Page 18 - Unit 731 Testimony

ray equipment at hospitals, and even portable X-ray machines in field
hospitals.

In contrast, war correspondents recorded a statement by one of the
Russian officers caught in the siege of Port Arthur: "Our principal enemies
are the scurvy and 11-inch shells, which know no obstacle and against
which there is no protection." (Eleven-inch shells were made possible by
another Japanese scientific breakthrough, this time in gunpowder by
Admiral Shimose Masachika; Shimose, like his compatriot Shiga, made it

into Webster's Dictionary.)
Japan's early contact with bacteriological warfare was defensive.
Seaman writes of the water sanitation methods which the Japanese

practiced in an attempt to neutralize the problem that "the water supplies in
the territory where the campaign was conducted had been left infected with
the deadly germs of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera by the retreating
Russians."
After the battle of Mukden, he wrote of sixty thousand Russian

prisoners, many of them sick and wounded, taken by Japan. Another
seventeen thousand sick and wounded were captured at Port Arthur. The
American surgeon recorded how the Japanese cared for captured prisoners,
taking careful case notes of their injuries and dressing their wounds, while
the fleeing Russians left their dead and wounded so as to be able to retreat
with maximum speed. Japan was in effect relieving the burden on the

enemy hospitals. "This fact should be borne well in mind," Seaman wrote,
"for should at a later date invidious comparisons be made regarding the low
death-rate of the Russian wounded, it is Japan to whom the credit belongs.
For it was under Japanese care that such a large percentage of them
recovered."

British war correspondents also wrote of the wartime ethics of the
Japanese. One account tells of Japanese patrols finding a Russian who was
wounded in the eyes. The Japanese cleansed and dressed the wound, then
returned the man to his own side. This was typical Japanese action in that
war.

Most armies of the world considered the role of the medical corps
something that began only after a soldier suffered sickness or injury. Japan
took an opposite stand and used preventive bacteriology as part of tactical
planning. "The army medical systems of the world were studied and a new