Deadly Knowledge
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare,
1932-45, and the American Coverup
By Sheldon H. Harris
Routledge
Decades before the Aum Shinri Kyo religious sect began gassing subways, the Japanese government funded another horror: the world's most brutal biological warfare (BW) experiments on human subjects. According to writer Sheldon Harris, all of this was delicately covered up for years by the United States in return for the valuable test data.
From the time Japan occupied all of Manchuria in 1931-1932 until the 1945 surrender to Allied forces, the Manchurian countryside became pockmarked with ugly scientific buildings known to locals only as "lumber mills," surrounded by moats and patrolled by aircraft. In these macabre fortresses, deadly microbes - such as anthrax, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery - were tested on live human subjects, who were either kidnapped from neighboring villages or shipped in via POW boats. Once the subjects - or "material" - had exhausted their usefulness and died, the corpses were cremated on-site or dumped in mass graves. Occasionally a nearby town was surreptitiously infected with plague germs. After inhabitants showed terminal symptoms, the test was deemed successful, and the community burned to destroy all evidence.
Sheldon Harris has spent the past 10 years compiling the definitive tome on the subject. One chilling account describes an outdoor test performed on Chinese prisoners:
"The subjects were bound to stakes some 10 to 20 meters away from a shrapnel bomb that was loaded with gas gangrene. The object was not to kill the men by exploding the bomb, but to test the effectiveness of gas gangrene as a BW weapon in below zero temperatures. Consequently, 'their heads and backs were protected with special metal shields and thick quilted blankets, but their legs and buttocks were left unprotected.' Using a remote-control device, the researchers exploded the bomb, and 'the shrapnel, bearing gas gangrene germs, scattered all over the spot where the experimentees were bound. All the experimentees were wounded in the legs or buttocks, and seven days later they died in great torment.'"
According to Harris's exhaustive research, three principal leaders of the BW program - Ishii Shiro, Kitano Masaji, and Wakamatsu Yujiro - were responsible for camps with ominously nondescript names like Unit 731 or Unit Ei1644. Once the war ended, all three men escaped prosecution. United States investigators reportedly cut a deal with them, promising complete immunity in exchange for their data, which was hidden from the War Crimes Tribunal and confined solely to the intelligence community. Thus, when the trials ended in 1948, Soviet and United States intelligence agents swarmed over Japan in a Cold War panic, hurriedly interviewing all known participants. The same questions were on all of their minds:
How did the Japanese do it? What were the results?
The American coverup was kept secret until a 1981 article in the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" by John W. Powell Jr., which eventually led to investigative segments on 60 Minutes and 20/20. Even today, 50 years after the Japanese death factories, United States intelligence still refuses to make public certain related information.
Harris's conclusion is open-ended. The reader is invited to ponder: What does the government have to hide? If the United States claims its own BW experiments ended in 1945, why were Persian Gulf soldiers inoculated with unproven vaccines, including anthrax, and why are 67 percent of their children born with severe illnesses or birth defects? When Factories of Death starts raising questions, they reach uncomfortably close to home.
By Jack Boulware
Hiroshima & Nagasaki
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Originally Posted by Serenity
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