Tag Archives: Japanese War Crimes

Masanobu Tsuji-Japanese Colonel and part time Cannibal.

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Masanobu Tsuji (11 October 1901 – ca.1961) was a Japanese army officer and politician. During World War II, he was an important tactical planner in the Imperial Japanese Army; he developed the detailed plans for the successful Japanese invasion of Malaya at the start of the war. He also helped plan and lead the final Japanese offensive during the Guadalcanal Campaign.

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Tsuji was deeply involved in Japanese atrocities throughout the war. He evaded prosecution for war crimes at the end of the war, living in hiding in Thailand. He returned to Japan in 1949 and was elected to the Japanese Parliament(Diet) as an advocate of renewed militarism. In 1961, he disappeared on a trip to Laos.

Tsuji was among the most aggressive and influential Japanese militarists. He was a leading proponent of the concept of gekokujō, “leading from below” or “loyal insubordination” by acting without or contrary to authorization. He incited the 1939 border clash with the USSR, and was a vehement advocate of war with the United States.

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Masunobu Tsuji was born in the Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan. He received his secondary education at a military academy and then graduated from the War College.

By 1934, he was active in the Army’s political intrigues as a member of the Tōseiha (“Control Faction”), and helped block the attempted coup d’état of the rival Kōdōha (“Imperial Way Faction”). This brought him the patronage of general and future Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and general and future War Minister Seishirō Itagaki.

In 1932, he saw action in China, and subsequently travelled as far as Sinkiang. Tsuji served as a staff officer in the Kwantung Army in 1937-1939. His aggressive and insubordinate attitude exacerbated the Soviet–Japanese border conflicts, and helped incite to the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939.

After the defeat at Khalkin Gol, Tsuji opposed any further conflicts with the USSR. His protectors in the Army got him safely transferred toTaiwan, where he helped organize the Army’s jungle warfare school. He was then assigned to the Operations Section of the General staff, where he became a strong advocate of war with the United States and Britain. It has been alleged that in late 1941, he planned the assassination of Prime Minister Konoye, if Konoye achieved peace with the U.S

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When the war with America and Britain started, Tsuji was on the staff of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, whose army invaded Malaya.He was largely responsible for planning Yamashita’s successful landing in Malaya and subsequent campaign against Singapore.After the capture of Singapore, Tsuji helped plan the Sook Ching – a systematic massacre of thousands of Malayan Chinese who might be hostile to Japan.

He was then transferred to the staff of General Homma in the Philippines. After the U.S. surrender there, Tsuji sought to have all American prisoners killed, and encouraged the brutal mistreatment and casual murder of prisoners in the Bataan Death March.

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https://dirkdeklein.net/2016/05/11/bataan-death-march/

He also had many captured officials of the Philippines government executed.

Tsuji planned the Japanese overland attack in New Guinea, via the Kokoda Trail. In this as in other operations, he ordered bold offensive moves regardless of difficulties or the costs to the troops involved.

In late 1942, Tsuji went to Guadalcanal, where he planned and led the last major Japanese attack on October 23–24. After these attacks were defeated, Tsuji went to Tokyo in person to urge additional reinforcements. But he then accepted the Navy’s conclusion that nothing could get through, and recommended the evacuation of the remaining troops. He impressed the Emperor with his frankness.

But the Guadalcanal fiasco had discredited him. He was sent to the Japanese HQ in Nanking, which was largely inactive, for the next year. While there, he made contacts with various Chinese, including both collaborators and agents of Chiang Kai-shek’s government.

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In mid-1944, Tsuji was sent to Burma, where Japanese forces had been repulsed at Imphal. Tsuji was assigned to 33rd Army, which faced the Chinese in northeastern Burma. He was an energetic and efficient planner, if notoriously arrogant, and once helped quell panic in the ranks by ostentiously having a bath under fire in the front lines.

Allegations of having committed cannibalism – by dining on the liver of a downed allied airman – arose after reports by a group of Japanese war correspondents and a fellow Japanese officer.

Following the surrender, Tsuji escaped to Japan via Indochina(Vietnam) and China disguised as a Buddhist priest.

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Arriving in Japan in 1949, after the Far East Tribunal had completed the trials of the major war criminals, he escaped attention from Allied occupation authorities and was elected to the Diet in 1952. The next year he founded a military rearmament society, denouncing the American presence in Japan and openly advocating for the rearmament of Japan in preparation for a second, final war with the United States. He was reelected to the Diet in 1956 in spite of being denounced for his war crimes by Kawaguchi Kiyotake. Tsuji wrote a number of books and articles on his experiences, of which his account of the Malaya campaign from the Japanese side has received the most attention from Western historians.  His writings should, however, be taken with a grain of salt

In April 1961, he traveled to Laos and was never heard from again. He may have been killed in the Laotian Civil War, but there were also rumors that he became an adviser to the North Vietnamese government. He was declared dead on July 20, 1968.

He held strong “pan-Asian” views and thought that the people of other Asian countries should support Japan against Western powers. His ultra-nationalist and militarist views and his war record won him the support of many like-minded Japanese nationalists, to the end of which his supporters erected a statue of him in Kaga City, Japan.

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In a bizarre twist, recently declassified CIA files show that an attempt was made to recruit Tsuji as an intelligence agent after he came out of hiding. However, he proved useless, the CIA concluding that “In either politics or intelligence work, he is hopelessly lost both by reason of personality and lack of experience… Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings”

 

 

Dr.Shirō Ishii-the time when evil went unpunished.

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Surgeon General Shirō Ishii ( June 25, 1892 – October 9, 1959) was a Japanese army medical officer, microbiologist and the director of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army  involved in forced and frequently lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII.

https://dirkdeklein.net/2016/07/01/unit-731-japanese-wwii-experiments/

Torture techniques conjured up in medieval times, especially the gruesome methods employed during the Crusades, took a giant leap forward thanks to Dr. Shiro Ishii’s diabolical imagination. The human suffering he was responsible for remains unimaginable and incomprehensible. He is infamous for being the director of a biological warfare research and testing program of the Imperial Japanese Army that existed from 1937 to 1945 during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

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Dr. Ishii studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University in Japan and was a microbiologist by trade.

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He spent his professional career as a medical officer in the Imperial Japanese Army, beginning as a surgeon in 1921, and by 1945, reaching the position of surgeon general. To attain that pinnacle, Ishii left behind a trail of human blood, body parts, and entrails and committed horrifyingly wicked inhumane acts along the way to reach the top echelon of military medicine in Japan.

Early in his career, Ishii extensively researched the effects of biological and chemical warfare that took place during World War I. He was obsessed with building upon this base of knowledge, and the Japanese army obliged. Ishii’s military medical career began to blossom in 1932 when he was chosen to head up the biological warfare division. His mission was to conduct covert experiments on human test subjects at a secret prison camp. In 1936, some escapees spread the word of Ishii’s crimes against humanity and the Japanese were forced to destroy the camp. They subsequently moved their medical testing operations to Pingfang, an area outside the city of Harbin, China, and again appointed Ishii as director. Funded by the Japanese government, Ishii had more than 150 buildings constructed across a huge compound covering over 2 square miles and able to house up to 400 prisoners. This prison camp was known as Unit 731. Its operations were conducted under the guise of its official name: the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army of Japan, which was supposed to be researching contagious diseases and water supplies.

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From 1942 through 1945, Dr. Ishii unleashed a barrage of the most shockingly cruel experiments perpetrated on human beings the civilized world has ever known. Ishii thought up many hideous medical experiments spontaneously. All atrocities were in the name of medical research meant to defeat Japan’s wartime enemies, as the effects of Ishii’s torture were studied and recorded.

At Unit 731, the diabolical doctor referred to his victims as “logs” because after he tortured them to death with his hideous medical tests, he had their bodies burned to ashes. Throughout his reign of horror, Ishii was praised by the Japanese government and even was decorated with the coveted Order of the Golden Kite.

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On August 15, 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered unconditionally, which ended Japan’s involvement in World War II as well as the war with the Chinese. Immediately after surrender, the Japanese demolished Unit 731 in order to erase all evidence and memory of the atrocities committed at the despicable death camp.

Ishii ordered the remaining 150 subjects to be executed. Bodies and body parts were buried. Inexplicably, as the camp was being demolished, the Japanese released thousands of plague-infested rats into the surrounding provinces. In addition, the Japanese released millions upon millions of plague-infested fleas into the area. As a result, an additional 20,000 to 30,000 Chinese died from plague and other diseases over the following 3 years.

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Realizing he would be prosecuted for war crimes, Dr. Ishii faked his own death and went into hiding to evade justice. He was found in 1946 and turned over to American occupation forces for interrogation. The US was desperate not to have Ishii’s knowledge of biological weapons fall into the hands of Russia, including the results of his myriad medical experiments on humans. The US also wanted to supplement its own germ warfare program knowledge base with the results of the biological warfare experiments conducted at Unit 731.

After his capture, Dr. Ishii offered to reveal details of the experiments conducted at Unit 731 in exchange for immunity from all of the war crimes he committed. The US agreed to the plea bargain, which also included immunity for top-level members of Ishii’s medical research team. In addition to the promise of not being prosecuted for war crimes, these researchers were enticed with money and other gifts from the US to share what was learned at Unit 731. Dr. Shiro Ishii was never punished for his crimes; he succumbed to throat cancer in 1960 at the age of 67. according to his daughter, he converted to Catholicism on his death bed

Many of Dr. Ishii’s staff (dubbed the Devil’s Doctors) went on to obtain high-profile and influential careers in politics, medicine, and business. They took on leadership roles at such institutions as the Japanese Medical Association, National Institute for Health, and National Cancer Center; others secured high-level positions at pharmaceutical companies.

The immunity deal granted to Dr. Ishii and members of his senior medical staff was kept secret from the public for years (with the assistance of the British government), until details of the atrocities finally appeared in the media in the 1980s. In 2001, a documentary titledJapanese Devils was released that was created from first-hand accounts of the death camp by members of Unit 731 who had been taken prisoner by the Chinese and later released. To this day, Japan denies what happened at Unit 731, explaining that many of the accounts were exaggerated or did not take place at all.

 

The Japanese Atrocities-Picture Blog

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No one will argue that the Nazi’s and their crimes are among the worse ever committed in history. However the Japanese were just as bad of not worse. The difference is that the Nazi’s focuses their crimes on certain groups, where the Japanese killed indiscriminately.

Below are pictures of Japanese War Crimes, some picture are very graphic.

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I think these pictures needed to be shown because many of these crimes have been forgotten. We need to be reminded that evil is universal. But thankfully so is love and I for one still believe that in the end love will conquer all.

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The Japanese beheading competition.

 

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It’s one of the lesser known facts of history but  in 1937, two Japanese officers named Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda held a contest over who was the first to succeed in killing a 100 people with his sword (Magoroku)

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Mukai and Noda were both two young second lieutenants in the Katagiri Regiment’s Toyama Battalion and their contest was held during the Japanese invasion of China. The winner was announced on 10th of December 1937, only a couple of days before the Japanese Army entered Nanking (now Nanjing). Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China (now of the Jiangsu province) was captured by the Japanese army on December 13, 1937 and in a total spree of six weeks over 200,000 residents were murdered and thousands of women were raped. It would become known as the Nanking Massacre and Rape of Nanking.

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The issue first emerged from a series of wartime Japanese-language newspaper articles, which celebrated the “heroic” killing of Chinese by two Japanese officers, who were engaged in a competition to see who could kill the most first.The issue was revived in the 1970s and sparked a larger controversy over Japanese war crimes in China.

The original newspaper accounts described the killings as hand-to-hand combat; historians have suggested that they were more likely just another part of the widespread mass killings of defenseless prisoners.

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In 1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and its sister newspaper the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun covered a contest between the two Japanese officers,  in which the two men were described as vying with one another to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword. The competition supposedly took place en route to Nanking, directly prior to the infamous Nanking Massacre, and was covered in four articles, from November 30 to December 13, 1937, the two last being translated in the Japan Advertiser.

Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. Therefore, (according to the journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shimbun of December 13), they decided to begin another contest, with the aim being 150 kills. The Nichi Nichi headline of the story of December 13 read “‘Incredible Record’ [in the Contest to] Behead 100 People—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings”.

Other soldiers and historians have noted the unlikelihood of the lieutenants’ alleged heroics’, which entailed killing enemy after enemy in fierce hand-to-hand combat. Tsuyoshi Noda admitted in a speech

Actually, I didn’t kill more than four or five people in hand-to hand combat … We’d face an enemy trench that we’d captured, and when we called out, “Ni, Lai-Lai!” (You, come on!), the Chinese soldiers were so stupid, they’d rush toward us all at once. Then we’d line them up and cut them down, from one end of the line to the other. I was praised for having killed a hundred people, but actually, almost all of them were killed in this way. The two of us did have a contest, but afterward, I was often asked whether it was a big deal, and I said it was no big deal

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After the war, a written record of the contest found its way into the documents of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Soon after, the two soldiers were extradited to China, trialed by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, convicted of atrocities committed during the Battle of Nanking and the subsequent massacre, and on January 28, 1948, both soldiers were executed at Yuhuatai execution chamber by the Chinese government.

The SS Tjisalak Massacre

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The SS Tjisalak was a 5,787-ton Dutch freighter with passenger accommodation built in 1917 for the Java-China-Japan Line and used by the Allies during World War II to transport supplies across the Indian Ocean between Australia and Ceylon. On 26 March 1944, she was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I-8 while traveling un-escorted. The freighter’s crew were subsequently massacred in an infamous naval war crime.

The Tjisalak was sailing from Melbourne and Colombo with a cargo of flour and mail. The crew of 80 consisted of Dutch, Chinese and English merchant seaman, plus ten Royal Navy gunners manning the ship’s four-inch gun. Also on board were five passengers (including an American Red Cross nurse, Mrs. Verna Gorden-Britten) and 22 Laskar sailors returning to India after the loss of their ship. Tjisalak had been travelling for 19 days, when her captain became confused by an unusual wireless message from Perth, and changed his course, sailing at 10 knots to conserve fuel. At 5.45 am on 26 March 1944, she was struck by a torpedo from the I-8.

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One passenger, a Lieutenant Dawson from Australia, was killed instantly, and the ship began to list to port. The order was given to abandon ship. Most of the crew obeyed, taking to the ship’s boats and liferafts, but the British gunners and the Dutch gun commander, second officer Jan Dekker, remained on board, waiting for the Japanese submarine to appear and opened fire. I-8 responded with her own deckgun, forcing the gunners to abandon ship.

Once in the water, the 105 survivors were collected by the Japanese, who placed them on the ship’s deck and ordered Captain Hen into the conning tower to confer with the Japanese commander, Tatsunosuke Ariizumi.

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Survivors reported Hen as shouting“No, no, I don’t know.” At that moment, a Chinese sailor slipped into the water and was shot.

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The Japanese then tied the survivors together in pairs and walked them towards the stern (rear) of the ship around the conning tower, where they were attacked with various weapons. Four men jumped or fell from the submarine while being attacked and survived the random gunfire ,from three Japanese sailors seated behind the conning tower. These were Chief Officer Frits de Jong, Second Officer Jan Dekker, Second Wireless Operator James Blears and Third Engineer Cees Spuybroek. A Laskar named Dhange also survived the massacre.

After the Japanese had killed all but about twenty of the prisoners, they tied the remainder to a long rope, pushed them overboard, and then submerged. Dhange, the last man on the tow rope, managed to free himself before he drowned.

The survivors swam several miles through the open ocean back to the location of the sinking, where they found an abandoned liferaft. Three days later they spotted a distant shape, which approached them. She was an American Liberty ship, the SS James O. Wilder. After briefly firing on them by mistake, the Americans rescued the survivors and took them to Colombo.

As merchant seamen, the Tjisalak survivors were ineligible for treatment at both the British military and civilian hospitals, and had to arrange for accommodations at their own expense.

The crew of the I-8 committed similar atrocities against the crew of the Liberty ship SS Jean Nicolet, and possibly other ships from which no one survived.

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(A Liberty ship similar to the SS Jean Nicolet with extra accommodation built on deck. Aerial photo of the Liberty ship SS John W. Brown outbound from the United States with a large deck cargo after her conversion into a “Limited Capacity Troopship.”

Captain Ariizumi committed suicide when Japan surrendered in August 1945, but three members of the crew were located and prosecuted for their participation. Two were convicted and served prison terms which were commuted by the Japanese government in 1955. The third was granted immunity in exchange for testifying against his former shipmates.

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The Bangka Island massacre

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One of the worst sorts of evil one can commit is to do harm or kill those who look after the infirm and injured. People who clearly care and have a kind spirit.

Alas this happened during WWII and still happens nowadays and not only in war torn countries.

The Bangka Island massacre was one of those atrocities committed by the Japanese forces in 1942.

On 12 February 1942, with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese imminent, sixty-five Australian Army nurses, including Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, were evacuated from the besieged city on the small coastal steamer Vyner Brooke.

In addition to the Australian nurses, the ship was crammed with over two hundred civilian evacuees and English military personnel. As the Vyner Brooke was passing between Sumatra and Borneo, Japanese aircraft bombed and strafed the overloaded ship and it sank quickly. The ship carried many injured service personnel and 65 nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service from the 2/13th Australian General Hospital, as well as civilian men, women and children. The survivors in lifeboats were strafed by Japanese aircraft but some reached Bangka Island off the coast of Sumatra. Twelve Australian nurses were either killed in the attack on the ship or drowned in the sea. The remaining fifty-three nurses reached Bangka Island in lifeboats, on rafts, or by drifting with the tide.

Wearing their Red Cross armbands, and having protected status as non-combatants by convention of civilised nations, the nurses expected to be treated in a civilised manner by the Japanese when they reached shore. About 100 survivors reunited near Radjik Beach at Bangka Island, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), including 22 of the original 65 nurses. Once it was discovered that the island was held by the Japanese, an officer of the Vyner Brooke went to surrender the group to the authorities in Muntok. While he was away nurse Irene Melville Drummond suggested that the civilian women and children should leave for Muntok, which they did.

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The nurses stayed to care for the wounded. They set up a shelter with a large Red Cross sign on it.

At mid-morning the ship’s officer returned with about 20 Japanese soldiers. They ordered all the wounded men capable of walking to travel around a headland. The nurses heard a quick succession of shots before the Japanese soldiers came back, sat down in front of the women and cleaned their bayonets and rifles. A Japanese officer ordered the remaining 22 nurses and one civilian woman to walk into the surf.A machine gun was set up on the beach and when the women were waist deep, they were machine-gunned. All but Sister Lt Vivian Bullwinkel were killed.

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Wounded soldiers left on stretchers were then bayoneted and killed.

Shot in the diaphragm, Bullwinkel lay motionless in the water until the sound of troops had disappeared. She crawled into the bush and lay unconscious for several days. When she awoke, she encountered Private Patrick Kingsley, a British soldier that had been one of the wounded from the ship, and had been bayoneted by the Japanese soldiers but survived. She dressed his wounds and her own, and then 12 days later they surrendered to the Japanese. Kingsley died before reaching a POW camp, but Bullwinkel spent 3 years in one. She survived the war and gave evidence of the massacre at a war crimes trial in Tokyo in 1947.

Vivian retired from the army in 1947 and became Director of Nursing at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital. Also in 1947 she gave evidence of the massacre at a war crimes trial in Tokyo.She devoted herself to the nursing profession and to honouring those killed on Banka Island, raising funds for a nurses’ memorial and serving on numerous committees, including a period as a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, and later president of the Australian College of Nursing.

Bullwinkel married Colonel Francis West Statham in September 1977, changing her name to Vivian Statham. She returned to Bangka Island in 1992 to unveil a shrine to the nurses who had not survived the war.

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She died of a heart attack on 3 July 2000, aged 84, in Perth, Western Australia.

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UNIT 731-Japanese WWII Experiments

The Nazi’s did not have ‘the monopoly’ on evil acts. Their Asian counterparts in Japan did not shy away from evil in order to get what they wanted. Some of their acts made the Nazi’s look like choirboys.

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Unit 731  was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) of World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japan. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China).

It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army. Originally set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shiro Ishii, an officer in the Kwantung Army.

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The facility itself was built between 1934 and 1939 and officially adopted the name “Unit 731” in 1941.

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Referring to their victims as maruta, meaning logs, the researchers experimented on, apparently, anyone they could get their hands on: Chinese, Russians, Koreans, Mongolians, Pacific Islanders, other South East Asians and even a few American prisoners of war all fell victim to the doctors at the camps.

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Unit 731 veterans of Japan attest that most of the victims they experimented on were Chinese, Koreans and Mongolians. Almost 70% of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese, including both civilian and military.Close to 30% of the victims were Russian.Some others were South East Asians and Pacific Islanders, at the time colonies of the Empire of Japan, and a small number of Allied prisoners of war. The unit received generous support from the Japanese government up to the end of the war in 1945.

Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation. Others that Soviet forces managed to arrest first were tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949.

 

Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into the U.S. biological warfare program, as had happened with Nazi researchers in Operation Paperclip.On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence.” Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as Communist propaganda.

Thousands of men, women and children interred at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often without anesthesia and usually ending with the death of the victim. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results.The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants, including pregnant women (impregnated by Japanese surgeons) and their infants.

Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners’ limbs were frozen and amputated, while others had limbs frozen, then thawed to study the effects of the resultant untreated gangrene and rotting.

Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of the brain, lungs, liver, etc. were removed from some prisoners.

Prisoners would be buried alive to see how long it would take before they died and what the effects were.

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Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners were also repeatedly subject to rape by guards.

Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around and possibly more than 400,000 Chinese civilians.Tularemia was tested on Chinese civilians.

Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644 and Unit 100 among others) were involved in research, development, and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both civilian and military) throughout World War II. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes upon Chinese cities, coastal Ningbo in 1940, and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1941. This military aerial spraying killed thousands of people with bubonic plague epidemics.

 

(140110) — CHANGCHUN, Jan. 10, 2014 (Xinhua) — File photo copied on Jan. 7, 2014 shows personnels of “Manchukuo” attend a “plague prevention” action which indeed is an bacteriological test directed by Japan’s “Unit 731” in November of 1940 at Nong’an County, northeast China’s Jilin Province. The Japanese documents released on Friday by Jilin Provincial Archives regarding “biological warfare” show in detail Japanese troops’ activities in building “bacteria forces” in its colonial regions and using human beings for experiments to develop biological weapons during World War II. According to the archives, Japanese “bacteria forces” including Unit 731 started biological warfare in more than 20 provinces and cities of China on 161 occasions, claiming more than 270,000 lives and causing more than 2.37 million people to be infected by plague. (Xinhua/Wang Haofei) (mt)

Physiologist Yoshimura Hisato conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water, and allowing the limb to freeze. Once frozen, which testimony from a Japanese officer said “was determined after the ‘frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck'”, ice was chipped away and the area doused in water. The effects of different water temperatures were tested by bludgeoning the victim to determine if any areas were still frozen. Variations of these tests in more gruesome forms were performed.

Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. The hypothetical possibility of vertical transmission (from mother to fetus or child) of diseases, particularly syphilis, was the stated reason for the torture. Fetal survival and damage to mother’s reproductive organs were objects of interest. Though “a large number of babies were born in captivity” of Unit 731, there has been no account of any survivors of the facility, children included. It is suspected that the children of female prisoners were killed or the pregnancies terminated.

While male prisoners were often used in single studies, so that the results of the experimentation on them would not be clouded by other variables, women were sometimes used in bacteriological or physiological experiments, sex experiments, and the victims of sex crimes. The testimony of a unit member that served as guard graphically demonstrates this reality:

“One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left, and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work

Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in different positions. Flame throwers were tested on humans. Humans were tied to stakes and used as targets to test germ-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, and explosive bombs.

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At the end of the war, unit 731 scientists destroyed much of the evidence of the program. According to reports, however, some infected test animals were released; it is believed that at least 30,000 people died from the plague in the Pingfang area within the first three years after the war.

In Japan, not one was brought to justice. In a secret deal, the post-war American administration gave them immunity for prosecution in return for details of their experiments.

 

Some of the worst criminals, including Hisato Yoshimura, who was in charge of the frostbite experiments, went on to occupy key medical and other posts in public and private sectors.

Like the German rocket scientists and engineers who were folded into military and other governmental programs at the end of World War II through Operation Paperclip, unit 731’s scientists were given immunity from prosecution and their atrocities were covered-up in exchange for exclusive access to their findings.

I don’t know what is more disturbing. The actual atrocities or the fact it was covered up and immunity was given or the fact that some of these’scientists’ were actually medical doctors, who subscribed to the principle of “First do no harm”

The amounts of graphic pictures relating to Unit 731 are staggering, but most of them were just too horrendous to include in this blog.

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