Page 130 - Unit 731 Testimony

The boss ordered us to dig up the bodies of people who had died from
the epidemic, dissect them, remove and preserve their organs, and send the
specimens back to unit headquarters. In some cases, mobile units came with

orders to exhume the bodies and open them up, and then to take small
specimens from lungs, livers, and kidneys and apply each to a petri dish.
Organs that tested positive for the plague were taken back to the unit. The
petri dishes of plague germs we gathered were taken to the Xinjing National
Hygiene Laboratory and cultivated, then sent to the boss. That was the most
distasteful job I had: violating people's graves.

On many occasions, I saw prisoners taken from their cells wearing leg
irons and made to move around the grounds. I think it was around spring of
1939 that I saw three mothers with their children in a test. One was a
Chinese woman holding an infant, one was a White Russian woman with a
daughter of four or five years of age, and the last was a White Russian

woman with a boy of about six or seven.
That was a low-altitude air drop test of typhoid or cholera. The air
team and those who knew how to handle bacteria would get into a plane
together and spread germs over a village or other areas of population

concentration. After that, the area would be examined for the effectiveness
of the attack. With plague, fleas were used as a carrier and transported in a
ceramic bomb. At first, glass bombs were tried, but they did not work well.
Rats weigh about six hundred grams. They were infected with plague,

then they were infested with three thousand to six thousand fleas each and
loaded into the ceramic bomb. When the bomb is dropped and breaks, the
fleas scatter. But a foolproof method of defense against the bacteria has to
be devised, or this cannot be used as a weapon. It's not just the enemy that
can be infected, but one's own troops.

The main ingredient of the defoliant used in the Vietnam War was
dioxin. Of course, Unit 731 conducted basic research using dioxin. America
took those research records and used them.

In the Korean War, doctors who had been in Ishii's unit went there and
studied the military effectiveness of dioxin, but nobody speaks about this.
They were taken to Korea because America used BW and was unable to
protect its own army. That's why the former Ishii unit's men were taken to
Korea. I was not there myself and did not see it, but the research in Korea
included not just animals but human dissection. I am sure of that.