So far so good, as long as military medicine was used for medical purposes. Except that in the late 1930s, as Japan became a militarist nation, a scientist named Shiro Ishii initiated an effort to build a network of laboratories to conduct disease research and dissect humans with the intent not to cure but to kill. Wealthy and politically well connected, he was extremely successful. His largest operation, known as Unit 731, was located in Pingfan, China, near Harbin, a major city 650 miles northeast of Beijing. The Pingfan facility was an enormous complex consisting of seventy buildings on 2.3 square miles. Inside the high walls were laboratories for breeding millions of fleas and other insects, vats capable of breeding eight tons of germs a month, large vegetable gardens, and enough land for livestock to graze. The complex was totally self-contained and closed to the outside world. To make sure no one learned about Pingfan, after it was built all the construction workers were lined up and shot.
Staffing this operation were three thousand doctors, technicians, and soldiers. It was like a small city; Unit 731 even had its own airport and a fleet of airplanes.
People in Harbin who wondered what was going on were told the facility was a lumber mill. The Japanese went so far as to call the five hundred prisoners maruta, or wooden logs. No prisoner ever escaped or left Pingfan alive. During their imprisonment patients were injected with deadly diseases and germs. To get the best test results on the germs’ impact and how long it took for a patient to die, anesthesia was never used, and patients were operated on while alive and free of putrefaction bacteria. Once the five hundred prisoners were satisfactorily vivisected and dead, another five hundred were wheeled in and the cycle continued.
During the war Chinese spies and American missionaries had heard rumors about Pingfan and alerted the OSS. More than nine hundred incidents were reported. Chiang Kai-shek sent a letter to Winston Churchill, who passed it along to Franklin Roosevelt, who was already nervous about what biological weapons the Japanese might try to use. In a safety precaution kept secret from the public lest it cause panic, immediately after Pearl Harbor everyone in the White House had been issued a personal gas mask, even the president. (His gas mask was tied to his wheelchair, readily available at a moment’s notice.) Throughout the Second World War, the threat of a gas attack on the White House hung in the air.
Another threat struck directly at the United States. In 1942 it was discovered that a group of Japanese saboteurs had tried to poison the Los Angeles city water supply with a mixture of typhoid and plague germs. President Roosevelt, on June 6, 1942, warned Japan against biological warfare and made it “unmistakably clear that if Japan persists in this inhuman form of warfare against China or any of the other United Nations, such actions will be regarded by this government as though taken against the United States, and retaliation in kind and in full measure will be meted out.” For the same reason, countries don’t try to assassinate other countries’ leaders: fear of retaliation. Only with the Japanese, it didn’t work. First they launched a small wave of balloons carrying anthrax; the result was nil because the anthrax spores froze at the high altitudes. Then, in December 1944, came a huge invasion: 9,300 balloons carrying incendiary devices. Some 200 landed in Alaska, Hawaii, Vancouver, the Aleutian Islands, and Michigan. One of the balloons, ninety-one feet in circumference, knocked out the power at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington State, causing a temporary delay in the construction of the atom bomb for Nagasaki. While the United States government played down the attack, the Japanese government told the Japanese public that the West Coast of the United States was a blazing inferno, with ten thousand dead.* Lest this message reach the already jumpy American public, on June 4, 1945, the War Department permitted Newsweek to run a small, barely noticeable four-inch article with the casual headline “Mustn’t Touch!” (as if it was child’s play). The article mentioned only scant details about the incendiary balloons. “These and other facts long have been known to many newspapers, magazines, and radio stations which, at the request of the Office of Censorship, have withheld publication or broadcasting of details,” admitted Newsweek. Since news of the balloons’ existence was out, might the public learn more? Hardly. Even then, “Papers and magazines were requested to withhold any specific information of the balloons; the time of arrival, locality, and effect of any incident connected with them.” The balloons were to be kept secret (along with America’s second-best-kept secret after the Manhattan Project: its own BW facility at Camp Detrick, Maryland, built in 1943).
In the final days of the war, the Japanese prepared their most daring plan yet, originally conceived by Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto of Pearl Harbor fame: to attack America with airplanes launched from submarines. By now the Japanese had developed the I-400 class, the biggest and most ingenious submarine ever seen. This massive, 400-foot-long sea monster had on its deck a watertight hangar 115 feet long, large enough to hold three seaplanes with wings folded. The deck also had a 200-foot runway ramp, and a derrick for hoisting a seaplane out of the water and into the hangar. The submarine carried enough fuel to cruise 35,000 miles, or one and a half times around the globe, meaning it could attack San Francisco and Los Angeles, then cross into the Atlantic Ocean via Cape Horn, attack Washington and New York, and return home. Two of these monsters had been built and were ready to go. What kind of weaponry would they use? Yamamoto had planned to use conventional bombs. Given the way the war was going downhill for Japan, something much more drastic was needed.
Enter BW. Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa hatched a plan with Shiro Ishii to use the I-400 and the I-401 to deliver germ bombs developed at Unit 731. Fortunately for the United States, Ozawa didn’t have the authority to go ahead on his own; he had to run the scheme by a committee. Head of the war plans committee was the chief of the general staff, Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu. Umezu, who would later sign the Missouri surrender and subsequently be tried and convicted in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and sentenced to life, didn’t like the idea. In late March 1945 he blackballed it. This extreme kind of warfare was morally unacceptable, he said: “Germ warfare against the United States would escalate to war against all humanity. . . . Japan will earn the derision of the world.”
The American general on the front line of Japan’s potential BW attack, the one most worried about it, was Douglas MacArthur. As a veteran of World War I, he had seen the effects of poison gas both in its ability to kill and in its pernicious effects on military morale. He had nothing but contempt for the Nobel Prize Committee, which had awarded the 1918 chemistry prize to Fritz Haber, the inventor of poison gas, who in his acceptance speech had had the effrontery to call his chlorine weapons “a higher form of killing.” This wasn’t killing, this was barbarism.*
Aware that the major cause of death in war is disease—not enemy bullets—MacArthur was always very punctilious about the health of his soldiers. In early 1943 he had established the Combined Advisory Committee on Tropical Medicine, Hygiene and Sanitation to develop preemptive strategies for combating tropical diseases. In less than fifteen months he had reduced the malaria rate by 95 percent. As his troops made their victorious sweep up from Australia through the South Pacific, they conducted blood tests of their Japanese prisoners to see what medicines they were using, and were astonished to find they had been inoculated against anthrax. There was no anthrax in the jungle: What was going on? Then it was discovered that a number of these Japanese had served in China at Pingfan and other facilities; now as prisoners they provided enough intelligence to generate eye-popping rumors. On the island of Morotai, American soldiers discovered a field manual on a dead Japanese soldier stating, “Great results can be obtained by contaminating their food and drink by bacterial strategy.” On Luzon they captured a document outlining a plan to contaminate the island with cholera. Specific techniques included “spraying bacterial solutions by airplane,” “firing shells and bullets containing pathogenic organisms,” “dropping ampoules containing bacteria,” “dropping infected insects and animals,” “spraying powdered bacteria,” a
nd “spreading bacteria by agents.”
Some of these sprays were actually used. Brig. Gen. Charles Loucks, the head of Pacific theater chemical warfare efforts such as smoke bombs and flamethrowers, had reported that the Japanese had used poison gas against American troops in a few isolated instances in New Guinea. MacArthur, when he got this report, resolved to do nothing retaliatory. The best solution was to stay on the move and keep capturing territory. But back in Washington, General Marshall had other ideas. The chief of staff told David E. Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (and later head of the Atomic Energy Commission, 1946–51), that he favored the use of poison gas for the invasion of Okinawa. The only reason it wasn’t used was opposition from Winston Churchill, who feared the Germans might feel free to do the same against Britain. Nonetheless, despite the views of MacArthur and Admiral Leahy, Marshall went ahead and ordered preparations to be made for BW warfare against Japanese rice crops should an invasion of Japan become necessary.
When MacArthur reached Manila and started making plans for the invasion of Japan, he demanded the services of Murray Sanders, Camp Detrick’s top expert in biological warfare, then about to leave for Burma to investigate a plague caused by cholera ampoules dropped from Japanese airplanes. Unlike Marshall, the supreme commander had no intention of using BW, but he did need to know what to expect. Sanders flew to Manila and conducted a four-hour briefing with MacArthur, General Willoughby, and Dr. Karl Compton, the former president of MIT, then President Truman’s personal emissary in charge of reviewing Japanese BW. Compton reported his findings back to the president.
After the atom bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered, MacArthur sent Sanders to Japan a week ahead of him to start looking for Japan’s BW criminals, which is why when he landed at Atsugi he asked about Ishii.
But the Japanese were one step ahead of the game. Waiting at the Yokohama dock to greet Sanders was none other than Ryoichi Naito, the man who had tried to bribe the Rockefeller Institute scientist in the parking lot.
This time Naito would be more successful.
ISHII KNEW HE was in deep trouble. No one, not even the emperor, could save him or even think of lifting a finger. He was on his own, the target of a massive manhunt. If he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a cave somewhere, he would have to do what every “big fish” criminal does when the jig is up: cut a plea deal. He could embarrass a lot of important politicians with what he knew. As the war drew to an end, he got his team together and issued his final command: his comrades in arms were to go into hiding, never again to seek government employment, and never again to contact one another. After they departed the Unit 731 facility at Pingfan, he ordered all the buildings blown up and razed to the ground.
By the time the Russians, who had invaded Manchuria, got to Pingfan, everything was gone. But some evidence still remained: Even though the prisoners’ bodies had been burned and then pulverized, skeletons from earlier days remained buried deep under the debris. The bullet holes, knife marks, and chemical residues indicated that this had been more than a lumber mill. Definitive proof came from the animals that the Japanese, in their haste to flee, had released into the countryside: thousands of plague-infested horses, monkeys, dogs, rats, even Mongolian camels.
What exactly had been going on at Pingfan? Allied investigators in Germany had it so much easier: the Germans have a well-known penchant for recording, documenting, and filming everything, so when it came time to prepare evidence for the Nuremberg trials, all the prosecutors had to do was collect and organize the available evidence. In Japan this was not the case. There were hardly any pictures or written records, and Ishii’s doctors and lab technicians were lying low. Considering that Ishii’s operation employed twenty thousand people in its various hospitals and factories of death in China, Japan, and the South Pacific, this was quite an accomplishment.
Ishii, who by now had escaped back to Japan, resorted to another stunt commonly used by most-wanted criminals. After burying many important documents in the garden of his Tokyo home, he arranged for the local mayor to issue a proclamation declaring that he was dead: He had been shot to death in Manchuria. His friends staged a massive funeral ceremony, complete with mourners, priests, burning incense, and prayers for his departed soul. By all eyewitness accounts it was an elaborate and moving event with many tears shed by mourners glancing at the sealed coffin.
Hearing that Ishii had beaten him to the grim reaper did not please MacArthur. Further news that he might have pulled a fast one made him even angrier. SCAP got an anonymous letter, written in Japanese, saying that the funeral had been a fake and that the writer, a former associate of Ishii, would reveal all if MacArthur’s office would place a specially worded advertisement in a certain Japanese newspaper within three days. However, by the time SCAP translated this bombshell letter and got it to MacArthur, the deadline had passed. An utter and complete foul-up: SCAP never heard from the anonymous source again.
Frustrated that there would be no Ishii, MacArthur called Sanders into his office. Their best lead was Naito, and he was not being very cooperative. The investigation into BW was going nowhere; it was now time to use some imagination. MacArthur instructed Sanders to bluff: The next time Sanders met with Naito, he was to make his best effort to look worn out and dejected. He would tell Naito he had some very bad news: MacArthur was sending him home because he was being too weak and soft, and a Russian was replacing him.
The bluff worked, but for unexpected reasons. What the Americans didn’t know was that Ryoichi Naito was hardly some bumbling scientist who had offered a bribe in New York City; he was a top man in Ishii’s operation. No way could a man who knew so much let himself fall into the hands of the Russians and face a torture chamber. Within twenty-four hours he returned with a twelve-page handwritten memorandum, along with a pile of important documents. He was now being what MacArthur would call “a good boy”: a cooperative witness.
But progress was still excruciatingly slow: Sanders was not an aggressive questioner able to unravel the nasty chiaroscuro of Japanese BW. He had none of a prosecutor’s skills in asking leading questions. There are two basic ways to get information out of a reluctant defendant: Use torture, or provide immunity. MacArthur rejected the former: “We’re not given to torture,” he told Sanders. That left MacArthur with the very distasteful possibility that he would have to grant immunity to Ishii—assuming he was still alive—a man he must have despised as the lowest of the low, lacking any shred of honor. Be that as it may, as a general MacArthur had to recognize that Unit 731’s research had serious potential military value; the Joint Chiefs wanted it, and his job was to get it—if possible.
Over at his hotel, Murray Sanders was getting ready to go to bed one evening when he heard a noise outside his room. Startled at seeing a Japanese face in the window, he quickly reached under his pillow and pulled out his gun. Keeping his revolver pointed at the intruder, he opened the window and ordered the man into the room. Apparently the man had climbed down a water pipe to reach Sanders’s room in order to smuggle a blueprint for him. The drawing was of a bomb designed to carry biological germs, called the Uji bomb, and more than a hundred of them had been made. Over the next hour the visitor revealed further details about Japan’s biological warfare, refused to give his name, climbed out the window, and vanished into the night, never to be seen again.
The next morning a shaken Sanders met with MacArthur. After hearing the story and lighting his pipe, MacArthur explained to Sanders: “We need more evidence. We simply can’t act on that. Keep going. Ask more questions. And keep quiet about it.”
Discretion was the key. In early 1946, knowing from Naito how little information the Americans had and how anxious they were to get it, a man surprised everyone by rising from the dead and walking in the front door, very much alive, Shiro Ishii himself. He proved to be sharp and shrewd: No matter how intense the questioning, he still managed to be vague. After numerous interrogations he put his conditions on the
table: He wanted to be hired by the United States as a biological weapons expert! “I have given a great deal of thought to tactical problems in the defense of BW,” he announced. “I have made studies on the best agents to be employed in various regions and in cold climates. I can write volumes about BW, including the little-thought-of strategic and tactical employment.”
No doubt he could, but at a high price: He wanted a written promise of immunity. There was also a risk: What if he didn’t deliver? He then played his trump card: “My experience would be a useful advantage to the United States in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.”
DEALING WITH EVIL is never a pleasant experience. MacArthur must have choked at this sadist’s consummate arrogance, but as supreme commander he had larger concerns than just putting Ishii in jail. The war with Japan was over, Russia was now the enemy, and Ishii had a lot of useful information about military medicine, both defensive and offensive, that was impossible to get in the United States (U.S. law prohibited medical experiments on live patients and any dispersal of harmful vaccines on U.S. soil). If the Russians got hold of this research, they could have a fearsome military weapon. The appeal of germ warfare, unlike the atom bomb, was that it was not only cheap, it was deniable and very difficult to trace. Finally there was the emperor to think about. Ishii, given the scale of his operation, clearly had powerful friends high up in the Japanese government, including possibly the emperor. If Hirohito knew, or if Ishii came out claiming he knew, about Japan’s weapons of mass destruction and had sanctioned their use against the United States, there would be a huge hue and cry in America and certainly a congressional investigation—and a call for the emperor’s head.
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