Page 17 - Unit 731 Testimony

. . . This dreadful and unnecessary sacrifice of life, especially among
the Anglo-Saxon races, is the most ghastly proposition of modern war,
and the Japanese have gone a long way toward conquering or

eliminating it. . .
I unhesitatingly assert that the greatest conquests of Japan have
been in the humanities of war, in the stopping of the needless sacrifice
of life through preventable disease . . .

In our war with Mexico, the proportion of losses was about three
from disease to one from bullets, and in our great Civil War nearly the
same proportion obtained . . . No lessons seem to have been learned
from these frightful experiences, for later statistics show no

improvement. In the French Campaign in Madagascar in 1894 fourteen
thousand men were sent to the front, of whom twenty-nine were killed
in action and seven thousand perished from preventable disease. In the
Boer War in South Africa the English losses from disease were simply
frightful, greater than even our Civil War record. But the crowning
piece of imbecility was reserved for our war with Spain, where, in
1898, fourteen were needlessly sacrificed to ignorance and

incompetency for every one who died on the firing line or from battle
casualties.

The author points out how in Japan's war with China in 1894, the
Japanese ratio of losses from disease was about the same as that suffered by
American soldiers suffered in two of the wars cited above. The experience
gained from that clash in Manchuria, however, was put to good use a
decade later, and the Japanese army's ratio of combat casualties to those

caused by disease turned around dramatically. Noting Japan's success, he
writes, "Only one and two-tenths percent of the entire army died of sickness
or disease. Only one and one-half died of gunshot wounds, although
twenty-four percent were wounded . . . This record is, I believe,
unparalleled and unapproached in the annals of war."

"Japan put into use the most elaborate and effective system of
sanitation that has ever been practiced in war," he wrote. For instance,
"every hospital throughout Japan, and every base and field hospital in
Manchuria, has its bacteriological laboratory." The author praises the work
done by "Japan's corps of trained experts with the microscope, that the

dread phantom of disease might be intercepted." He describes the use of X-