare by the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning biological weapons. If they had to be banned under international law, reasoned Ishii, they must be extremely powerful.
Ishii prospered under the patronage of Japan's army minister. He invented a water filter which was used by the army, and allegedly demonstrated its effectiveness to Emperor Hirohito by urinating into it and offering the results to the emperor to drink. Hirohito declined, so Ishii drank it himself.
A swashbuckling womaniser who could afford to frequent Tokyo's upmarket geisha houses, Ishii remained assiduous in promoting the cause of germ warfare. His chance came when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, the region in eastern China closest to Japan, and turned it into a puppet state.
Given a large budget by Tokyo, Ishii razed eight villages to build a huge compound - more than 150 buildings over four square miles - at Pingfan near Harbin, a remote, desolate part of the Manchurian Peninsula.
Complete with an aerodrome, railway line, barracks, dungeons, laboratories, operating rooms, crematoria, cinema, bar and Shinto temple, it rivalled for size the Nazis' infamous death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The numbers of prisoners were lower. From 1936 to 1942 between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women and children were murdered in Unit 731. But the atrocities committed there were physically worse
than in the Nazi death camps. Their suffering lasted much longer - and not one prisoner survived.
At Unit 731, Ishii made his mission crystal clear. "A doctor's God-given mission is to block and treat disease," he told his staff, "but the work on which we are now to embark is the complete opposite of those principles."
The strategy was to develop biological weapons which would assist the Japanese army's invasion of south-east China, towards Peking.
There were at least seven other units dotted across Japanese-occupied Asia, but they all came under Ishii's command. One studied plagues; another ran a bacteria factory; another conducted experiments in human food and water deprivation, and waterborne typhus.
Another factory back in Japan produced chemical weapons for the army. Typhoid, cholera and dysentery bacteria were farmed for battlefield use.
Most of these facilities were combined at Unit 731 so that Ishii could play with his box of horrors. His word was law. When he wanted a human brain to experiment on, guards grabbed a prisoner and held him down while one of them cleaved open his skull with an axe. The brain was removed and rushed to Ishii's laboratory.
Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.
Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit.
But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.
Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.
Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.
"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms.
Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.
Those which did have a genuine medical value, such as finding the best treatment for frostbite - a valuable discovery for troops in the bitter Manchurian winters - were achieved by gratuitously cruel means.
On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold water to accelerate the freezing process.
Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.
People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.
Ishii demanded a constant intake of prisoners, like a modern-day Count Dracula scouring the countryside for blood. His victims were tied to stakes to find the best range for flame-throwers, or used to test grenades and explosives positioned at different angles and distances. They were used as targets to test chemical weapons; they were bombarded with anthrax.
All of these atrocities had been banned by the Geneva Convention, which Japan signed but did not ratify. By a bitter irony, the Japanese were the first nation to use radiation against a wartime enemy. Years before Hiroshima, Ishii had prisoners' livers exposed to X-rays.
His work at Pingfan was applauded. Emperor Hirohito may not have known about Unit 731, but his family did. Hirohito's younger brother toured the Unit, and noted in his memoirs that he saw films showing mass poison gas experiments on Chinese prisoners.
Japan's prime minister Hideki Tojo, who was executed for war crimes in 1948, personally presented an award to Ishii for his contribution in developing biological weapons. Vast quantities of anthrax and bubonic plague bacteria were stored at Unit 731. Ishii manufactured plague bombs which could spread fatal diseases far and wide. Thousands of white rats were bred as plague carriers, and fleas introduced to feed on them.
Plague fleas were then encased in bombs, with which Japanese troops launched biological attacks on reservoirs, wells and agricultural areas.
Infected clothing and food supplies were also dropped. Villages and whole towns were afflicted with cholera, anthrax and the plague, which between them killed over the years an estimated 400,000 Chinese.
One victim, Huang Yuefeng, aged 28, had no idea that by pulling his dead friend's socks on his feet before burying him he would be contaminated.
All he knew was that the dead were all around him, covered in purple splotches and lying in their own vomit. Yuefeng was lucky: he was removed from a quarantine centre by a friendly doctor and nursed back to health.
But four relatives died. Yuefeng told Time magazine: "I hate the Japanese so much that I cannot live with them under the same sky."
The plague bombing was suspended after the fifth bacterial bombing when the wind changed direction and 1,700 Japanese troops were killed.
Before Japan surrendered, Ishii and army leaders were planning to carry the war to the U.S. They proposed using "balloon bombs" loaded with biological weapons to carry cattle plague and anthrax on the jet stream to the west coast of America.
Another plan was to send a submarine to lie off San Diego and then use a light plane carried on board to launch a kamikaze mission against the city. The war ended before these suicidal attacks could be authorised.
As well as Chinese victims, Russians, Mongolians, Koreans and some prisoners of war from Europe and the U.S. also ended up in the hands of Ishii, though not all at Unit 731.
Major Robert Peaty, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was the senior British officer at Mukden, a prisoner-of-war camp 350 miles from Pingfan. Asked, after the war, what it was like, Peaty replied: "I was reminded of Dante's Inferno - abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
In a secret diary, Peaty recorded the regular injections of infectious diseases, disguised as harmless vaccinations, which were given to them by doctors visiting from Unit 731. His entry for January 30, 1943, records: "Everyone received a 5cc typhoid-paratyphoid A inoculation."
On February 23, his entry read: "Funeral service for 142 dead. 186 have died in 5 days, all Americans." Further "inoculations" followed.
Why, then, after the war, were nearly all the scientists at Unit 731 freed? Why did Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi 'Angel of Death' at Auschwitz, have to flee to South America and spend the rest of his life in hiding, while Dr Shiro Ishii died at home of throat cancer aged 67 after a prosperous and untroubled life?
The answer is that the Japanese were allowed to erase Unit 731 from the archives by the American government, which wanted Ishii's biological warfare findings for itself.
In the autumn of 1945, General MacArthur granted immunity to members of the Unit in exchange for research data on biological warfare.
After Japan's surrender, Ishii's team fled back across China to the safety of their homeland. Ishii ordered the slaughter of the remaining 150 "logs" in the compound and told every member of the group to "take the secret to the grave", threatening death to anybody who went public.
Vials of potassium cyanide were issued in case anyone was captured. The last of his troops blew up the compound.
From then on, a curtain of secrecy was lowered. Unit 731 was not part of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. One reference to "poisonous serums" being used on the Chinese was allowed to slip by for lack of evidence.
Lawyers for the International Prosecution Section gathered evidence which was sent directly to President Truman. No more was heard of it.
The Americans took the view that all this valuable research data could end up in the hands of the Soviets if they did not act fast. This was, after all, the kind of information that no other nation would have had the ruthlessness to collect.
Thus the Japanese were off the hook. Unlike Germany, which atoned for its war crimes, Japan has been able to deny the evidence of Unit 731. When, as now, it does admit its existence, it refuses Chinese demands for an apology and compensation on the grounds that there is no legal basis for them - since all compensation issues had been settled by a treaty with China in 1972.
Many of the staff at Unit 731 went on to prominent careers. The man who succeeded Ishii as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Green Cross, once Japan's largest pharmaceutical company.
Many ordinary Japanese citizens today would like to witness a gesture of atonement by their government. Meanwhile, if they want to know what happened, they can visit the museum that the Chinese government has erected in the only building at Pingfan which was not destroyed.
It does not have the specimens kept at Unit 731: the jars containing feet, heads and internal organs, all neatly labelled; or the six-foot-high glass jar in which the naked body of a Western man, cut vertically in two pieces, was pickled in formaldehyde.
But it does give an idea of what this Asian Auschwitz was like. In the words of its curator: "This is not just a Chinese concern; it is a concern of humanity."
Lindbergh may have been a daring pilot but he was also a strong Nazi supporter.
There no doubt were isolated acts committed by US troops, there are on both sides in EVERY war (WAR IS HELL, REMEMBER!!) but to equate that to deliberate, systematic tourture mass murder and genocide is stupid and intillectually dishonest.
The reason "this story" is vertually unknown except for Lindbergh's account is because he had a pro-Axis, anti American agenda to push.
20th Century ManThis is the age of machinery,
A mechanical nightmare,
The wonderful world of technology,
Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare,This is the twentieth century,
But too much aggravation
Its the age of insanity,
What has become of the green pleasant fields of jerusalem.Aint got no ambition, Im just disillusioned
Im a twentieth century man but I dont wanna be here.
My mama said she cant understand me
She cant see my motivation
Just give me some security,
Im a paranoid schizoid product of the twentieth century.You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me william shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
Ill take rembrandt, titian, da vinci and gainsborough,Girl we gotta get out of here
We gotta find a solution
Im a twentieth century man but I dont want to die here.I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy got no liberty
Cos the twentieth century people
Took it all away from me.Dont wanna get myself shot down
By some trigger happy policeman,
Gotta keep a hold on my sanity
Im a twentieth century man but I dont wanna die here.My mama says she cant understand me
She cant see my motivation
Aint got no security,
Im a twentieth century man but I dont wanna be here.This is the twentieth century
But too much aggravation
This is the edge of insanity
Im a twentieth century man but I dont wanna be here.
To me, the Japanese are a riddle wrapped in an enigma. And anyone who thinks Japanese society is stable is kidding himself. Their society used to rest on Shintoism. Now it rests on nothing but consumerism, and that's a very slender reed.
Yes, you are right..Thats' what I get for being too emotional regarding this subject.
the Japanese simply fought like Asians have always fought wars, all sorts of Asians, from Mongols to Caucasian Russians..
Tokyo got firebombed like Dresden did.
The woman known as 'Tokyo Rose' was American of Japanese descent and was a convicted traitor. Although Gerald Ford pardoned her in the 1970s, it still shows your statement to be untrue.
I am not sure how you can defend and pump the Imperial Japanese and their American descendants especially the Kibei. I mean why are you doing this? And to try and foist your idea that the Nisei were the most decorated?? What are you trying to accomplish?
I'll tell you what you are trying to do. You are doing what many of the Japanese have done since the conclusion of that conflict and that is defend the honor of the race. Honor is so important to Imperial Japanese loyalists that they have been in denial about the atrocities or attempted to equate them with other war atrocities, they have created a revisionist history and refused to apologize for the war crimes committed, and they try to obfuscate and even eliminate references to Japanese betrayal and to promote Japanese as something that they were not.
Unfortunately for you that history remembers. To this day the Japanese are hated by many survivors throughout Asia and the Pacific.
Lindbergh wasn't a Nazi. Or even a Nazi supporter. That was spin from the FDR machine.
What Lindbergh wanted in the 1930's was the US to make it out of the depression in one piece. The two competing ideologies in Europe where he lived in the 30's, was highly controlled capitalism in Germany (not totally unlike todays regulated economy) and Communism in Russia. He visted both countries, several times, and reported on what he saw. Of the two, it was obvious to him which economic system worked, and which did not.
The elites of the day were in love with the Bolsheviks, and Lindbergh merely told it like he saw it, first hand. People didn't like him for that.
He was not an economist, and couldn't have known that the Nazis were operating on a looter economy, and that's why it was working better than any other in the world at the time.
Lindbergh was an aviator, and he was courted by the German aviation industry that sought to portray themselves as superior to what they were. They tricked him by taking him to several places over a period of time where he saw the same planes several times, which convinced him that the Luftwaffe was stronger than it was. He duely came back to the US and reported what he saw to the US Army Air Corps.
After Lindbergh came back from Europe, he went on active duty for some time, flying an Army P-35 around the country visting aircraft plants and helping them get their act together. Do you think the Army would have allowed a Nazi access to that high level of contact? He only left the Air Corps when he got involved with politics in the America First movement. That was when FDR destroyed his reputation with the false "Nazi" label. Lindbergh was associated with Henry Ford, who was likely was anti-semetic. Lindbergh was not, and neither of them were Nazis.
Lindbergh was not allowed back into the Air Corps when the war started, because FDR was afraid that he would renew his "hero status" by being an important general, and would later return as a strong Republican politician like his father was. But Lindbergh stayed involved at the highest levels of aviation manufacturing all during the war. Do you think they would have let a Nazi do that?
Lindbergh was a victim of an earlier version of the Politics of Personal Destruction. Nothing more. He was not a Nazi, or even a Nazi supporter. If he was, then so was the rest of the country in the late thirties, because Lindbergh and America First polled higher than FDR for a time.
Because we killed them even when they tried to surrender.
That doesn't even begin to put them on the same level.
Didn't say it did.
How nice of you to point this out.
Just thought there should be a little balance while we're gloating about how good we are, and how evil the Japs were, that we weren't entirely angelic at the time either.
On a purely historical note, I think it would be good if a few GIs who fought in the South Pacific would tell *everything* they saw back then. This Japanese guy confessed to what he did. I think americans who were there should be man enough to do the same, if only to set the facts straight while there are eye witnesses still alive who know what really happened.
those two cities could have been hit instead of the two which were.
Tokyo and Kyoto were both already destroyed by fire bombing.
There was little to destroy there, so they bombed other cities that were intact. One of the cities bombed was a secondary target, which was bombed because the primary was covered with clouds.
What slurs?
I have a book of his wartime journal where he entered his daily experiences.
He worked for Henry Ford as a consultant and test pilot for the B24 bombers manufactured by Ford.
He did a lot of high altitude research using a pressure chamber and high altitude airplanes.
He became a consultant and test pilot for the F4U Corsair.
He went to the South Pacific as a factory rep, and flew many missions with the Marines. When MacArthur learned he was down there, he had him come meet with him.
MacArthur had him go around to airbases and teach the pilots how to get more range out of the airplanes. Using his procedures the fighters got 750 more miles of combat range.
MacArthur told him that 750 more miles would enable them to skip over many islands and not invade them. That became the island hopping campign.
His procedures were why the army P38s had enough range to intercept Yamomoto.
He had the utmost respect for the Pilots he flew with, and the pilots he flew with had the utmost respect for him.
You must have read some revisionist history to say that he slured any American fighters.
Just what is your point with this post?
Japan attacked us and we were at war, the commanders on the ground made decisions based upon the real enemy they were facing.
Validating Lindbergh's comments are no different than validating the armchair generals in the media or in the Democrat party today, some who have also 'traveled extensively' thoughout Iraq and Afghanistan.
Japan started the war and got what they deserved, America achieved what we were required to do.
We need that attitude today to allow our trusted military leaders to do their job and not worry about the 'experts' on the sidlines. Just because Lindbergh flew a plane over the Atlantic doesn't make him right. It was a war. People get killed. The whole thing is an atrocity.
Some people will do anything to find a speck of dirt in a mission of glory carried out by millions of Americans. I find it distasteful, disgusting...and ask myself "why"? Others should be questioning why YOU make this statement. My Dad fought in CBI theater, and at 86 he would still choke anybody who would defame the mission and achievements of those great men and women with statements like that.
Expecting a guarantee on a 'clean, perfect war' is just hiding some other agenda. Take it elsewhere, please.
This is pure crap. Your agenda of 'Americans are bad, just not as bad' is disgusting.
So he didn't observe what he observed? Right?
He was there. I wasn't, and I seriously doubt you were.
Your agenda of 'Americans are bad, just not as bad' is disgusting.
My agenda is truth. Putting underwear on prisoners heads is one thing, but shooting an enemy soldier under a white flag is another. I always thought we were better than that, and I was surprised to learn that we were not.
My Dad fought in CBI theater, and at 86 he would still choke anybody who would defame the mission and achievements of those great men and women with statements like that.
CBI meant that he was likely early in the war. The issues Lindbergh witnessed were late, after the atrocities of the Japs were known and we were in a rush to get things over with.
Expecting a guarantee on a 'clean, perfect war' is just hiding some other agenda.
Hiding your eyes to the facts is no different than the Japanese of today being surprised that Chinese don't like them because of what happened in the war. Todays Japanese, and many Germans, have no idea of what their parents generation did. How is your attitude different?
And you know for a fact that they didn't "surrender" like the terrorists in Iraq do? Feigning death to kill more of our soldiers? There's no way those "atrocities" the Americans were accused of even come close to what the Japanese did to their prisoners. I don't doubt that the soldiers did things that some would find distateful, but to equate the two is unreal. Considering the pressure those men faced on the field and what they knew about Japanese treatment of people, I don't think anyone who hasn't been there is in any position to criticise their behavior.
That kind of attitude making Americans look just as bad is disgusting and smacks of the anti-American setiment displayed by the America hating left today like Jane Fonda and Michael Moore. They want perfect little sodiers who behave in the prefect little leftist way while fighting a war; a way that would put the life of every other soldier on the line. Prisoners are treated like guests and we're the bad guys. It's equivalent to spitting in the face of those men who suffered and died to give us the freedom to speak our mind.
It certainly appears that the Japanese then were today's muslim terrorists. They feign surrender, or anything else for that matter, to kill Americans.
I don't blame the Americans for not taking prisoners. Why should they take the chance and put their life on the line for some inhuman scum that wants to kill or torture them. They should be nice to the enemy so he can kill them? That's stupidity.
That was war with a cruel, unrelenting enemy. They didn't even want to surrender after both bombs were dropped. There's no choice about how to deal with them. As far as *eyewitnees* accounts.... well, I'd trust the opinion of a liberal anti-war activist back then just about as much as I would now. Only a liberal would consider that an accurate account because it's what they want to hear: Americans are bad.... booo.
Makes me sick.
Lindbergh said (remember, he was there) than when rewards were offered by our commanders to bring in prisoners, then they got prisoners. When there were no rewards offered, then no prisoners.
There's no way those "atrocities" the Americans were accused of even come close to what the Japanese did
I didn't say they did.
That kind of attitude making Americans look just as bad is disgusting and smacks of the anti-American setiment displayed by the America hating left today like Jane Fonda and Michael Moore.
I'd settle for the truth. The only two pieces of evidence I have that this occured are Lindberghs writing (he was pretty upset that this was going on), and the mantra repeated endlessly that "the Japs never surrendered, the japs never surrendered", which sounds like a justification if what Lindbergh witnessed was true.
The GIs who where there are dying, and the truth of their stories along with them. We'll see if any one of them have the guts of this Japanese guy that confessed about what he did.
In 1943, the Eighth Air Force in England lost tens of thousands of airmen because they were trying to make daylight bombing work. Daylight bombing let them hit the targets better, and spare civilians at least to some extent. By 1945 over Japan, the B-29s were running firebomb raids on cities like Tokyo, where the only possible military goal was to destroy their economy, by killing as many civilians as possible. Quite a change.
The left is making political hay, attempting to make the US look bad for Gitmo and putting underwear on prisoners heads. On the other extreem, you're willing to excuse shooting a soldier, wearing the uniform of his country, carrying a white flag. I have no use for either of those extreem opinions.
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