Updated: The Suppressed Report on 1952 U.S. Korean War Anthrax Attack

[Link to download PDF of the document above]

With the U.S. threatening a pre-emptive attack on North Korea for the latter's pressing development of a nuclear warfare capability, it is more imperative than ever that the history of the U.S.-North Korea conflict be made available to the world, the better to assess the claims made by both sides.

While many see North Korea as a dictatorship run by a madman or evil, others see a rational government - dictatorial, yes - that seeks to defend itself against a power that once obliterated its country in war, and threatened it with nuclear weapons. Indeed, even today, the U.S. says it will not forego using nuclear weapons against North Korea and even executes military war games with South Korea that involve practice runs with nuclear bombers almost up to the border of North Korea.

Back in the early 1950s, during the Korean war, until the Soviets began to fly MiGs over the Korean peninsula in defense of the North Koreans, the U.S. had near unconstrained freedom of airspace over North Korea and China, and in particular, dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of Napalm on North Korea, wiping out nearly every city, and contributing to over a million civilian deaths, maybe 15% of the entire population. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur found the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.

Most controversially, both North Korea and China maintain that the U.S. used biological or germ warfare weapons against both North Korea and China during the Korean War. The U.S. has strenuously denied this. Captured U.S. flyers who told their North Korean and Chinese captors of the use of such weapons were told under the threat of courts martial to renounce such confessions after they were returned to U.S. custody. They all did so.

To convince the world of the truth of their claims, the North Koreans and Chinese, sponsored a purported independent commission, using the auspices of the World Peace Council, gathering together a number of leftist scientists from around the world. Most surprisingly, this commission, which came to be known as the International Scientific Commission, or ISC, was headed by one of the foremost British scientists of his time, Sir Joseph Needham. The ISC travelled to China and North Korea in the summer of 1952 and by the end of the year produced a report that corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations.

This posting is not meant to examine the full range of opinions or evidence about whether or not the U.S. used biological weapons in the Korean War. It is instead an attempt to publish essential documentation of such claims, documentation that has been withheld from the American people, and the West in general, for decades. I am publishing here Appendices AA and BB from the Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China.

I introduced that report to the world and posted the report itself online back in January 2015. But the report itself is only some 60-odd pages long, and I was unable at that time to post or publish any of the voluminous appendices that documented the claims of the report. (I am reposting the original executive summary report at the close of this post, for reference sake.) The ISC appendices are crucial in assessing the claims made in the report, and the later denials from U.S. and other allied governments, such as Great Britain.

Appendices AA and BB concern claims of air attacks against various villages in Northeastern China in the Spring of 1952. Using the same kinds of insect (fleas, beetles, etc.) and related "vectors" (such as dropping feathers or rodents) that were studied intensely by Imperial Japanese military scientists and doctors as part of the infamous Unit 731 program. In a matter of proven historical record, but still largely unknown in the United States, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, with knowledge of scientists working out of the Army's Ft. Detrick chemical and biological warfare labs, gave amnesty to the Unit 731 war criminals, who conducted their biological warfare experiments on live prisoners, who were incinerated after the Japanese scientists were done with them.

In the executive report, the ISC examined claims of a biological warfare attack in the town of "K'uan-Tien, which lies in the southeastern part of Liaotung province near the Yalu River," as well as a number of other "localities in the provinces of Liaotung and Liaohsi." They looked in depth at five "fatal human cases of respiratory anthrax and haemorrhagic anthrax," including "a railwayman, a tricycle-rickshaw driver, a housewife, a school-teacher, and a farmer." They considered the extreme, indeed, unprecedented appearance of this disease in that part of the world, and the fact that respiratory or inhalational anthrax had earlier been the subject of research by Ft. Detrick scientists. The analysis included laboratory examination from the bodies and from insects discovered in the area and believed to be spreading the disease, after being dropped by U.S. aircraft.

The ISC concluded (pg. 34 of the summary report, which can be accessed at end of this post):

On the basis of the evidence presented, and on their own searching and prolonged interrogation of a considerable number of witnesses, both medical and lay, the Commission was compelled to conclude that the delivery of various biological objects contaminated with anthrax bacilli to many places in the two Chinese provinces had taken place, and that this had given rise to a number of cases of a mortal infection hitherto unknown in the region, namely pulmonary anthrax and ensuing haemorrhagic meningitis. Eye-witness statements impossible to doubt indicated American airplanes as the vehicles of delivery of the infected objects.

The U.S. denied all biological warfare charges. They demanded the International Red Cross be allowed to independently examine the evidence and document the charges. But unknown to all, in secret meetings of top U.S. Pentagon, the CIA, and State Department officials, gathered together as the U.S Psychological Strategy Board, agreed that there never would be any independent investigation, as the Eighth Army was conducting operations during the Korean War which if they became known ("e.g. chemical warfare") "could do us psychological as well as military damage.” (See full article here.) The scholars Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman found similar evidence of an unwillingness to really examine the North Korean/Chinese/Soviet charges in their 1998 book on the BW controversy.

The controversy has simmered every since.

But convergent evidence of the charges was made in Chapter 13 of the 2006 book Deadly Cultures. Entitled "Allegations of Biological Weapons Use," the chapter was written by Martin Furmanski and Mark Wheelis. While these authors were highly dubious of the claims of U.S. biowarfare, they couldn't discount the anthrax charges. Primarily, they found that the description of inhalational anthrax made at this time - for instance, the wide range of incubational periods reported for the Chinese cases - came before a detailed scientific examination of such cases of anthrax had already been studied. But the ISC description was peculiarly apt and prescient. Furmanski and Wheelis concluded that the deaths documented by the ISC as due to inhalational anthrax had to be real and not faked.

"These results must have been from real human inhalation anthrax cases, since the information did not exist in 1952 to have allowed fabrication using textbook or medical literature sources," Furmanski and Wheelis wrote. (See pg. 260 of Deadly Cultures.)

But I should note, Furmanski and Wheelis in the end did not conclude this was full evidence of biological weapon attack. Indeed, they concluded it must have been of natural origin, though how such a coincidence of widely dispersed, unprecedented appearance of the disease occurred coinicentally with charges of biowar attack.

What they solely relied on for their conclusion was an April 2004 "personal communication" from a U.S. scientist that isolates from the B. anthracis samples from China, which by inference included those from the 1952 putative attack were "subjected to genomic analysis, and all were clearly indigenous to China." Furmanski and Wheelis believe that despite the "highly suspicious" nature of the inhalation anthrax cases discussed in the 1952 ISC Needham report, the genomic analysis proved that the anthrax cases reported to the ISC were of natural origin, and not from a U.S. biological warfare attack.

I have been in touch with all the people involved in this supposed genomic analysis, and while I find it odd that nothing was every published on this genomic or DNA analysis, I will leave a full analysis of the refutation of the ISC report on this score for a future and more scholarly essay. In the meantime, I have decided to publish the ISC documentation as in the West all we ever seem to get are what Cold War scholars publish. Even when critics of the U.S. historical account publish, the actual documentation is thin. This leaves us reliant on the authority of the scholars, which is an extraordinary situation.

[Update, December 21, 2017 - In spring 2017 I contacted U.S. anthrax expert Martin Hugh-Jones, whom Furmanski and Wheelis had referred to in their book as the source of a "genomic analysis" that showed the inhalation anthrax cases in China could not have come from U.S. stocks of anthrax. Professor Hugh-Jones referenced a Chinese scientist, Wang Bingxiang, who worked on bacterial vaccines at the Langhou Institute of Biological Products, who Hugh-Jones said had supplied samples of the 1952 anthrax cases to the Special Pathogens Lab (SPL) at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Louisiana State University.

I subsequently contacted both a U.S. scientist, Kimothy Smith, who Professor Hugh-Jones said worked on the identification of the anthrax strains brought from China to the SPL, and Mr. Wang in China. Neither of them backed up Hugh-Jones' story that the 1952 anthrax strain had been identified, much less worked on. Wang denied knowing anything even about it. Prof. Hugh-Jones subsequently told me in an email, "And as it seems that no one, including the Chinese, have any cultures from the 1952 'incident' (true or false) matters must remain at that. It was a time rife with governmental disinformation, especially by the Chinese & Soviets, so one must be cautious with any personal conclusions."

Professor Hugh-Jones did not reference any possible governmental disinformation from the U.S. side. But the failure to dismiss the inhalation anthrax accounts from the ISC, which Furmanski and Wheelis found so compelling that only the presence of supposed "genomic analysis" - now discredited - could dispel, means that hard evidence indeed exists to prove the presence of U.S. biological warfare attack upon China, and most likely North Korea, during the Korean War.

For his part, Professor Furmanski in correspondence to me maintains for other reasons that the North Korean and Chinese claims of germ warfare attacks were a hoax. He does this for a number of reasons, and seems among them to embrace the fairly recent publication of a Chinese official at the time, Wu Zhili, who had a posthumous publication stating the germ warfare attacks were a "false alarm," one which was then amped up for propaganda reasons into a full-scale campaign around the ostensibly false charges.

Few have embraced my main concerns, which center around the suppression of information in general around this historical incident. I cannot speak to North Korean or Chinese suppression, but I can document and obviously comment about the suppression by the U.S. and its allies, as information slowly is obtained about them. I can also encourage others to pursue original documents and do their own analysis, as I have done.

For his part, despite much professional obloquy, Dr. Needham maintained until the day he died that the U.S. had indeed used biological weapons against the North Koreans and the Chinese. His investigation went far beyond that detailed in this essay, and concerned more than the dissemination of anthrax.

Was there any fraud involved in Chinese, North Korean, or Soviet evidence of germ warfare attacks by the U.S.? I think it's possible there was, just as a suspicious patient might exaggerate symptoms to get the attention of a doctor they fear isn't taking them seriously. The importance of the suppressed ISC report is the attention given to many multiple sources of evidence. Sir Joseph Needham wasn't one of the leading scientists of his day for nothing. He understood the scientific approach to evidence.]

I hope that the publication of this material will lead to a greater effort by U.S. and European media and other commentators to assess the real history of U.S. and North Korean and Chinese relations, the better to counter the claims of the hawkish Trump administration and Pentagon spokespeople, who are threatening to plunge this country, and possibly the world, into a terrible new war, painting the North Koreans as unreasonable and dangerous people. But any fair historical account will see that while not by any means perfect, the North Korean regime has plenty to complain about and fear from U.S. intervention.


[Link to download PDF of the document above]

Original version of this article, without update, was published on April 26, 2017

Department of Justice Official Releases Letter Admitting U.S. Amnesty of Japan’s Unit 731 War Criminals

[The following is a portion of an article published initially at Medium.com. The length of the article (over 7000 words) precludes my reposting the full essay here. But approximately half is posted below. Please follow this link to read the entire work.]

Upon my request, both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have released copies of a December 1998 letter from DOJ official Eli Rosenbaum to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In the letter, Rosenbaum admitted to Cooper that after World War II the United States government had classified records pertaining to a Japanese military unit that engaged in biological warfare experimentation and field trials on humans.

The letter, one of two released to this author, confirmed the U.S. "essentially assisted Japan in covering up the atrocities perpetrated by the unit.”


In 1998, Rosenbaum was director of DOJ’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), while Rabbi Cooper was associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center. The occasion for the correspondence was the Wiesenthal Center’s sponsorship of a “Trans-Pacific Video-Conference on Japanese Wartime Atrocities,” held at the Center’s own Museum of Tolerance on August 16, 1998.[1]

Reported briefly in the press at the time [2], Rosenbaum’s letter of December 17, 1998 ended any doubts that the U.S. government had given scientists and military personnel associated with the notorious Japanese biological warfare program of the 1930s-1940s “immunity [from prosecution at the International Military Tribunal, Far East] in return for their human experimentation research data.”[3]

This appears to have been the first time that any U.S. government official admitted publicly and officially that the U.S. had proposed an amnesty for the members of Japan’s Unit 731 and assorted components, known to have murdered thousands of prisoners in illegal biological experiments, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians in biological warfare operations predominantly in China, but also the Soviet Union, from 1939 until nearly the end of World War II.

While Rosenbaum’s letter was quoted in the press, and in a 2002 Congressional Research Service report, the letter itself, and a November 1998 letter to Cooper also on the subject of Japan’s war crimes, were never released publicly. These letters are now available with the publication of this article, along with supporting documentation that until now was also not available.

This article looks at some of the salient issues in regards to aspects of these new documents, including the motivation for the U.S. amnesty action, the question of experimentation on U.S. and allied prisoners of war (and its possible cover-up), and the question of assigning culpability to those involved. The article concludes with remarks on these matters by both Rosenbaum and Cooper, who were interviewed for this article in Spring 2013. (The delay in publishing this information was occasioned by personal matters.)

Unit 731

Beginning with John Powell’s 1980 article, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The US Coverup of a War Crime,” and a subsequent article in the October 1981 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “A Hidden Chapter in History”, revelations concerning long-hidden or suppressed aspects of Japanese war crimes began to surface in the U.S. and Western press. Powell shocked the American public by writing about and producing documentary evidence of a cover-up of “Japan’s use of biological warfare against China and the Soviet Union.”[4]

The primary Japanese military unit associated with the biological warfare research and production of weaponry was known as Unit 731, although there were a number of other military units also involved. Powell (1981) wrote, “The American government’s participation in the cover-up, it is now disclosed, stemmed from Washington’s desire to secure exclusive possession of Japan’s expertise in using germs as lethal weapons.”

The original promise of amnesty for information was made after a discussion some months after the end of World War II between the Ft. Detrick’s Colonel Murray Sanders and General Douglas MacArthur, according to numerous accounts of Unit 731’s history. The finalization of such a deal, however, took a few years, and was not without controversy within government circles.

Powell (1980) quoted a July 1, 1947 memo from two U.S. doctors associated with bacteriological research that Japanese researchers had thousands of slides of human tissues taken from their experiments on prisoners. The slides and reports from the Unit 731 researchers were available if the U.S. could provide assurances the Japanese doctors and scientists would be saved from war crimes prosecution. The two doctors, Edward Wetter and H. I. Stubblefield argued that since "any 'war crimes' trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interests of defense and national security of the U.S."

The vagueness of the language – “it is felt” – appears to indicate their message was something discussed comprehensively in their circle, in particular by scientists from the Army’s Ft. Detrick, which was the center of a major crash program in biological warfare research begun during the war, and intelligence officers.[5]  Ft. Detrick personnel had been in charge of the debriefing of the Unit 731 doctors and scientists, while various documents speak to the sharing of such information with intelligence agencies.

According to Powell, Wetter and Stubblefield furthermore indicated “the knowledge gained by the Japanese from their experiments ‘will be of great value to the U.S. BW research program’ and added: ‘The value to the U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes prosecution.’”

The furor over Powell’s revelations peaked in the mid-1980s with public controversies over Japanese biological warfare (BW) experiments on U.S. and allied prisoners of wars. Congressional investigators ignored evidence of such experiments on U.S. POWs. It wasn’t until the publication of Linda Goetz Holmes’s book, Guests of the Emperor: The Secret History of Japan's Mukden POW Camp (Naval Institute Press, June 2010) that any mainstream historian accepted such experiments even took place. The entire episode is still ignored in the press accounts of World War II history.

Subsequently, the scandal around Unit 731 appeared to die down publicly, until it was revived approximately a decade later. In 1995, there were two major narratives published on Unit 731 and the U.S. immunity deal. One was an article by Nicolas Kristof in the New York Times. The other was historian Sheldon Harris’s book, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-up.[6]  The publication and controversy surrounding the publication of Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking, in November 1997, also brought greater attention to the issue of Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Amnesty to Protect Collaboration and to Protect U.S. Biowar “Expertise”

The supporting documentation for this article includes two memoranda for the record from the early 1980s by Norman Covert, then Chief of Public Affairs and historian for the U.S. Army at Ft. Detrick, Maryland. Rosenbaum’s December 17 letter had quoted liberally from the latter of these two memoranda.[7]  While it is worth considering the portions Rosenbaum did not quote, the selection revealed to Rabbi Cooper, taken from Covert’s May 5, 1982 Memorandum for the Record, explained the U.S. rationale for the Unit 731 amnesty:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to keep Top Secret any information about the Japanese Biological Warfare Program. The Joint State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee expressed its desire that the information be retained in US hands exclusively and certainly it should be kept from the Soviet Union....

In the [June 26, 1947] memorandum written by Dr. Edward Wetter and Mr. H. I. Stubblefield[8] for the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee for the Far East, the decision not to prosecute LTG [Lieutenant General Shiro] Ishii [founder and leader of Unit 731 and the biological warfare program] was discussed. “An agreement with Ishii and his associates that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels is equivalent to an agreement that this government will not prosecute any of those involved in BW activities in which war crimes were committed.”

.... Scientists in the US program said the information was not of significant value, but it was the first data in which human subjects were described. It indicated the Japanese program reached a level of expertise in 1939 that was never advanced because of lack of resources. Any prosecution of LTG Ishii and his associates would have exposed the Japanese capability in addition to US expertise. It would have been difficult to retain such information in US-only hands in such a case. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and SCAP [Supreme Command Allied Powers] agreed there would be little gained by such prosecution and deferred, offering LTG Ishii immunity in exchange for detailed information. [bold added for emphasis]

The Covert memorandum was certainly a kind of spin, although Mr. Covert himself may not have been aware of the full extent of U.S. crimes. Even so, he admitted to this author in an interview for this article that at the time he wrote the memos he was concerned mainly with “protecting Ft. Detrick[‘s]” reputation. The May 5 memo, and an earlier one Covert wrote on November 17, 1981, were a response to media attention following the Powell disclosures. The November 17 memo was undertaken as a rewrite of the May 5 memo for the purpose of submission to the Secretary of the Army.

“News media was beating me to death on that,” Covert said, referring to the strong response to the Powell articles. “The Memorandum for the Record was to cover your ass, a record of what I had done.”

Covert added there had also been “several legislative requests” for more information on the Unit 731 material as well. He also recalled that the Department of Justice had also contacted him on one occasion during this period, although he did not remember the details. Rosenbaum indicated in his interview that DOJ had likely been involved in some capacity in the postwar discussions surrounding the granting of amnesty to Ishii and associates.

The question of the value of the Japanese data and biological samples is a matter of conjecture, while the controversy over the use of such data (and similar data from the Nazi concentration camp experiments), including use of operational knowledge in purported U.S. germ warfare attacks on North Korea and China during the Korean War, is a separate, though related issue.[9]  At one point, Covert said U.S. scientists found the Japanese research “not of significant value.” He appeared to have gotten this information from speaking to Ft. Detrick scientists still resident in the Frederick, Virginia area. In addition, Covert appeared to give little credence to evidence that came from Soviet sources.

But elsewhere, writing about Ft. Detrick representative Dr. Norbert Fell's interrogation of Shiro Ishii, Covert wrote in his November 17, 1981 memo, "The data on human testing appeared to have significant value to the U.S. BW Research programs at Camp Detrick." Some months later, in his May 5, 1982 memo, Covert concluded, “It is certain the Japanese had a full-scale BW effort and achieved a level of expertise working with many traditional BW agents.”

A later report by Doctors Edwin Hill and Joseph Victor, also from Ft. Detrick, was quite direct when considering the value of getting the Unit 731 data. “Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation,” they wrote.[10]

To conclude the discussion on the value of Unit 731’s data, it is worth noting a May 1947 memo from MacArthur’s office to the War Department and Major General Alden Wiatt of the Chemical Warfare Service on the BW human experiments, “confirmed tacitly by Ishii” to interrogators. The memo was obtained by author William Triplett, and also describes the intersection of the amnesty agreement with unnamed intelligence agencies:

"Data already obtained from Ishii and his colleagues have proven to be of great value in confirming, supplementing and completing several phases of U.S. research in BW, and may suggest new fields for future research.... For all practical purposes an agreement with Ishii and his associates that information given by them on the Japanese BW program will be retained in intelligence channels is equivalent to an agreement that this Government will not prosecute any of those involved in BW activities in which war crimes were committed."[11]

MacArthur’s command told the War Department, “valuable technical BW information as to results of human experiments and research in BW for crop destruction probably can be obtained….”

Ft. Detrick’s Norbert Fell resumed interrogations of Shiro Ishii two days after this memo was sent....

[To see the rest of this article, click through to read at Medium.com - Relevant footnotes for portion published here are posted below - JK]

[1] China News Daily, Aug. 14, 1998, http://www.cnd.org/CND-US/CND-US.98/CND-US.98-08-14.html. CNET reported on the conference at the time: URL http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-214541.html. See also the original announcement of the event by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, archived online at http://web.archive.org/web/19981203135255/http://events.broadcast.com/events/swc/nanjingmassacre/ (all accessed May 14, 2017).

[2] See Stars and Stripes, week of March 15 – 28, 1999, vol. 122, no. 6, reposted online at http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/5850/deathcamp.html (accessed May 14, 2017).

Reference was also made in a Congressional Research Service report by Gary K. Reynolds in December 2002, “U.S. Prisoners of War and Civilian American Citizens Captured and Interned by Japan in World War II: the Issue of Compensation by Japan,” online at http://web.archive.org/web/20080406073324/http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/usprisoners_japancomp.htm (accessed May 14, 2017).

[3] Letter, Eli Rosenbaum to Abraham Cooper, December 17, 1998.

[4] Powell’s 1980 article was published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, “Japan’s Germ Warfare: The US Coverup of a War Crime” (Oct.-Dec. 1980, vol. 12, no. 4.) See URL: http://criticalasianstudies.org/assets/files/bcas/v12n04.pdf (accessed May 14, 2017).

Powell’s 1981 article is available online, reproduced as part of the Congressional Record on November 10, 1999, http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/1999/11/feinstein.html (accessed May 14, 2017) Powell died in Dec. 2008.

In the middle 1970s, John Saar at the Washington Post wrote a story, “Japan Accused of WW II Germ Deaths” (Nov. 19, 1976), that described a Japanese documentary by Haruko Yoshinaga, aired by the Tokyo Broadcasting System on Unit 731. “Japanese scientists killed at least 3,000 Chinese prisoners in World War II in bacteriological warfare experiments and escaped prosecution by sharing the findings with US occupation forces…. Press officers at the US Defense and Justice Departments said they had no information on the charges but would investigate,” Saar wrote. (See URL: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19761119&id=5E0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XCkEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6053,6138361 - accessed May 14, 2017) But no one in the Western press pursued the story further until Powell published his first article four years later.

The impact of Powell’s expose can be gauged by the fact that 60 Minutes interviewed Powell for an on-air segment, “War Crime,” on April 4, 1982. The transcript for this episode is available beginning on pg. 352 in this large PDF file online: URL http://philippine-defenders.lib.wv.us/pdf/bios/sandy_and_search_for_truth.pdf.

Morley Safer narrated: "During World War II, the Japanese military experimented with germ warfare. Their guinea pigs were Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. For a variety of reasons, the American government kept it all a secret."

[5] The U.S. World War II program in both chemical and biological warfare is discussed in Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Random House, 2002.

[6] Nicolas D. Kristof, “Unmasking Horror -- A special report. Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity,” New York Times, March 17, 1995, URL: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html (accessed May 14, 2017).

Routledge published an expanded, revised version of Factories of Death in 2002. Harris died a few months later.

[7] My thanks to Mr. Norman Covert for sharing certain documents. The attempt to obtain the documents through official channels is a story in itself. A DoD spokesman had referred my query to Fort Detrick. Ft. Detrick’s FOIA office referred me to the National Archives. But the documents did not apparently exist there either. They may or may not constitute documents that Mr. Covert claims were destroyed by order of Ft. Detrick’s commanding officer in 1998.

[8] “Mr. H. I. Stubblefield” was in fact Dr. Henry I. Stubblefield, a bacteriologist who we know, at least in 1954, was on the Chemical Corps Advisory Council, according to an in-house history of Ft. Detrick written by Norman Covert. See URL: http://www.detrick.army.mil/cutting_edge/chapter09.cfm. Coincidentally, along with two other researchers, he had co-authored with Andrew C. Ivy an article in 1934, “Protective Action of Sodium Thiocyanate against Dysentery Toxin (Shiga): An Experimental Study in Dogs and Rabbits.” Ivy was later to be a major figure testifying on medical ethics at the Nuremberg trials.

According to Powell (1980), Dr. Wetter was at the time of the SWNCC memo “Panel Director” of the “Committee on Biological Warfare.” Powell does not say, but it appears likely this was the secret “DEF” committee, the third of three secret committees formed during the World War II years by the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council. See URL: http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/history/archives/collections/cbw-1941-1948.html (accessed May 14, 2017). Wetter later went to work as a civilian employee for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development (http://www.archive.org/stream/officialregister1955unit/officialregister1955unit_djvu.txt). According to the 1955 Official Register of the United States, p. 114, Wetter worked in this office as “Executive Secretary, Committee and Panel on Special Operations.”

[9] See Till Bärnighausen, “Data generated in Japan’s biowarfare experiments on human victims in China, 1932–1945, and the ethics of using them,” Japan's Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics, Taylor and Francis, 2010.

On the Korean War allegations, see Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1998.

[10] Op. cit., Bärnighausen, p. 97.

[11] See William Triplett, Flowering of the Bamboo, Woodbine House, 1985, pp. 241-250.

[To see the rest of this article, click through to read at Medium.com]

Proof US Agencies Destroyed Evidence of Japan's WWII Medical War Crimes

The letter published below came from the November 19, 1999 Congressional Record (pp. S14542-S14543). Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, Northridge, wrote the letter, which alleged the destruction by various U.S. military agencies of records concerning Japanese war crimes during World War II. Harris had been investigating these crimes, as well as actions by the U.S. government to cover-up them up. In one instance, Harris claimed "sensitive" documents were destroyed at Dugway Proving Ground as "a direct result" of research he had initiated there.

Harris' letter was entered into the record by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was speaking about the controversies at the time about the ongoing classification even 50 or more years after the fact of documents pertaining to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan war crimes. In particular, the 1990s had seen a growing campaign to expose the activities of Japan's World War II biological warfare experiments and subsequent operational bacteriological and chemical warfare campaigns, which have collectively come to be known under the rubric of the campaign's most notorious brigade, Unit 731, led by Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii.

The kick-off for the controversy was the publication in the Oct. 1981 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of "Japan's Biological Weapons: 1930-1945 - A Hidden Chapter in History," written by Robert Gomer, John W. Powell, and Bert V.A. Roling. Feinstein entered the entire article into the Congressional Record, along with another letter from historian Sheldon Harris, who had written a book on Unit 731 and the U.S. cover-up of their activities. According to Harris and Gomer/Powell/Roling, the U.S. had amnestied the Unit 731 scientists in order to get at the unethical data from human experiments on prisoners, data derived from intentional infliction of disease followed often enough by vivisection. The 731 survivors were incinerated or buried in mass graves.

Historians have documented the massive amount of destruction of records by the Japanese military, including many if not most of the records for Unit 731 and associated units. Professor Harris's letter references the U.S. destruction of records, and not the larger, and even more problematic destruction of records by the Japanese authorities.

The Japanese government denied any biological/chemical war crimes, while the U.S. slowly declassified some incriminating documents, but would not come out and say what the U.S. had done in relation to the Japanese doctors and scientists. Some of the Unit 731 personnel were tried in 1949 in a special war crimes trial by the Soviet Union. Much of what we know about Unit 731 and associated biological and chemical warfare divisions comes from this trial, which for years was derided in the West. (Google Books has republished a free ebook of the Soviet transcripts from the trial.)

In January 1999, President Bill Clinton, "in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (PL 105-246)... established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG)." But it wasn't until May 2000 that Congress, "as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2001... extended the IWG's life to December 2004 through passage of the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, P. L. 106-567." The IWG's name was accordingly changed to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. According to the IWG website, declassification of U. S. Government records related to imperial Japan's war crimes then became an official part of the IWG's mission.

The IWG ended its declassification mission in March 2007 (extended from an original 2004 ending date). It subsequently published a final report to Congress in September 2007. Some resources have been placed online for researchers, primarily Select Documents on Japanese War Crimes and Japanese Biological Warfare, 1934-2006.

While over 100,000 previously unclassified documents related to Imperial Japan's biological warfare program were reportedly released via IWG's efforts, no further discussion or elaboration took place regarding Professor Harris's documentation of the destruction of records held by different U.S. military agencies.

The following is the text of Professor Harris's letter, which can be found online as part of the Congressional Record, or also here. It can also be accessed here.

GRANADA HILLS, CA,
October 7, 1999

Hon. SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN,
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. 

DEAR SENATOR FEINSTEIN: Several Asian American activists organizations in California, and organizations representing former Prisoners of War and Internees of the Japanese Imperial Army, have indicated to me that you are proposing to introduce legislation into the United States Senate that calls for full disclosure by the United States Government of records it possesses concerning war crimes committed by members of the Japanese Imperial Army. I endorse such legislation enthusiastically. 

My support for the full disclosure of American held records relating to the Japanese Imperial Army’s wartime crimes against humanity is both personal and professional. I am aware of the terrible suffering members of the Imperial Japanese Army imposed upon innocent Asians, prisoners of war of various nationalists and civilian internees of Allied nations. These inhumane acts were condoned, if not ordered, by the highest authorities in both the civilian and military branches of the Japanese government. As a consequence, millions of persons were killed, maimed, tortured, or experienced acts of violence that included human experiments relating to biological and chemical warfare research. Many of these actions meet the definition of "war crimes" under both the Potsdam Declaration and the various Nuremberg War Crimes trials held in the post-war period. 

I am the author of "Factories of Death, Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up" (Routlege: London and New York; hard cover edition 1994; paperback printings, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999). [Note: a revised edition was published in 2002 - ed.] I discovered in the course of my research for this book, and scholarly articles that I published on the subject of Japanese biological and chemical warfare preparations, that members of the Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps committed heinous war crimes. These included involuntary laboratory tests of various pathogens on humans—Chinese, Korean, other Asian nationalities, and Allied prisoners of war, including Americans. Barbarous acts encompassed live vivisections, amputations of body parts (frequently without the use of anesthesia), frost bite exposure to temperatures of 40–50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, injection of horse blood and other animal blood into humans, as well as other horrific experiments. When a test was completed, the human experimented was "sacrificed", the euphemism used by Japanese scientists as a substitute term for "killed." 

In my capacity as an academic Historian, I can testify to the difficulty researchers have in unearthing documents and personal testimony concerning these war crimes. I, and other researchers, have been denied access to military archives in Japan. These archives cover activities by the Imperial Japanese Army that occurred more than 50 years ago. The documents in question cannot conceivably contain information that would be considered of importance to "National Security" today. The various governments in Japan for the past half century have kept these archives firmly closed. The fear is that the information contained in the archives will embarrass previous governments. 

Here in the United States, despite the Freedom of Information Act, some archives remain closed to investigators. At best, the archivists in charge, or the Freedom of Information Officer at the archive in question, select what documents they will allow to become public. This is an unconscionable act of arrogance and a betrayal of the trust they have been given by the Congress and the President of the United States. Moreover, ‘‘sensitive’’ documents—as defined by archivists and FOIA officers—are at the moment being destroyed. Thus, historians and concerned citizens are being denied factual evidence that can shed some light on the terrible atrocities committed by Japanese militarists in the past. 

Three examples of this wanton destruction should be sufficiently illustrative of the dangers that exist, and should reinforce the obvious necessity for prompt passage of legislation you propose to introduce into the Congress: 

1. In 1991, the Librarian at Dugway Proving Grounds, Dugway, Utah, denied me access to the archives at the facility. It was only through the intervention of then U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, Dem., Utah, that I was given permission to visit the facility. I was not shown all the holdings relating to Japanese medical experiments, but the little I was permitted to examine revealed a great deal of information about medical war crimes. Sometimes after my visit, a person with intimate knowledge of Dugway’s operations, informed me that "sensitive" documents were destroyed there as a direct result of my research in their library. 

2. I conducted much of my American research at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The Public Information Officer there was extremely helpful to me. Two weeks ago I telephoned Detrick, was informed that the PIO had retired last May. I spoke with the new PIO, who told me that Detrick no longer would discuss past research activities, but would disclose information only on current projects. Later that day I telephoned the retired PIO at his home. He informed me that upon retiring he was told to ‘‘get rid of that stuff’’, meaning incriminating documents relating to Japanese medical war crimes. Detrick no longer is a viable research center for historians. 

3. Within the past 2 weeks, I was informed that the Pentagon, for ‘‘space reasons’’, decided to rid itself of all biological warfare documents in its holdings prior to 1949. The date is important, because all war crimes trials against accused Japanese war criminals were terminated by 1949. Thus, current Pentagon materials could not implicate alleged Japanese war criminals. Fortunately, a private research facility in Washington volunteered to retrieve the documents in question. This research facility now holds the documents, is currently cataloguing them (estimated completion time, at least twelve months), and is guarding the documents under ‘‘tight security.’’ 

Your proposed legislation must be acted upon promptly. Many of the victims of Japanese war crimes are elderly. Some of the victims pass away daily. Their suffering should receive recognition and some compensation. Moreover, History is being cheated. As documents disappear, the story of war crimes committed in the War In The Pacific becomes increasingly difficult to describe. The end result will be a distorted picture of reality. As an Historian, I cannot accept this inevitability without vigorous protest. 

Please excuse the length of this letter. However, I do hope that some of the arguments I made in comments above will be of some assistance to you as you press for passage of the proposed legislation. I will be happy to be of any additional assistance to you, should you wish to call upon me for further information or documentation. 

Sincerely yours,
SHELDON H. HARRIS,
Professor of History emeritus,
California State University, Northridge

In a March 30, 2007 Memorandum for the "Director, US Army Records Management and Declassification Agency" on the matter of "Japanese War Crimes - Record Search at Fort Detrick, Maryland", William H. Thresher, Chief of Staff at US Army Medical Command, referenced the Harris charges of destruction of records at Fort Detrick. Thresher was responding to a request from the Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA) "for information concerning records of interest to the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG)."

It is worth noting that this memorandum was written even as the IWG had just finished its declassification project.

Thresher wrote, "In early 2007, the USAMRIID [US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] performed a thorough search for any remaining responsive records, including records regarding Unit 731, and found no records." The search included "the Commander and other senior personnel."

Thresher then turned to allegations by Professor Sheldon Harris concerning possible destruction of records at Fort Detrick. He reviewed the controversy:

Professor Harris, in his letter, dated 7 October 1999, stated that the recently-retired Public Information Officer at Fort Detrick (Mr. Norman Covert) told Professor Harris that upon retiring he was told to get rid of documents relating to Japanese war crimes. 

The USAMRMC [US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command] is unaware of any authority at Fort Detrick or the USAMRMC requesting destruction of any responsive original records, or of copies of Fort Detrick or USAMRMC documents not previously provided to Dugway or NARA.

Professor Harris died on August 31, 2002. To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has written about his 1999 letter to Senator Feinstein detailing his charges about the destruction of records by US military officials. If it were up to the powers that be, this would be an example of government censorship lost in the whirlwind of moving events. But it seems an episode worth reviving, if nothing else as a documentation of an important episode in the history of exposing U.S. and Japanese biological warfare history.

A few years back, Norman Covert confirmed to this author his contention that his commanding officer at Ft. Detrick was the superior officer who told him to destroy the weapons.

And there the controversy stands to this day.

Google Publishes Free Ebook Facsimile of Famous Soviet 1949 War Crimes Trial of Unit 731

"Question: So it would be correct to say that all persons brought to Detachment 100 for experimental purposes, were doomed to die.
"Answer: That is so."

-- Page 325, Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons

Google Books is to be congratulated for shining a light on one of the most heinous and yet still largely unknown episodes of World War II, via the free publication for the general public of the English language version of the materials released on the 1949 Khabarovsk War Crimes trial. Published originally by Moscow's Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1950 (see full title above), "Materials" documents the examination of the use of biological weapons and illegal human experimentation, including thousands of "terminal" experiments, by members of the Japanese military unit most closely identified with this program, Unit 731.

Written off by some as a Stalinist "show trial" -- and there undoubtedly are some elements of that here -- the facts examined at Khabarovsk have been established to be true by Western historians. "Materials" is divided into pages of documentary proof, testimony by the accused and various witnesses, the state prosecutor's case, statements by the defendant's attorneys, and of course the verdict itself. I have personally found the reading of this trial material to be one of the most amazing and emotional experiences I've ever had. You cannot read this book and be unaffected.

It may be of interest to readers to know that none of the criminals indicted and convicted were executed for their crimes, though some did die in captivity. The majority were released early, as the USSR in the 1950s trying to win political points with the post-WWII Japanese state.

The question remains: why has the worst use of biological weapons and illegal human experiments, even dwarfing the crimes of the Nazis, gone mostly unremarked for almost three generations?

The ramifications of the decision by the Japanese government to research bacteriological or "germ" warfare on prisoners, killing thousands of them via inoculation of biological toxins, and then wage biological warfare across China and parts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, are still resonant in Asia today. It is not unusual to hear in Chinese or North Korean propaganda references to the crimes of Unit 731. An article by AFP, and published in Feb. 2015 by Japan Times, documents the fact that "70 years on, Unit 731’s wartime atrocities fester in China’s memory."

The actions of the Japanese emperor and his Army to unleash biological warfare -- led by the infamous general Shiro Ishii -- went unremarked during the Toyko War Crimes trials at the end of World War II. The reason for this was likely due to the established fact that the U.S. made at the time a secret agreement to amnesty all the personnel involved in Japan's Unit 731, "Detachment 100," and other assorted BW experimental and operational units, with the aim of gathering all the data gathered by Japan's illegal human experiments and operational experience with biological weapons for itself.

The Soviets, stymied in their attempt to get the matter brought up at the Tokyo trials -- the U.S. dragged its feet on even letting the Soviets interview BW chief Ishii, who was under house arrest by the Americans -- turned to their own separate trial of captured personnel from Unit 731 and the Kwantung Army, spurred on by popular resentment against the Japanese imperialist army and the dreaded Kampetei, who had kidnapped hundreds of Soviet and Chinese citizens for terminal use as guinea pigs in the Unit 731 dungeons at Pingfan, Manchuria. At moments, the anger of those in attendance at trial is even noted in the proceedings.

Some of the documentary material regarding the decision by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, or Tokyo War Crimes trials) not to pursue biological warfare charges against the Japanese have been published digitally online at a special site dedicated to the Tokyo trials by the University of Virginia Law Library.

The information obtained by the Americans, and, if some reports are true, in some cases the personnel, went to the U.S. Army's biological weapons labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (According to the official military historian at Ft. Detrick, years later documents about Unit 731 were destroyed by order of Ft. Detrick's commander, leading to Congressional action to release what documentation still existed.) During the Korean War, the Chinese and the Soviets claimed the U.S. tested use of such materials during limited biological warfare operations against North Korea and China. Famously, captured U.S. airmen confessed to such use after interrogation (leading to the "brainwashing" scare pushed by the CIA and the U.S. media in the 1950s and 1960). The U.S. strenuously denied using biological weapons, but the accusations remain, and the evidence is still being sifted, much of it still classified after 60 years.

Indeed, for historians, both amateur and professional, finding original materials, such as the prosecutor's examination of the general leading the Kwantung Army's BW unit during WWII, was next to impossible, unless you had the money and perspicacity to search out rare copies of the printed version of selected materials. Now, thanks to a review of the copyright legality of publishing this material, initiated at my request, Google has published this important historical text for all readers to use. I am grateful to them, and hope that the general availability of this important original documentation will facilitate greater recognition of the crimes that took place during World War II, and throw greater light on the aftermath of the Unit 731 episode, one that reaches far across the historical divide to allegations of the use of biological and chemical weapons today.

For further reading: Here are two articles of interest. The first from a bioethics journal, "The West's dismissal of the Khabarovsk trial as 'communist propaganda': ideology, evidence and international bioethics."

The second article is a 2001 article in The Japan Times, which recounts the trial itself: "The trial of Unit 731". The following is an excerpt from that article (the link to Harris's book is added):

Russians aware of the atrocities in Harbin were outraged. Josef Stalin responded by ordering trials of his own. On Dec. 25, 1949, the trial of Unit 731’s doctors began, with orders to finish by the end of the year, before implementation of a decree reinstating the death penalty in the Soviet Union. Stalin apparently feared that Japan might execute Soviet prisoners of war if the physicians were hanged in Khabarovsk, Permyakov said.

Nevertheless, the proceedings “were not a show trial on the Stalinist model,” said Sheldon Harris, the American author of “Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45.”

“It was a strange affair, having the trial take place in Khabarovsk rather than in Moscow or Leningrad,” Harris said. “However, the evidence presented at the trial was reasonably faithful to the facts. It was discredited in the U.S. and elsewhere because of the notoriety of earlier show trials in the U.S.S.R. Nevertheless, the [U.S.] State Department and MacArthur’s people were in a panic that some evidence would come out at the trial that there were American POWs who were [victims of] human experiments.”

On the 70th Anniversary of Hiroshima: "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs"

Transcribed below is the entire text of Japanese historian Shingo Shibata's 1996 essay in Seisen Review, "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs." I've posted on it before, including a link to a photocopy of the entire essay. The text was transcribed independently by Wikispooks, and the copy I used below is based upon it (with some quiet corrections and formatting changes). (Wikispooks did not transcribe Shibata's Bibliography, but it can be found on pages 11-12 of the online version directly below.)



The medical condition of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, or Hibakusha, for years was the subject of censorship by the Occupation forces of the U.S. and later Japanese censorship. It is still effectively so, by media and scholarly neglect rather than government order.

The Hibakusha were studied and examined by U.S. doctors and scientists organized as the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), in conjunction with staff from the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH)., In the course of their research, medical treatment was withheld from the atomic bomb victims, arguably because it interfered with their research goals.

Researcher Susan Lindee wrote about these topics in her excellent (and out-of-print) 1994 book, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Univ. of Chicago Press). Amazingly, U.S. refusal to offer medical care to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was because U.S. authorities believed "that medical treatment of the survivors by the ABCC would constitute atonement for the use of atomic weapons."

"From the beginning," a 1955 report to the Atomic Energy Commission stated, US researchers of the effects of the atom bomb on civilians were "not permitted to attempt medical therapy of the patients who had been injured by the two bombs.... to do so would have given confirmation to the anti-American propagandists... [who would] insist that such treatment should be an act of atonement for having used the weapons in the first place." (Lindee, pgs. 134-135.)

The U.S. has never apologized for the use of atomic weapons. Indeed, the policy of the U.S. is to frighten and terrorize the world with its awful arsenal.

One might ask, what did the Japanese Government do to aid the Hibakusha? In his essay, Shingata replies, "I am ashamed to say that the Japanese government did nothing to help the Hibakusha either."

Stop U.S. Plan to Modernize and Replace Nuclear Arsenal

In October 2009, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in part because of his supposed position in favor of nuclear disarmament. But since then, Obama has moved to increase spending on nuclear weapons, stating the supposed need to modernize weaponry and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalize a nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City, Missouri.

New estimates made by Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, and reported at Al Jazeera America, say U.S. plans to modernize its nuclear arsenal will cost nearly $1 trillion dollars over the next 30 years.

In an August 5 press release by Peace Action, formerly SANE/Freeze, on the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan (August 6th and 9th), Paul Kawika Martin, the policy and political director of Peace Action, and a guest of one of Japan's largest peace groups, Ginsuikin, commented from the official commemoration in Hiroshima:

“Here in Hiroshima, on the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of this city and Nagasaki, we remember the hundreds of thousands of casualties caused by the most basic of nuclear weapon designs and know that we never want another populace to suffer from such a bomb. Even worse, today’s nuclear weapons are several to hundreds of times more destructive.

Clearly, these horrific weapons are no asset to any country. The current U.S. plan to waste $1 trillion over the next thirty years modernizing, maintaining and replacing delivery systems must be stopped.

President Obama should heed his Prague speech and live up to U.S. obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by significantly reducing America’s 7,100 nuclear warheads.

Additionally, the agreement reached with Iran will verifiably block it from getting a nuclear weapon, making it paramount that the U.S. Congress support the accord.”

The issues above are amplified and expanded in Professor Shingo Shibata's essay below. I encourage readers to email or tweet or post on Facebook or otherwise send this article far and wide, as an action YOU can take on this, the 70th anniversary of the great crime of the atomic bombings, in the hopes it will aid in stopping atomic weapons from being used again.

The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs

Shingo SHIBATA

In connection with the Smithsonian flap, the United States Senate Resolution 257 was passed on 22 September 1994. It reads: "...The role of the Enola Gay during World War II was momentous in helping to bring World War II to a mercy end, which resulted in saving the lives of Americans and Japanese." (emphasis added) Further, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was repeatedly contended that President Truman was right when be ordered the use of the atomic bombs because thereby numberless lives of not only American soldiers but also Japanese were saved. But such an argument has been proved groundless by some leading researchers. (Blackett, 1949; Alperovitz, 1965, 1985 and 1995; Tachibana, 1979)

What aim did the U.S. government have in carrying out the atomic bombing?

Firstly, by demonstrating the enormous destructive power of the atomic bomb, it wanted to establish U.S. hegemony over the world after World War II.

Secondly, it aimed to make mass experiments of the uranium bomb on Hiroshima and the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to test numberless humans as guinea pigs and thereby to obtain data on its effects in order to make use of them for development of nuclear weaponry.

In this paper I am going to demonstrate my conception of the atomic bombing as being human experimentation.

I. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE VICTIMS

What did U.S. Military Forces do after the Atomic Bombing?

First of all, I would like to examine the post-bombing policy of the U.S. Forces.

The first order of the U.S. Forces immediately after the occupation was to ban all publication of reports concerning the genocide and destruction caused by the atomic bombs. Thus they wanted to monopolize all information on the bombing. Until the end of the occupation on 28 April 1952, Japanese journalists, writers, cameramen, novelists and scientists were prohibited from reporting on the real situations of the atomic destruction. If they dared to do so, they were threatened with trial before the military tribunals of the Occupation Forces. Many books, including novels, poems and accounts of the events, were censored and often confiscated by American authorities. (Braw, 1986; Horiba, 1995a and 1995b) As a result, the urgent necessity to give medical and other social aid to the atomic victims (the “Hibakusha” in Japanese) was not reported even among Japanese.

Their second step was to prohibit all doctors in Japan from communicating and exchanging, even among themselves, the records of clinical experience and research on the Hibakusha. At that time they, especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tried to do their best to find ways to cure the unheard-of terrible burns and internal disorders caused by atomic heat and radiation. The U.S. Forces further confiscated the samples of burnt or keloid skins, internal organs and blood and the clinical records of the dead and living Hibakusha. (Committee, 1981)

Their third step was to force the Japanese government to refuse any medical aid offered by the International Red Cross.

If a laboratory animal were cured, it would be utterly useless from the standpoint of medical scientific observers. Maybe it was by the same reasoning that the U.S. authorities did their utmost to prevent any medical treatment given to the Hibakusha. “As far as medical aid is concerned, the less the better” was their policy.

Their fourth step was to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) as two institutions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the purpose of observing, not curing, of the hibakusha. Thus, almost all Hibakusha have been treated as if they were only human guinea pigs. Suppose that an assailant continues only to observe a wounded victim for many years after an assault. There is no doubt that such observance itself is nothing but an infringement on human rights.

What did the Japanese Government do to aid the Hibakusha?

I am ashamed to say that the Japanese government did nothing to help the Hibakusha either.

Firstly, its bureaucrats did their utmost to cooperate with the above policy of the U.S. Army toward the Hibakusha. Only two months after the atomic bombing they dissolved the governmental hospitals in charge of medical treatment of the Hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result, many Hibakusha were left on the streets of the devastated cities without any medical treatment, compounding the many difficult post-war economic and social conditions they had to contend with.

Secondly, by orders of the General Head Quarters (GHQ) of the U.S. Occupation Forces, on 21 May 1947, the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH, YOKEN in Japanese abbreviation) was founded with half of the staff of the Institute of Infectious Diseases (IID) attached to the University of Tokyo.

During the period of the Japanese invasion of China from 1931 to 1945, the IID had fully cooperated with the notorious Unit 731, that is, the Army unit for bacteriological warfare. (Williams & Wallace, 1989; Harris, 1994) Most of the staff of the JNIH transferred from the University of Tokyo to the Health and Welfare Ministry were medical scientists who had intimately cooperated with the network of Unit 731 in China and Singapore as well as the Laboratory for Infectious Disease Control (LIDC) attached to the Imperial Army's Medical College. The LIDC in Toyama, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, was the headquarters for the network of the bacteriological warfare program and its institutions, including most of the medical schools of many universities.

The officially declared aims of the JNIH were to make research on pathogens and vaccines and also to screen the safety of biological products (vaccines, blood products and antibiotics), and thereby to contribute toward preventive medicine and public health under the control of the GHQ. However, there were two hidden objectives of the JNIH. The first was to cooperate with the ABCC. The second was to continue, under the guidance and control of the U.S. Army 406th Medical Laboratory,[1] some uncompleted studies of biological warfare program as schemed up by Unit 731. (Shibata, 1989 and 1990)

As for the first hidden objective, only 13 days after the establishment of the JNIH the GHQ asked it to help the ABCC. Dr. Saburo Kojima, then the first Vice-Director and later the second Director of the JNIH, in his commemorative essay, “Memories on the Past Ten Years of the JNIH,” looking back on its initial stage of cooperation with the ABCC, wrote, “We, the intelligent scientists had equally thought that we must not miss this golden opportunity” [2] to record the medical effects of the A-bomb on humans. He was reportedly one of the leading medical scientists who committed vivisection on Chinese prisoners as human guinea pigs in the network of Unit 731 in China. [3] As such a scientist, very positively appreciating the proposal of the GHQ, he never showed humanistic sentiments towards the Hibakusha, still less a counter-proposal for medical treatment of them. He only betrayed such cold-blooded and calculating words as is cited above.

It is clearly reported in the 1948 Annual Report of the JNIH how eagerly and positively the staff of the JNIH, following the directive of the ABCC, drafted and submitted the “Atomic Bomb Casualty Research Program" to the GHQ. [4] At that time the JNIH branches were set up in the same rooms of the ABCC buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The directors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Branches of the JNIH served the vice-directors of the ABCC in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the directors of the ABCC were American high ranking military officers (e.g. colonels). 

The JNIH staff intimately helped and cooperated with the staff of the ABCC as a kind of branch of the U.S. Military Forces to check up on conditions of the Hibakusha, doing follow-up research. The staff of the ABCC-JNIH went around threatening the Hibakusha that they would be on trial before the military tribunal of the U.S. Forces if they would not cooperate. With such threats they took the Hibakusha to the ABCC buildings and took off their clothes to photograph them in the nude, took x-rays, collected blood samples, so they could record the relationship between the quantity of radiation and the after-effects of the atomic bomb. (Hiroshima City Council against A and H Bombs, 1966; Chugoku Shimbun, 1995) 

They did not respect the human dignity of the Hibakusha. They treated them as human guinea pigs and recorded them as “samples.” When the Hibakusha died, the ABCC-JNIH staff put pressure on the bereaved to consent to autopsies, and their inner organs, burnt skins and other parts were dissected and taken away.

In such cold and inhumane sentiments, Dr. Keizo Nakamura, the third Director of the JNIH, proudly wrote that the ABCC could not have attained their objective without the cooperation of the JNIH. [5] The information thus collected about the atomic mass experiment on humans was never made public in Japan. It was secretly reported to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission (later the Department of Energy) and other military institutions to be utilized for the improvement of nuclear weapons and reactors.

The post-war Responsibilities of the Japanese Government and the JNIH in Violation of Human Rights of the Hibakusha

Some may excuse the Japanese government and the JNIH under the pretext that they were only forced by the authoritarian power of the GHQ. But this was not the case, because the positive cooperation of the JNIH with the ABCC continued for 28 years from 1947 through to 1975. In 1975 the ABCC had to reorganize itself, and the JNIH was also forced to divorce itself from the former in the face of increasing denunciation on the part of the Hibakusha and the Japanese people. The ABCC was reorganized and renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), funded by both U.S. and Japanese governments. Of course, their character and tasks are almost the same. Their main operations have been and are the follow—up research on the Hibakusha and the renewed cooperation with U.S. military institutions and the nuclear industry.

Thus the physical sufferings and mental agony of the Hibakusha were and have been aggravated by the post-war policy of the U.S. and Japanese governments toward them.

Of course, the Japanese government is to blame for its aggressive wars against Asian countries and then the first-strike on Pearl Harbor. [6] However, this doesn’t justify the U.S. atomic bombing. The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be denounced as the unheard-of cruel genocide and destruction as well as the most serious violation of international law. (NHK, l977: Committee, 1981) The further misery of the Hibakusha has also been aggravated by the nature of the atomic bombing as a massive test on innocent men and women, young and old.

Someone may still try to justify the atomic bombing on the pretext that it saved a number of lives. Even if true, such a pretext could never justify the fact that the U.S. government, supported by the Japanese government, has done so much to leave the Hibakusha abandoned, uncared-for and uncured after the end of the war. If the above pretext had been true, why didn't it do the best to give medical and other social aid to victims produced by an act of “mercy”? Its post-bombing and post-war policies themselves have demonstrated what so-called “mercy” of the atomic bombing was in reality.

For over fifty years since the bombing, both governments have arrogantly continued to treat and alienate the Hihakusha as human guinea pigs. It is evident that such a political attitude itself deprived them of the feeling of human dignity. If the Japanese government had resisted the U.S. government policy of neglecting the Hibakusha and had done their best to provide them with medical and other social aid immediately after the bombing, the life span of the dead Hibakusha would have been much longer. Their will to live would not have diminished.

The Japanese government and the JNIH should feel deeply responsible in this respect. Why don’t the prime ministers and the directors of the JNIH apologize for their negligence toward the Hibakusha? Why don't they try, in this way, to restore the feeling of human dignity which for almost a half century they have denied these people?

As a professor of Hiroshima University, I have for many years been involved in the sociological, philosophical and ethical study of the agony of the Hibakusha. In this chapter as a result of my research, I tried to shed new light on one of the most important, but hitherto overlooked, aspects of the atomic bombing and the sufferings of the Hibakusha.

As explained, there is no doubt that the Japanese government is responsible for its post-war policy of negligence toward the Hibakusha as well as its violation of their human rights. If the government feels responsible for them, there must he no objection to legislation providing state compensation for the Hihakusha.

II. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE U.S. MILITARY FORCES AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT SCIENTISTS

In the previous chapter I submitted my thesis mainly on the basis of the analysis of the post-bombing and post-war policies of the U.S. government toward Hibakusha, especially the no-treatment policy of the ABCC-JNIH. 

As for the prebombing policy of the U.S. government, I don't think that all the principle characters at that time, including Truman, had a conscious intention to use the A-bombs as a means of experimenting on humans from the military and scientific viewpoints.

However, I am convinced there were surely some leading people who, with the cool eyes of an " experimental observer, "viewed the bombing as an experiment on human beings from the military and scientific points of view.

From the Military Standpoint

I checked the following main documents of the Manhattan Project (MP): 

---- Captain W.R. Parson's memorandum "Notes on Initial Meetings of Target Committee" to Rear Admiral W.R. Purnell (l2/12/1944);
---- Brigadier General L. Norstad’s memorandum to Director, Joint Target Group (28/ 4/45);
---- Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer’s memorandum to Brigadier General T.F. Farrell ( 11/5/45);
---- Major J.A. Derry's and Dr. N.F. Ramsey's memorandum to Major General L.R. Groves (12/5/45);
---- Brigadier General L. Norstad's memorandum "Notes of the Interim Committee" to Commanding General, XXI Bomber Command (29/5/45).

Having examined these documents (Yamagiwa, Tachibana & Okada, 1993), I came to the conclusion that the U.S. Armed Forces deliberately planned not only to use the A-bombs on civilians to make the destruction most effective, but also to gain as much information as possible about the “ effects" of the bombs. I think that my thesis is proved by the very quick organization of the Manhattan survey teams going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Jones, 1985, pp. 543f.)

I cannot but conclude that the atomic bombings were nothing but a kind of massive experiment on human beings from the military point of view.

From the Standpoint of the Manhattan Scientists

I was shocked to learn about one terrible scheme of Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project (MP). He had a plan to produce radioactively contaminated foods "sufficient to kill half a million men." (Oppenheimer’s letter to Fermi, 25/5/43 ) Such a plan should surely have needed a series of human experiments.

It seems to me that it was in this atmosphere that a number of scientists, in their studies on the effects of radioactivity on the human body. deliberately injected plutonium into humans, including children, hospital patients, veterans, and other people.

According to an important source (The Albuquerque Tribune and Hirose, 1994), Dr. D. L. Hempelman, a leading scientist in the Health Department, Los Alamos Laboratory, sent a plan for human experiments to Oppenheimer on 29/8/44.

Dr. Stafford Warren, chairman of the Radiology Department at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, who was a consultant to the MP, also proposed a program of experiments to compare the effects of radioactivity on human beings and mice.

In March 1945, medical scientists of the MP had a meeting in Los Alamos to make a program of experiments to inject plutonium into patients hospitalized at the University of Rochester and University of Chicago. In a letter of 29/3/45 Oppenheimer assured Stafford Warren that he would help with his plan of human experiments.

As a result, on 10/4/45 Ebeneezer Cade (HP-12), who was hospitalized in the hospital attached to the MP at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, became the first victim injected with plutonium. It was the first plutonium experiment committed by the MP staff.

On 26/4/45 Arthur B. Hubbard (CHI-1) was injected with plutonium at the hospital attached to the University of Chicago. He died on 3/l0/45. Two other patients were also injected with plutonium.

On 14/5/45 Albert Stevens (CAL-1) was injected with plutonium at the hospital of University of California, San Francisco.

As for plutonium experiments on Americans performed after August 1945, I would be able to add a long list of many who were made human guinea pigs, including several hundred thousand "atomic soldiers." (Rosenberg, 1980) 

It is noteworthy that the leading scientists of the MP systematically committed the crime of human experiments even during the pre-bombing period. They sacrificed many fellow Americans as human guinea pigs.

It seems therefore that it would be reasonable for us to assume that these MP scientists also observed “Japs" in atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki as human guinea pigs from their scientific point of view.

It was also interesting and not accidental that Dr. Warren, one of the pioneering scientists of human experiments in the MP, was one of two leading American scientists who later strongly recommended the establishment of the ABCC. Another person who also recommended setting up the ABCC was Dr. Shields Warren. The two Warrens were not related by family. (Lindee, 1994)

In the Light of other Facts

I submitted my conception of the atom bombings as human experiments in the light of the pre- and post-bombing policies of the United States government and the MP scientists toward Americans and Hibakusha. Their post-bombing policies toward the latter were assisted by the Japanese government as well, especially the JNIH.

I appreciate Lindee’s description of the inferiority of the JNIH very much. I think that she accurately describes the no-treatment policy of the ABCC-JNIH. I have to stress the fact that the U.S. government, assisted by the Japanese government, not only applied its no-treatment policy to Hibakusha, but also did their utmost to obstruct Hibakusha from receiving care as proved.

Why? In my opinion it can be explained only when we look at the bombings as human experiments. I would like to reinforce my argument by submitting some additional facts.

1. In the light of the above mentioned mentality and morals of some leading American scientists in the period of the pre-bombing, it seems that it was natural for them to see the bombing as such. In this context, the opinion of J.B. Koepfli, scientific advisor to the State Department, deserves to be cited. He wrote the following in a letter to Shield Warren, Director, Division of Biology and Medicine, AEC on 1/6/51:

"The atomic bomb casualty areas in Japan constitute an unparalleled natural laboratory and a unique opportunity particularly for pursuing certain long phases of the studies." (emphasis added). [7]

It seems to me that such an opinion represented a common understanding among most of the MP and ABCC-JNIH scientists.

2. According to a 5/2/93 story from the Kyodo News Agency at Los Angeles the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were described as "experiments" or "tests" in the official records of the nuclear tests issued by the Nevada Office, Department of Energy (DOE).

Every year since the beginning of the 1980s, the revised version of these records, supplemented with the record of new tests, has been published for the mass media and researchers by this Nevada office. Since the first version, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have been recorded as the second and third "tests," following the first one at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bombings have been counted as the second and third as a part of the subsequent test series that included the blasts on the Bikini Atoll, the Nevada site and others from 1945 through to the 1990s.

These facts were reported on 7/2/93 in a major article in the Ciwgoku Shimbun. This is an influential local newspaper with a circulation of 700,000 in Hiroshima Prefecture. It is important to recognize that even the Nevada Office, DOE, understood the bombings to be "tests."

III. NECESSITY OF A NEW WAY OF THINKING

Someone might disagree with me because I might have committed a mistake of confusing post-bombing curiosity about the A-bombs’ effects with pre-bombing motives. But I think that I have reconsidered and proved my thesis on the basis of the analysis of not only the post-bombing but also the pre-bombing policies of the U.S. government.

In connection with the above critical comment, I would like to cite my concept of history:

“What is history? History is a process in which, when the past is looked back on, the implication of the past becomes the present, and its historic significance is revealed. History is also a process in which the implication of the past is re-examined and re-written from the standpoint of the present, thereby making clearer the truth about the past, in which process the historic conception of both past and present is changed. This can be said about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ‘damage’ of those events. The historic implication of this is found in the fact that its truth has been revealed in the process of history." (Shibata, 1982)

I applied this concept of history to the bombings and argued one of the motives of their being carried out was human experimentation.

ln this context, it is further noteworthy that Professor S. Harris submitted an important thesis toward the critique of all kinds of human experimentation in our age. [8] I would say the implication of my concept of the bombings might well be interpreted and understood in the light of his thesis. lt is also ironical that the ABCC was assisted by the JNIH as one of the heirs of the tradition of the medical scientists who committed experiments on humans in the Japanese biological warfare program. Their crimes were covered-up by the American Forces. I fully agree with Professor Susan Lindee, when she characterizes the ABCC and the JNIH as the "colonial science." (Lindee, 1994. Chapter Two)

Not only Japanese but also Americans, including soldiers who were affected by the atomic blast, were treated as guinea pigs. (Sternglass, 1972; Rosenberg. l9B0; Freeman, 1981; Saffer & Kelly, 1982; Wasserman, et al, 1982; Haruna, 1985; Lifton & Mitchell. 1995)

A pioneering American, Hermann Hagedorn had an admirable insight into the atomic bombing i.r1 his poem. (l-lagedorn, 1946) He pointed out that the bombs were dropped not only on Japanese but also on Americans. Another pioneering American philosopher. John Somerville coined the word “ omnicide. " According to him. a nuclear war is no longer a kind of war, but an "omnicide." (Somerville, 1980) This was already proved by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victims of nuclear destruction are humanity as a whole, including the so-called enemy as well as friends and allies.

It is in this context that Albert Einstein warned us, "If mankind is to survive, then we need a completely new way of thinking." I hope that those who have tried to justify the Truman argument and supported the Senate Resolution 257 cited at the beginning of this paper will listen to Einstein and reconsider the implication of the nuclear age from the new way of thinking.

Notes

1. The US. Army 406th Medical Laboratory was to be a research unit for preparation of biological warfare in Asia. lt was set up in Yokohama and then in Tokyo immediately after the beginning of the occupation. Later it moved to Sagamihara City near Tokyo and existed there until around 1965. I have no space here to deal with the second hidden aim. 

2. The 1956 Annual Report of the NIH, Tokyo. 1957. p. 30, emphasis added, in Japanese. 

3. See the documentary report entitled "The Unit [or Bacteriological Warfare still Exists," Monthly Shinsu (Truth), N0, 40, April 1959. in Japanese; Williams, P. & Wallace, D. 1989, p. 238. 

4. The 1948 Annual Report of the NIH, Tokyo. 1949. pp. 58-61, in Japanese. 

5. NIH and ABCC, 20 Years of the ABCC, Tokyo, 1966, p. 1, in Japanese. 

6. When we Japanese declare, “No More Hiroshimas!”, Americans very often reply, "Remember Pearl Harbour”. We completely understand and support Americans when they do so. ln fact, Americans and Japanese have to remember Pearl Harbor forever, firstly because those who committed the war crimes in the invaded Asian and Pacific countries including Pearl Harbor have not always been punished, secondly because the bombing of Pearl Harbor was nothing but the first-strike. Nevertheless, it is the U.S. government that has continued to support these Japanese war criminals including Shiro Ishii, the Commander of the infamous Unit 731 and Nobusuke Kishi who was one of the then ministers of the Tojo government. Ishii was later hired and Kishi supported by the U.S. government. It is also strange to see that the U.S. government still sticks to the first-strike policy in a possible nuclear war. Isn't it another Pearl Harbor in a nuclear war, more correctly a global nuclear omnicide? 

7. I am grateful to Mr. Kazuo Yabui, a reporter of the Chugoku Shimbun, who kindly provided me with a copy of this letter. 

8. His thesis deserves to be cited: "Most distressing is the tact that the ultimate disclosures in the mid to late l940s of Japanese biological warfare human experimentation did not appall those individuals who were apprised of these criminal acts. Instead, the disclosures whetted the appetites of scientists and military planners among both the victors and the vanquished. Rather than being motivated to abandon such actions, research using involuntary or uninformed subjects has proliferated over the past fifty years. Scientists in the United States alone conducted at least several hundred tests with human subjects who were not informed of the nature of the experiments, or of the danger to their health." (Harris, 1995, p. x) 

 [The Bibliography goes here in the document. See link to original or embedded version above.] 

Postscript and Acknowledgment

The original version of the chapter I of this paper was written in 1994. A condensed text of it was published in Japanese in the Evening edition of the Mainichi Shimbun, 6/9/1994. Its condensed but longer text in English in the Mairtichi Daily News, 11/11/1994.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1995. I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Klaus Gottstein, Emeritus Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and gave him a copy of the paper for his comment. He kindly paid much attention to my paper and sent it to Professor Barton Bernstein at Stanford University, Stanford, California, and asked him to make a comment on it. The kind comments of Professors Gottstein and Bernstein, scientists of international repute, meant a great deal and honor to me. It motivated me to reconsider my thesis and to write a long letter to reinforce my argument as a reply to them. This letter was rewritten and incorporated as Chapter II of this paper. This text is a new enlarged one with added references. I am grateful to both of them for their warm and sincere comments.

I am also grateful to Professor Seiitsu Tachibane, Dr. David Tharp and Mr. David Jordan for their kind and informative suggestions.

When I almost completed this paper for the Seisen Review, Dr Rosalie Bertell, the editor of the International Perspectives in Public Health, Toronto, kindly told me that she would like to print its original text in this journal. It is a great honor to me. However. needless to say, I don’t like to see the old text published in any journal. In this context I asked her to print this new text in her journal as well. I hope the readers of the Seisen Review kindly understand the present paper would soon be printed in the International Perspectives in Public Health, too.

Communication to the author should be addressed : 1-18-6 Toyame, Shinjuku-ku, Toyko 162....

I would add that this copy of Dr. Shingata's essay is reproduced as a public service and under fair use criteria. No money is, has, or will be received for this publication, which is published here to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Additional reading:
"Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the World-War-II Era" by Sheldon Harris, Ch. 16 of Military Medical Ethics, Vol. 2

"The Pentagon and the Japanese Mengele: The Abominable Dr. Ishii" by Christopher Reed, published at Counterpunch, May 27, 2006

Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan (1945-1949) by Stephen Buono, Journal of History, SUNY Binghamton, no date (Accessed 12/8/2012)

Promoting Health in American-Occupied Japan: Resistance to Allied Public Health Measures, 1945-1952 by Sey Nishimura, PhD (see especially the section, ""Suppression of Reports on Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs")

The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Japan, 1945-1948, by Monica Braw

"Medical Censorship in Occupied Japan, 1945-1948" by Sey Nishimura, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 1-21.

Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan (1945-1949) by Stephen Buono, Binghamton University website