Page 51 - Unit 731 Testimony

ground. Then, on the third try we made it to the river. It was around
early September. The location was one or two hours by truck from our
camp, and we traveled at night, without lights, to a point near the

dumping site. The pathogens were stored in twenty-two or twenty-
three 18-liter oil drums. The cans were tied with straw rope, and we
carried one in each hand. We crossed over swampy ground to the
riverbank, watching the Soviet-Mongolian army's signal flares
shooting up overhead from the opposite side. The pathogens were
cultured in a vegetable gelatin. We opened the lids, and poured the
jelly-like contents of the cans into the river. We carried the cans back

with us so we wouldn't leave any evidence.

One of the men added that, at the time, he did not know what the
pathogens were, but some time later, a hygiene specialist from a special
operations team died in a hospital from typhoid, and he assumed that it was
the same disease as the germs he had carried in the Nomonhan Incident.

The Asahi reporter also spoke with an instructor of military history at
the Japanese Defense Agency who had known the leader of that action,
Lieutenant Colonel Yamamoto, after the war. The instructor told of
Yamamoto's receiving the Order of the Golden Kite for meritorious service
at the time of the incident.

The Asahi article was capped off with a comment by Professor
Tsuneishi Keiichi, a professor at Kanagawa University and probably Japan's
leading expert on Unit 731: "The use of BW at the Nomonhan Incident is
also recorded in testimony at the Khabarovsk military trials in 1949. But if
intestinal typhoid germs are dumped into a river, they will become

ineffective almost immediately. The Ishii unit people surely knew that.
Rather than actually conducting biological warfare, it seems more likely
that it was a method of gaining publicity for the unit, as well as a drill. But
the Nomonhan Incident was definitely the first use of BW by the Japanese
army."

The Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Department was
responsible for sanitary work wherever Japanese troops were in China.
According to post-World War II testimony by Ishii to Lieutenant Colonel
Arvo Thompson of the U.S. Army in 1946, Japan's initiation of biological
warfare was defensive. There was always the danger that Chinese troops

would themselves employ bacteriological tactics, and so the Japanese had