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7 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs discusses Japanese atrocities in China during World War II, including a giant one the liberal left loves to blame on America.
(Photo: General Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito cut a postwar deal)
CO Nation has probably heard that the Japanese army (IJA) committed many atrocities during its occupation of Manchuria (1931-1945) and mainland China (1937-1945).
The most famous of these is the Rape of Nanking (Chinese: Nanjing da tusha, or “great Nanking massacre”), where Japanese soldiers went berserk on the civilian population as they occupied the Nationalist capital.
However the Nanking massacre is just a microcosm of the same sadism the IJA inflicted throughout most of China. For example, the “Three Alls” campaign of 1941-42 (“Kill all, burn all, loot all”) targeted civilian populations the same way in northern China and killed 2.7 million people, compared to “only” 300,000 in the capital.
Then there’s retribution for the 1942 Doolittle Raid. When fifteen U.S. carrier-launched B-25’s bombed Japanese cities in a more symbolic than strategic attack, the Japanese government lost face. Having previously boasted their home islands were invulnerable, the enraged Japanese combed the eastern China countryside searching for the Doolittle airmen who were forced to crash land when they ran out of fuel.
They only captured eight of the 75 flyers—executing three with a fourth dying in captivity—but they slaughtered about 250,000 Chinese civilians during the search. Villages “suspected” of aiding or even witnessing American pilots were massacred and burned down.
UNIT 731
Another notorious atrocity that we’ll focus on for the remainder of the article was biological experiments on civilians in the “Unit 731” program.
Emperor Hirohito was fascinated by biology and the potential for weaponizing it, and he personally approved Japan’s Unit 731 program. With access to such plentiful state resources it quickly became the most advanced biological weapons project in the world.
Based in the extreme northern Manchurian city of Harbin and euphemistically named “The Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department,” Unit 731 didn’t limit its research to animals. An estimated 14,000 Chinese and a smaller number of ethnic Russian civilians perished in gruesome experiments, usually conscious and without anesthesia.
Another 200,000 civilians are estimated to have died “in the field” to outdoors Unit 731 experiments. For example, one of the tests dropped planeloads of fleas infected with bubonic plague on Chinese population centers. Another was “inoculating” villagers with vaccines that actually contained anthrax to observe its effects on live humans.
Once again, if the Correspondent typed out all the gory details Facebook would probably censor this post. However readers can get a quick overview of the sadistic activities at this Wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Weapons_testing
The Correspondent suggests reading from the link through the end of the “Other Experiments” section.
DOUGLAS MACARTHUR: “WAR CRIMINAL”
But changing gears for a moment, the Correspondent wants to focus on an allegation surrounding Unit 731 that is often leveled against the United States, usually by left-wing liberals and some “always blame America” style libertarians: that the USA granted immunity to Unit 731 scientists from war crimes prosecution in exchange for their valuable biological weapons research data.
Any time you find an online article or YouTube video about Unit 731, or Japanese atrocities in general, there will usually be comments angrily condemning the evil United States because General Douglas Macarthur let Unit 731’s officers off the hook for their war crimes.
The story goes something like this:
”Unit 731 performed horrific experiments on Chinese and ethnic Russian civilians, but Douglas Macarthur wanted Japanese research data in order to establish a sophisticated American biological weapons program at Camp Detrick. In return he granted all Unit 731 directors, officers, and scientists full immunity from war crimes prosecution and proceeded to cover up the program’s existence, a crime against humanity as evil as the sadistic experiments themselves.”
“Unit 731 Director Shiro Ishii and his men lived in comfort into old age and died of natural causes while the cries of betrayal ring from the graves of the Chinese victims, directed at the duplicity of the United States.”
Terms you will see describing the USA’s policy, usually in a self-righteous tone, include “shameful” and “history’s most morally bankrupt bargain hunting spree.”
By the way, Chinese state-run media runs similar commentary to paint the United States as a greedy war criminal nation that preaches human rights while hypocritically letting Japanese war criminals free. CCP propaganda is particularly effective since most Chinese are already aware of Unit 731’s reputation.
Well most of this tale, as it’s told, is actually true. On its face it’s hard to argue that “this is a lie.”
But as is usually the case when dealing with anti-U.S. historical revisionists, they leave out critical pieces of the story that would undermine their desired narrative.
Here’s the more complete version:
Unit 731 was based in Harbin, China, a far northern Manchurian city about 300 miles from the Russian border.
In late 1944 and 1945 as the tide of the war turned against Japan, Unit 731 Director General Shiro Ishii was becoming concerned that he and his staff would be tried as war criminals if Tokyo surrendered to the Allies. So nearly a year before war’s end he already devised a plan to save himself from prosecution.
Ishii instructed his scientists to gather all data from their research. When the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in August 1945 they quickly reached Harbin, so Unit 731 staff blew up their buildings, destroyed whatever evidence they could, burned corpses of the victims, and fled.
Ishii went into hiding by faking his own death and many of his men fled to Japan with samples of their research data.
When Douglas Macarthur’s occupational army landed on the Japanese home islands they didn’t have to look hard to find Unit 731 war criminals. Instead the scientists eagerly sought him out.
A representative of Ishii approached American officers within a week of their arrival and presented a proposal: Grant immunity to all Unit 731 officers and scientists and in return we will give you our research data. But if we’re not granted immunity, the data “might” fall into the hands of the over one million Soviet troops in Manchuria right now.
Ishii’s men skillfully and deliberately played on American fears that the research could be handed to the USSR instead of the West.
MacArthur and his staff analyzed the sample data and were appalled at the sadism and indecency of the crude experiments, but they feared the prospect of Joseph Stalin procuring and weaponizing research from the most advanced biological program in the world.
Despite their disgust at the idea of granting amnesty to Ishii’s men, MacArthur and the War Department took the deal. Once his amnesty was secure Ishii came out of hiding.
Once the USA possessed the research data, they weren’t just going to destroy it. The information was integrated into the postwar Operation Paperclip program and used to set up Fort Detrick’s biological warfare center in Maryland. Weaponization was studied, as were defensive and vaccination/treatment options for the civilian population against likely offensive agents.
But the primary motivation for the amnesty deal wasn’t to start a leading bioweapons program as much as it was to deny Stalin one.
To protect the scientists, information was withheld from the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals. Years later the judges were outraged upon hearing of the coverup.
The War Department wanted research data withheld from the tribunals because any public disclosure would alert the USSR not only to the existence of the Unit 731 program, but also clue in the Soviets that the USA likely had obtained valuable research data which in turn would give Moscow impetus to start their own program.
That’s the end of the more complete story.
The CCP and left-leaning western critics of the United States both omit the Soviet threat to boost their “American is evil” thesis. The coverup story is also used by critics to “prove” the alleged moral bankruptcy of the United States, again leaving out the USA’s concerns about alerting the Soviets.
THE SOVIETS IN MANCHURIA
As it turned out, in their hurry to retreat from the Red Army’s rapid advance, Ishii’s men missed destroying some of their data and the Red Army stumbled across sporadic research notes here and there.
With what little information they found the Soviets did exactly what MacArthur and the Pentagon predicted: started up their own competing biological weapons program albeit far behind the USA’s which enjoyed a head start. However during the Cold War the Soviets threw enormous resources and many of their own scientists into the program which eventually caught up with America’s.
Ultimately the world condemned biological weapons as too dangerous and inhumane. In 1972 the United States and USSR signed a treaty to ban further research and development and destroy their biological weapons stockpiles—the Biological Weapons Convention.
However today we know that the USSR secretly continued developing biological weapons, effectively “cheating,” and an accident occurred at one of the original postwar labs: the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak.
Due to a maintenance misstep with the ventilation system, weaponized anthrax spores were accidentally released into the air outside the lab and killed about 65 local townspeople. Since the Soviets were officially not supposed to be conducting weapons research in 1979, they concocted a cover story involving livestock, sanitized the area, and constructed a Potemkin Village staged area for visiting western scientists.
The scientists, headed by Harvard microbiologist Matthew Meselson, were fooled and reported the Soviet cattle story was completely “plausible and consistent with what is known from medical literature and recorded human experiences with anthrax.”
When the Cold War ended, the Soviet official responsible for the 1979 coverup publicly admitted that the USSR had lied and fabricated the elaborate deception for western observers.
His name was Boris Yeltsin.
But back to the original Unit 731 story, there’s no shortage of people in the West and the Chinese Communist government who tell only half the story in order to portray the American government as an immoral biological weapons peddler that sold out the victims of Japanese atrocities. The western comments in particular often pose as sophisticated observers of America’s villainous history, far more educated than those naïve Americans whose patriotism blinds them to realizing the USA is the most evil country in history.
But they always leave out the Soviet factor. MacArthur didn’t grant immunity out of some lust for weapons research data. He could have prosecuted the Unit 731 war criminals and we would all feel cleaner and morally superior for it, but then Joseph Stalin would have possessed by far the most advanced biological weapons program in the world while the USA would get nothing. It would be like handing Stalin a working atomic bomb while America was still struggling to refine uranium ore.
Read on for a few words on sources.
Over two decades ago the Economics Correspondent read about Douglas MacArthur’s concerns regarding Soviet procurement of Unit 731 research data, but all these years later can’t find the exact book.
But there's still no shortage of online sources, for those actually motivated to look for the fuller story, mentioning how fear of the Soviets factored into the USA’s decision to cut a deal with Unit 731 officials and scientists for exclusive access to their data. A few include:
1) As if it’s that difficult for the critics to glance at Wikipedia:
“After reviewing the data provided by those involved in Unit 731, [Colonel Murray] Sanders presented the findings to MacArthur, stating that he believed the data to contain valuable information that must not end up in Soviet hands. Knowing that the physicians had fled their headquarters in order to avoid prosecution by the Soviets for war crimes, Sanders suggested that MacArthur grant the physicians involved legal immunity against any war crimes charges in exchange for their data, stating, 'My recommendation is that we promise [Unit 731 Lt. Colonel Ryoichi] Naito that no one involved in [bioweapons] will be prosecuted as war criminals.'”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Sanders#Unit_731_cover-up
2) ”Keeping the information secret, the United States secured this data with a price tag, i.e., not prosecuting those responsible for the operations, such as Emperor Hirohito. The Soviet Union later joined in hiding information, since the secrets of successful biological warfare provided both superpowers massive new weapons of destruction.”
https://www.pacificatrocities.org/book-unit-731-coverup-the-operation-paperclip-of-the-east.html
3) “U.S. authorities were torn between the desire to deny the Russians access, even at the cost of an international incident, and their suspicion that allowing the Soviets to interrogate the Japanese with Americans present could reveal useful tips about the Soviets’ current knowledge of bacteriological warfare.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4487829/
4) “After Japan's surrender in World War II, the United States gave immunity from prosecution to many of Unit 731’s top scientists in exchange for their research, which they wanted to keep out of Soviet hands, according to U.S. government records.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/for-japanese-unit-731-survivor-speaking-truth-carries-a-cost-/7841643.html
5) “The Americans were not acting on behalf of the Allied nations, rather, unilaterally to protect their own self-interests. It was imperative that they obtained Ishii and his research data, as opposed to allowing it to fall into the hands of another nation, none more so than the Soviet Union.”
“MacArthur was clear to [Colonel Murray] Sanders: draw out the information at all costs to avoid it falling into the hands of the Soviet interrogators.”
“The seeds had been sown for an immunity deal and [Shiro] Ishii will have known that, at that time, this route was his best option to survive any impending prosecution. Ishii will also have known that it would be far more preferable to assist the Allies than to fall into the hands of the Soviets.”
https://clok.uclan.ac.uk/48605/1/Dyson%20-%20Final%20Thesis%20-%20Master%20Copy.pdf
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