Inside Fort Detrick, Maryland in the early days
I first wrote this blog entry in 2006 after reading an amazing book
called “A Plague Upon Humanity” by Daniel Barenblatt. It reveals the hidden history of Japan’s biological warfare program before and
during WW II. Since we are currently in deep concern that the Trump war team will bomb North Korea it seems like a good time to retell this important story.
Barenblatt begins by revealing how Japan created a phony pretext in
order to start the Manchurian war. In September 1931 Japanese army
engineers secretly blew up the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway
near Shenyang. The Japanese government then immediately blamed the
explosion upon Chinese soldiers garrisoned nearby. Japan then attacked
the Chinese troops, sleeping in their barracks at the time. A war was
underway.
Early on Japan set up a biological warfare (BW) unit led by Shiro Ishii.
BW units were established throughout Manchuria and China in Japanese
army occupied territory. At these locations Chinese freedom fighters and
civilians were used as lab rats and were given lethal doses of bubonic
plague, cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid. Bodies of infected
prisoners were cut open, often while people still lived, to study the
effects of the biological contamination. Japan’s BW program used
infected rats and fleas, dropped from airplanes, to spread the deadly
diseases killing entire Chinese villages. Hundreds of thousands of
innocent Chinese civilians were killed by Japan.
As WW II widened throughout the Pacific, Japan took their BW campaign to
Japanese occupied islands. Japan also sent disease laden animals into
Russia in hopes of spreading disease into that country. American
prisoners of war were experimented on in Japanese labs as well.
Following Japanese surrender at the end of WW II one would have thought
that these crimes against humanity would have been exposed and punished,
similar to Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. But this was not
the case. General Douglas MacArthur made a deal with Japan’s chief BW
expert, Shiro Ishii, protecting him from prosecution by literally
covering up the entire BW story. Ishii and his BW team gave their
expertise to the US. According to Barenblatt, “Not only did they escape
war crimes proceedings and public scrutiny by virtue of their
cooperation with the US occupation authorities, they also became
prominent public health officials and respected academic figures in
Japanese university and government circles. A few became quite wealthy
as executives of pharmaceutical companies.”
The Soviet Union knew about Japan’s BW program and in late 1949 called
for Ishii to be apprehended and tried by the US occupation forces in
Japan as the ringleader of the secret Japanese program. In response,
Gen. MacArthur’s office in Tokyo denounced the Soviet charges of
Japanese biological warfare and a US cover-up as evidence of communist
propaganda.
In fact on March 13, 1948 the US War Department cabled instructions to
Gen. MacArthur in Japan to give “immunity” to Japanese BW operatives.
“Information retained from Ishii and associates may be retained in
intelligence channels,” the instructions concluded.
There were war crimes trials in Japan after WW II. B.V.A. Roling, the
last surviving judge from the Tokyo trials, who represented the
Netherlands on the international tribunal, learned of this American
deception many years later. “As one of the judges in the International
Military Tribunal for the Far East, it is a bitter experience for me to
be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the
most disgusting kind was kept secret from the Court by the US
government,” Roling wrote. The US should be “ashamed because of the
fact they withheld information from the Court with respect to the
biological experiments of the Japanese in Manchuria on Chinese and
American prisoners of war,” he said.
In the 1950’s Ishii was secretly taken to the US to lecture at Fort
Detrick, Maryland on how to best conduct germ warfare. And as the Korean War
heated up, Ishii was used by the US to advise on how to spread deadly
disease in that war against North Korean and Chinese forces. North
Korea, China and the Soviet Union all claimed in 1951-52 that the US
Pentagon was using germ warfare on a large scale in the Korean War.
The Chinese showed footage and photographs of metallic US shells that
snapped open upon hitting the ground, releasing a swarming cargo of
insects that unleashed bubonic plague, smallpox, and anthrax. This
method of delivery had been a favorite of Japan’s BW program.
Barenblatt notes that an international scientific investigating team,
headed by a highly noted British biochemist from Cambridge University,
did research in Korea and issued a report saying that sudden appearances
of insects and spiders, of species not normally known in the region, in
winter, and in association with the dropping of strange containers and
objects by US military planes were evidence of bio-warfare. Lab tests
performed on fleas discovered in such unusual circumstances, positively
showed the presence of bubonic plague bacteria.
In some cases, US military jets, usually F-86 fighters, had flown over
Korea dropping masses of fowl feathers tainted with anthrax.
In 1956 American journalist John Powell was charged with 13 counts of
sedition for trying to expose the US BW campaign in Korea. In 1953
former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover brought Powell before congressional
committees charging him with “un-American activities.” Years later, in
the 1980’s, Powell’s story was finally aired in an article in the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
So as we today hear China warning about the re-arming of Japan, with
full support and encouragement of the U.S., can we not see some
historical precedent for their worry? Both Japan and the US have
shown, since WW II, that they will use extreme measures to subdue Korea
and China in the quest for control and domination of the Asia-Pacific.
As the US today doubles its military presence in the Asia-Pacific
region, can there be any doubt that China and North Korea have not forgotten
the stories of the past? Stories that to most Americans are unknown and
long covered up.
Bruce
