UNIT 731
Officially known under the gloriously misleading name of the “Anti-Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army”, Unit 731 was a covert Japanese biological and chemical warfare group set up in 1936. The unit’s main base was a six kilometre square compound at Pingfang in Manchuria, complete with a railway line, barracks, dungeons, laboratories, operating rooms, crematoria, bar, airport, cinema and Shinto temple. At this Auschwitz of the East, Unit 731 conducted medical and biological warfare (BW) experiments on criminals, political opponents, Allied POWs and Chinese civilians. Known to staff as “logs”, the victims were subjected to a Dante-like range of horrors—live vivisection, food deprivation, injection with horse urine, hanging upside down until death, frostbite, electrocution, incarceration in high pressure chambers (until the victim’s eyes popped out) but mostly injection with the germ cultures of cholera, botulism, anthrax, smallpox, plague and VD. Unit 731 planes dropped plague-infected flea “bombs” on the Chinese populations of Yunnan, Ningbo and Changde in which over 400,000 people died. A clear case, you might think, for Unit 731 scientists to be tried for war crimes? Especially the Unit’s leader, Lieutenant-General Shiro Ishii?
The Soviets thought so, and hauled captured Unit 731 personnel before the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial in 1949, with those found guilty being sent to a gulag. And the Americans? The US Army sent several investigators from its BW base, Fort Detrick, to Japan after the war to interrogate Japanese scientists from 731; the US interrogators concluded that, although Unit 731 members were guilty of contravening the rules of land warfare, their BW knowledge was so essential—and so far in advance of the USA’s—that some deal should be done with them. And reported to this effect to General MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. He, in turn, wrote to Washington DC in 1947, suggesting 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”.
Replying to MacArthur, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee agreed that Ishii and his scientists would receive immunity from prosecution for war crimes if they gave up all their deadly data. Unsurprisingly, they said “
To this day, Japan refuses Chinese demands for an apology and compensation for what happened at Pingfang on the grounds that there is no legal basis for them.
The site at Pingfang is now a museum.
Sheldon Harris,
Peter Williams and David Wallace,
DOCUMENT: CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE REPORT FOR CONGRESS: US PRISONERS OF WAR AND CIVILIAN AMERICAN CITIZENS CAPTURED AND INTERNED BY JAPAN IN WORLD WAR II: THE ISSUE OF COMPENSATION BY JAPAN
Starting with the 1980 publication of “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime”, in
According to Sheldon Harris, there were apparently at least two different chemical and biological warfare units centered in Manchuria, each commanded by a different officer. One organization was Unit 100, with a central headquarters at Changchun, 150 miles south of Harbin: it was commanded by Major, later Major General, Wakamatsu Yujiro. Although, Harris reported, it experimented on humans, it has gotten little attention so far. The experiments about which the most is known are the biological warfare (BW) as well as some chemical warfare (CW) experiments, reportedly directed by a military doctor named Shiro Ishii. From the mid-1930s through 1945, Dr. Ishii, who eventually rose to the rank of Lieutenant General, reportedly directed BW experiment organizations under various names at a number of locations in and around the northern Manchurian city of Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province. His main organization, Unit 731, was based in Manchuria, 15 miles south of Harbin at Ping Fan [sic]. The base at Ping Fan [sic] had a perimeter of almost four miles, an airfield, and a rail spur from Harbin, 150 buildings, and 3,000 employees. Ping Fan [sic] was declared a Special Military Region and was very securely fortified and guarded.
Three books have been written about the activities of Unit 731, and it has been the subject of frequent mentions in U.S. newspaper articles in the late 1990s. A one-hour television documentary on Unit 731, entitled
Ongoing private investigations by scholars have described Unit 731 as spreading disease and causing epidemics in field experiments that may have killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of Chinese. Although exact numbers are unknown, various researchers have alleged that Unit 731 performed laboratory experiments on somewhere between 850 to 10,000 or more subjects, and that none of them survived. According to author Sheldon Harris, victims consisted mostly of Han Chinese inhabitants of the area around Harbin but also included stateless White Russians, Harbin Jews, criminals, communist guerrillas or spies, Mongolians, Koreans, the mentally handicapped, and also Soviet soldiers captured in border skirmishes. Newspaper articles also state that Allied soldiers, possibly including some Americans, might have been experimented on.
Experiments on humans reportedly not only included infection with anthrax, typhoid, and other infectious diseases but also live dissections of prisoners without anesthesia, exposing prisoners to low air pressure, freezing of prisoners, removal of limbs, blood, and organs (often without anesthesia) to see the results, exposing humans to fragmentation rounds containing infectious agents, and other experiments.
News accounts have indicated possibly as many as 1,500 U.S. POWs, many of them survivors of the Bataan Death March, were among Allied POWs sent to a POW camp at Mukden (also known as Shenyang) in Manchuria, more than 300 miles southwest of Harbin. The first testimony by a U.S. POW about his experiences at Mukden apparently occurred in the brief testimony of Warren W. Whelchel in a 1982 field hearing on Veterans Administration health care in Montana. At the hearing, Whelchel testified that different men were given different injections and, thereafter, the Japanese took careful note of each man’s condition.
At a half-day hearing of the Compensation Subcommittee of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, held in 1986 on treatment of U.S. POWs in Mukden, much of the discussion focused on compensation issues. There were four witnesses at the 1986 hearing, only one of whom was a former POW. The first witness, John H. Hatcher, Chief of Army Records Management and Army Archivist, testified that no primary records had been found by the Army dealing with what might have happened at Mukden and that Japanese Army records which could have contained such information had been returned unread to Japan. He stated that the Army had no records which could confirm or deny claims that had been made. Former POW James Frank, the second witness, testified that he had been sent to Mukden and that he believed he had been experimented on. He described what he saw when he was assigned to help Unit 731 personnel with autopsies of those who died and he stated that Unit 731 functionaries were interested
