History of Sorts

When we hear about the evil during World War 2, it is mostly about the evil committed by the Nazis, and it is important to be reminded of that. However, some acts of the Imperial Japanese Army were just as evil, if not more evil than that of the Nazis.

In 1945, as a first-year student at Kyushu Imperial University’s medical school in southern Japan, Tono became an unwilling witness to atrocities. For a while after the end of the second world war, Toshio Tono could not bear to be in the company of doctors. And the thought of putting on a white coat filled him with dread. Those atrocities, the AWFUL medical experimentation on live American prisoners of war, decades later, continue to provoke revulsion and disbelief in his country and abroad. Tono wanted to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in his country’s modern history, he saw this as a final job.

Below are a few descriptions of what he witnessed.

In early May 1945, a US B-29 Superfortress crashed in northern Kyushu after being rammed by a Japanese fighter plane. The US plane, part of the 29th Bomb Group, 6th Bomb Squadron, had been returning to its base in Guam from a bombing mission against a Japanese airfield. Justin McCurry wrote in The Guardian, “One of the estimated 12 crew died when the cords of his parachute were sliced by another Japanese plane. On landing, another opened fire on villagers before turning his pistol on himself. Local people, incensed by the destruction the B-29s were visiting in Japanese cities, reportedly killed another two airmen on the ground. “The B-29s crews were hated in those days.

“I was in a state of panic, but I couldn’t say anything to the other doctors. We kept being reminded of the misery US bombing raids had caused in Japan. But looking back it was a terrible thing to have happened.”

“The remaining airmen were rounded up by police and placed in military custody in the nearby city of Fukuoka. The squadron’s commander, Marvin Watkins, was sent to Tokyo for questioning. There, Watkins endured beatings at the hands of his interrogators. The prisoners were led to believe they were going to receive treatment for their injuries. But over the following three weeks, they were to be subjected to a depraved form of pathology at the medical school”

“One day two blindfolded prisoners were brought to the school in a truck and taken to the pathology lab. Two soldiers stood guard outside the room. I did wonder if something unpleasant was going to happen to them, but I had no idea it was going to be that awful. Inside, university doctors, at the urging of local military authorities, began the first of a series of experiments that none of the eight victims would survive. They injected one anaesthetised prisoner with seawater to see if it worked as a substitute for sterile saline solution”

“In another experiment, doctors drilled through the skull of a live prisoner. Apparently, to determine if removing some part of the brain could treat epilepsy.”

“Medical staff preserved the POWs’ corpses in formaldehyde for future use by students, but at the end of the war, the remains were quickly cremated, as doctors attempted to hide evidence of their crimes. When later questioned by US authorities, they claimed the airmen had been transferred to camps in Hiroshima and had died in the atomic bombing on 6 August. On the afternoon of 15 August, hours after the emperor had announced Japan’s surrender, more than a dozen other American POWs held in Fukuoka camps were taken to a mountainside execution site and beheaded.”

SOURCES

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/13/japan-revisits-its-darkest-moments-where-american-pows-became-human-experiments

https://factsanddetails.com/asian/ca67/sub427/item2531.html

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