Unit 731, Japan's Mengele WWII/Korea Human Experiments

[TonyGosling]

And not to forget:
'How The U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War And Denied It Ever Since':
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-u-s-waged-germ-warfare-in-the-kor ean-war-and-denied-it-ever-since/5487929

'There is no historical controversy as contentious or long-lasting as the North Korean and Chinese charges of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War. For those who believe the charges to be false — and that includes much of American academia, but not all — they must assume the burden of explaining why the North Koreans or Chinese made up any bogus claims to attack the credibility of U.S. forces. Because they had no reason to do that.

It is a historical fact that the United States carpet-bombed and napalmed North Korea, killing nearly 3 million civilians thereby.

In other words, massive war crimes are already self-evident, and if there is any mystery, it is how historical amnesia and/or callous disregard for crimes such as those committed by the U.S. and its allies in Korea, or the millions killed by the U.S. in Southeast Asia, can go ignored today.

But the U.S. media and academia largely ignore evidence of U.S. use of weapons of mass destruction in its wars against independence struggles and for imperial dominance, or hock their wares to support propaganda that claims such crimes never took place. Evidence to the contrary, such as the 1950s International Scientific Commission investigation into U.S. use of bacteriological weapons in the Korean War, or the many confessions under interrogation by U.S. Air Force personnel, were generally suppressed. (I published myself the ISC’s summary report earlier this year.)

The suppression of the ISC investigation was, as Chaddock points out, at least in part because ISC chair, Sir Joseph Needham, was not shy in mentioning the connections between the US use of BW in Korea and China and Japanese use of biological experimentation and warfare against China during World War II. This was of high sensitivity to the U.S. as they publicly denied that, having made a deal with Shiro Ishii and the Japanese war criminals of Unit 731 to not prosecute them if US scientists from Fort Detrick and the CIA could get Japanese data and samples — of human tissues gathered via vivisection! — and use them for the US’s own secretive BW program in the early years of the Cold War.

One man with evident integrity and unwilling to let the truth be buried is Dave Chaddock. His book, This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since, is a superb exercise in historical rebuttal. The falsifications and lies and secrets propounded by the U.S. on the issue of its crimes has been going on for decades now. For instance, the U.S. populace did not learn of its government’s post-war deal with Nazis, or its amnesty of the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731, until nearly 40 years had passed from the time of these events. If the book seems partisan at times, it is understandably the passion of someone outraged at what he has discovered — just as many who have served in America’s imperial wars returned home outraged, and too often broken, by what they had seen and endured......'

[TonyGosling]

Inside Unit 731, World War II Japan’s Sickening Human Experiments Program
https://www.allthatsinteresting.com/unit-731

By Richard Stockton | Checked By John Kuroski - Published November 2, 2017

Six of the most disturbing "experiments" conducted by Unit 731, the gruesome biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Unit 731 Germ Test

Xinhua via Getty ImagesUnit 731 personnel conduct a bacteriological trial upon a test subject in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

World War II was beyond horrible for hundreds of millions of people. It’s as if all the developed countries of the world had surplus rage and hate that they had been storing up, and it all came flooding out in the war years.

Out of all the areas in which World War II was fought, none were active as long as what would come to be known as the Pacific Theater. In fact, Japan arguably started the war by attacking Manchuria in 1931, and it inarguably waged war with China by invading in 1937.

The disturbances and upheavals that these invasions caused shook China to its very foundations, triggered a civil war and a famine that probably killed more people than currently live in Canada and Australia combined, and lasted until the country’s Soviet “liberation” in 1945.

And out of all the outrages that Imperial Japan unleashed upon the Chinese people during this brutal occupation — and there were indeed some stunning crimes committed, even by World War II standards — probably none was as gratuitously hateful as the operations of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit that somehow plumbed new depths in what was already a nearly genocidal war.

Despite innocent beginnings as a research and public health agency, Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. All this “progress” was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human prisoners, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 disbanded at the end of the war.

In a long list of atrocities, these six programs, in particular, stand out in the bloody history of Unit 731:
Unit 731 Experiments: Frostbite Testing
Unit 731 Frostbite Test

Xinhua via Getty ImagesThe frostbitten hands of a Chinese person who was taken outside in winter by Unit 731 personnel for an experiment on how best to treat frostbite. Date unspecified.

Yoshimura Hisato, a physiologist assigned to Unit 731, took a special interest in hypothermia. As part of Maruta’s study in limb injuries, Hisato routinely submerged prisoners’ limbs in a tub of water filled with ice and had them held until the arm or leg had frozen solid and a coat of ice had formed over the skin. According to one eyewitness account, the limbs made a sound like a plank of wood when struck with a cane.

Hisato then tried different methods for rapid rewarming of the frozen appendage. Sometimes he did this by dousing the limb with hot water, sometimes by holding it close to an open fire, and other times by leaving the subject untreated overnight to see how long it took for the person’s own blood to thaw it out.

Vivisection Of Conscious Prisoners
Unit 731 Medical Table

Xinhua via Getty ImagesA Unit 731 doctor operates on a patient that is part of a bacteriological experiment. Date unspecified.

Unit 731 started out as a research unit, investigating the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of an armed force. One element of the unit, called “Maruta,” took this research a little further than the usual bounds of medical ethics by observing injuries and the course of disease on living patients.

At first, these patients were volunteers from the ranks of the army, but as the experiments reached the limits of what could be non-invasively observed, and as the supply of volunteers dried up, the unit turned to the study of Chinese POWs and civilian prisoners.

And as the concept of consent went out the window, so did the restraint of the researchers. It was around this time that Unit 731 began referring to confined research subjects as “logs,” or “Maruta” in Japanese.

Study methods in these experiments were barbaric.

Vivisection, for example, is the practice of mutilating human bodies, without anesthesia, to study the operations of living systems. Thousands of men and women, mostly Chinese communist prisoners as well as children and elderly farmers, were infected with diseases such as cholera and the plague, then had their organs removed for examination before they died in order to study the effects of the disease without the decomposition that occurs after death.

Subjects had limbs amputated and reattached to the other side of the body, while others had their limbs crushed or frozen, or had the circulation cut off to observe the progress of gangrene.

Finally, when a prisoner’s body was all used up, they would typically be shot or killed by lethal injection, though some may have been buried alive. None of the Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, or Russian prisoners assigned to Unit 731 survived their confinement.
Weapons Tests
Bayonet Practice

Associated Press/LIFE via Wikimedia CommonsA Japanese soldier uses a Chinese man’s body for bayonet practice near Tianjin, China. September 1937.

The effectiveness of various weapons was of obvious interest to the Japanese Army. To determine effectiveness, Unit 731 herded prisoners together on a firing range and blasted them from varying ranges by multiple Japanese weapons, such as the Nambu 8mm pistol, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, and grenades. Wound patterns and penetration depths were then compared on the bodies of the dead and dying inmates.

Bayonets, swords, and knives were also studied in this way, though the prisoners were usually bound for these tests. Flamethrowers were also tested, on both covered and exposed skin. In addition, gas chambers were set up at unit facilities and test subjects exposed to nerve gas and blister agents.

Heavy objects were dropped onto bound prisoners to study crush injuries, subjects were locked up and deprived of food and water to learn how long humans could survive without them, and victims were allowed to drink only sea water, or were given injections of mismatched human or animal blood to study transfusions and the clotting process.

Meanwhile, prolonged X-ray exposure sterilized and killed thousands of research participants, as well as inflicting horrible burns when the emitting plates were miscalibrated or held too close to the subjects’ nipples, genitals, or faces.

And to study the effects of high G-forces on pilots and falling paratroopers, Unit 731 personnel loaded human beings into large centrifuges and spun them at higher and higher speeds until they lost consciousness and/or died, which usually happened around 10 to 15 G’s, though young children showed a lower tolerance for acceleration forces.


Syphilis Experiments
Shiro Ishii

Wikimedia CommonsGeneral Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731.

Venereal disease has been the bane of organized militaries since ancient Egypt, and so it stands to reason that the Japanese military would take an interest in the symptoms and treatment of syphilis.

To learn what they needed to know, doctors assigned to Unit 731 infected prisoners with the disease and withheld treatment to observe the uninterrupted course of the illness. A contemporary treatment, a primitive chemotherapy agent called Salvarsan, was sometimes administered over a period of months to observe the side effects, however.

To ensure effective transmission of the disease, syphilitic male prisoners were ordered to rape both female and male fellow prisoners, who would then be monitored to observe the onset of the disease. If the first exposure failed to establish infection, more rapes would be arranged until it did.
Rape And Forced Pregnancy
Harbin Facility

Wikimedia CommonsUnit 731’s Harbin facility.

Beyond just the syphilis experiments, rape became a common feature of Unit 731’s experiments.

For example, female prisoners of childbearing age were sometimes forcibly impregnated so that weapon and trauma experiments could be done on them.

After being infected with various diseases, exposed to chemical weapons, or suffering crush injuries, bullet wounds, and shrapnel injuries, the pregnant subjects were opened up and the effects on the fetuses studied.

The idea seems to have been to translate the teams’ findings into civilian medicine, but if Unit 731’s researchers ever published these results, the papers seem not to have survived the war years.


Germ Warfare
Children With Unit 731 Researchers

Xinhua via Getty ImagesUnit 731 researchers conduct bacteriological experiments with captive child subjects in Nongan County of northeast China’s Jilin Province. November 1940.

The totality of Unit 731’s research was in support of their larger mission, which by 1939 was to develop horrific weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese population, and presumably American and Soviet forces, if the time ever came.

To this end, Unit 731 cycled through tens of thousands of prisoners at several facilities across Manchuria, which had been occupied by imperial forces for years. Inmates of these facilities were infected with several of the most lethal pathogens known to science, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, and typhus, which the Japanese hoped would spread from person to person after being deployed and depopulate disputed areas.

To breed the most lethal strains possible, doctors monitored patients for rapid onset of symptoms and quick progression. Prisoners who pulled through were shot, but those who got sickest fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table, and their blood was used to transfect other prisoners, the sickest of whom would themselves be bled to transfer the most virulent strain to yet another generation.

One member of Unit 731 later recalled that very sick and unresisting prisoners would be laid out on the slab so a line could be inserted into their carotid artery. When most of the blood had been siphoned off and the heart was too weak to pump anymore, an officer in leather boots climbed onto the table and jumped on the victim’s chest with enough force to crush the ribcage, whereupon another dollop of blood would spurt into the container.

When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of prisoners to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis’ preferred vector of contagion. The fleas were then packed in dust and sealed inside clay bomb casings.
Germ Warfare

Xinhua via Getty ImagesJapanese personnel in protective suits carry a stretcher through Yiwu, China during Unit 731’s germ warfare tests. June 1942.

On October 4, 1940, Japanese bombers deployed these casings, each loaded with 30,000 fleas that had each sucked blood from a dying prisoner, over the Chinese village of Quzhou. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone.

From contemporary accounts, it is known that more than 2,000 civilians died of plague following this attack, and that another 1,000 or so died in nearby Yiwu after the plague was carried there by sick railway workers. Other attacks, using anthrax, killed approximately 6,000 more people in the area.

In August 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been bombed, the Soviet Army had invaded Manchuria and utterly annihilated the Japanese Army, and the emperor read his infamous surrender declaration over the radio, Unit 731 was officially disbanded.

Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty.

To this day, Japan has not apologized for, and China has not forgiven, the countless atrocities Japanese forces visited upon China between 1931 and 1945. As the last witnesses to this history grow old and die, it’s possible that the matter will never be addressed again.

After this look at Unit 731, read up on some more of the worst war crimes ever committed as well as other Japanese war crimes from the World War II era. Then, have a look at four of the most evil science experiments ever performed and find out whether or not any of the highly disturbing Nazi research actually contributed anything to medical science.