by Jon E. Lewis
So let us resolve to hold forever in our hearts and minds the memory of a time not long ago in Macon County, Alabama, so that we can always see how adrift we can become when the rights of any citizens are neglected, ignored and betrayed. And let us resolve here and now to move forward together.
The legacy of the study at Tuskegee has reached far and deep, in ways that hurt our progress and divide our nation. We cannot be one America when a whole segment of our nation has no trust in America. An apology is the first step, and we take it with a commitment to rebuild that broken trust. We can begin by making sure there is never again another episode like this one. We need to do more to ensure that medical research practices are sound and ethical, and that researchers work more closely with communities...
The people who ran the study at Tuskegee diminished the stature of man by abandoning the most basic ethical precepts. They forgot their pledge to heal and repair. They had the power to heal the survivors and all the others and they did not. Today, all we can do is apologize. But you have the power, for only you – Mr. Shaw, the others who are here, the family members who are with us in Tuskegee – only you have the power to forgive. Your presence here shows us that you have chosen a better path than your government did so long ago. You have not withheld the power to forgive. I hope today and tomorrow every American will remember your lesson.
Thank you, and God bless you. (Applause.)
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 “Hai.” So: in return for acquiring the expertise of Unit 731’s scientists, the US covered up the evidence of its crimes, which may well have included torture and experimentation on captured GIs (see Congressional Research Report document, p.563). No charges were ever brought by the prosecutor at the Tokyo War Crimes trial, and many of the Unit’s personnel went on to play a prominent role in Japanese society; Ishii’s successor as head of 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of the Green Cross pharmaceutical giant. Ishii himself was transported to the USA to carry on his bioweapons research, this time for Uncle Sam, in much the same way useful Nazi war criminals were under Project Paperclip.
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.
Further Reading
Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death, 1994
Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: Japan’s Secret Biological Warfare in World War II, 1989
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 The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, information on alleged Japanese Army biological warfare experiments on POWs has slowly been revealed, contributing to the continuing intensity of the WWII POW issue.
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 History Undercover: Unit 731, Nightmare in Manchuria, was broadcast on the History Channel on March 7, 1999, and was rebroadcast an additional three times. Books have been written about Unit 731 in Japan, former members have come forward to tell of their activities, and a traveling exhibit about it has been seen by some 200,000 Japanese.
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.
Reports of Experi
mentation on POWs
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 in only certain of the dead POWs. He also testified that after he had been liberated, he and others had been required by the Army to sign papers promising not to reveal what had gone on at the camp under penalty of court martial. He also spoke of the difficulty in getting the VA to accept claims for illnesses he believed were caused by his time at Mukden when the VA said no medical records of such time existed.
The third witness at the 1986 hearing, Greg Rodriguez, Jr., was the son of a deceased POW and had previously testified at the 1982 hearing in Montana. He stated he believed his father’s many ailments stemmed from being experimented on at Mukden, talked of his father’s struggle to get veterans’ benefits and about the records the son had found about Mukden. The last witness, William Triplett, who had written a book focusing on involvement of Unit 731 personnel in the Tokyo Imperial Bank murders in 1948, said that in his research he had found declassified DOD documents which he believed attested to the existence of Unit 731, to the fact that it performed biological warfare experiments on human beings, and that Army occupation officials knew about these facts when dealing with former members of Unit 731. He quoted from a State Department memorandum that was part of a U.S. War Department Judge Advocate General document, which said, “It should be kept in mind that there is a remote possibility that the independent investigation conducted by the Soviets in the Mukden area may have already disclosed evidence that American prisoners of war were used to experimental purposes of a BW nature and that they lost their lives as a result of these experiments.” Mr. Triplett stated that he believed that the government was in possession of records about what happened to POWs at Mukden that could help the VA in diagnosing POWs’ ailments. Since 1994, there have been newspaper accounts discussing the experiences of several American POWs who were interned at Mukden.
In his 1994 book, Factories of Death, Sheldon Harris analyzed the fragmentary and sparse available data and concluded that “… the evidence, while inconclusive, suggests strongly that they [U.S. POWs] were not [among those] subjected to human BW experiments at Mukden”.
In Unjust Enrichment, Linda Goetz Holmes lays out in much more detail than Harris the reported incidents that led to POWs’ claims that they were experimented on at Mukden and elsewhere.
U.S. Agreement Not to Prosecute Unit 731 Members
One of the most persistent allegations surrounding Unit 731 is one made in the initial 1980 article, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime” (in The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars), in Harris’s Factories of Death, and elsewhere – that General Ishii and his staff were given immunity against prosecution as war criminals by the United States in exchange for the scientific information gathered during Unit 731’s experiments. In a letter to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, dated December 8, 1998, Eli M. Rosenbaum, Director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, indicated that such a deal was struck. Mr. Rosenbaum wrote that “Two of these [formerly classified] reports [about biological warfare data collected by the Japanese and the arrangement made between the United States and Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731], dated November 17, 1981, and May 5, 1982, confirm that Ishii and his colleagues received immunity from prosecution and that, in exchange, they provided a great deal of information to U.S. authorities.”
According to news accounts, Gen. Ishii returned to Japan after the war where he was permitted to continue medical research, was paid a Japanese government pension, and died of cancer in 1959. Moreover, many of Ishii’s chief lieutenants occupied prominent positions in post-war Japanese society. According to one news account, the several hundred remaining members of Unit 731 were still holding their annual reunion in Japan as of 1999.
Missing Records
In the 20-year controversy over whether Americans were experimented on, the chief problem has been the lack of documentary evidence to support anecdotal accounts. According to U.S. Army testimony in the 1986 hearing on treatment of U.S. POWs in Mukden, the United States captured the records of the Imperial Army when it occupied Japan. These very hard-to-translate records were brought to this country, remained here for some 13 years largely untranslated and unread, and were then returned to Japan. However, according to a 1999 New York Times article, in 1948 the Central Intelligence Agency screened the records before they were turned over to the National Archives. Later 5% of the records were hurriedly microfilmed by a group including scholars from Harvard and Georgetown University, between the time they were ordered returned to Japan in 1957 and when they were actually put on a boat in February 1958. Japan has denied access to these records to those trying to document the actions of Unit 731. Author Sheldon Harris is quoted in the New York Times article as saying that he learned from Freedom of Information Act requests for military debriefing records dealing with this issue that relevant records were lost in the fire at the St. Louis Military Personnel Records Center in 1973. In 1995 an article in the Washington Times quoted Ken McKinnon, spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs, as saying, “The Veterans Administration has never seen evidence that research was done on the U.S. POWs. We would be more than willing to see new information on how POWs were treated and review the causes of injury and death.” Mr. McKinnon said that the VA depends on DOD for analysis and documentation in this area. The article then went on to say that a Pentagon spokesman said he had never heard about U.S. POWs and the germ-warfare experiments at Mukden.
Efforts to Obtain an Apology
Several times since the end of WWII, Japanese government officials made statements that they regarded as an apology for their conduct in WWII, but that other nations did not accept as a full, direct, and unambiguous apology. These statements have evolved. In 1989, Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita stated that, “We cannot say in affirmative terms whether the Japanese state was an aggressor nation. That is a matter for future historians to judge.” But, in 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologized to the United States by expressing his “deep remorse … that we inflicted an unbearable blow on the people of America and the Asian countries.” In 1992, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa apologized to the people of the Asia-Pacific Region, saying, “During a period in the past, the people of the Asia-Pacific region experienced unbearable suffering and pain due to our country’s behavior. I would like to express again deep remorse and regret.” According to the article citing his apology, this apology to the people of the Asia-Pacific region was the f
irst apology by a Japanese prime minister in a policy speech. A senior government official said that this apology to the people of the Asia-Pacific region was also meant to apply to the United States. However, a month before this apology, the Japanese parliament rejected a bill which called specifically for a Japanese apology on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In August 1993, Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa stated that the Japanese “… state clearly before all the world our remorse at our past history and our renewed determination to do better.”
In 1994 the Japanese Foreign Ministry apologized for the “deeply regrettable” conduct of failing to break off diplomatic relations before their attack on Pearl Harbor. However, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that this apology was to the Japanese people and not to the people of the United States.
On August 15, 1995, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama made the following statement, “During a certain period in the not too distant past, Japan, following a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensnare the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and through its colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” He went on to say, “In the hope that no such mistake be made in the future, I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.” However, some observers pointed out that he made his apology in the first person, on his behalf, and not that of Japan. This statement was not seen as adequate by various victims’ groups because, they said, it was not endorsed by the Japanese parliament. According to newspaper accounts Prime Minister Murayama’s apology obtained a tepid reaction in Asia. Speaking to veterans in Honolulu on the 50th anniversary of V-J Day, a few days after Murayama’s remarks, President Clinton said, “… let me say especially how much the American people appreciate the recent powerful words of the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr. Murayama, when he expressed his nation’s regret for its past aggression and its gratitude for the hand of reconciliation that this, the World War II generation, extended 50 years ago.”