Page 59 - Unit 731 Testimony

germs mixed with wheat, corn, cloth scraps, and cotton were dropped from
the air.

Qian Guifa, a resident of the area attacked, was fourteen years old at
the time and working in a cofu shop. He was infected, but managed to
recover, and it is said that he is the only living person today who can bear
witness to the Japanese biological warfare experiment at Ningbo. His
testimony has been recorded in video documentary and in printed literature
in Japan. He recounts: "One day, a Japanese plane flew over and kept

circling. Then, it dropped something that looked like smoke. It was wheat
flour and corn and other things. The next day people started getting sick.
Three days later, the tofu shop owner's two children were dead, and other
people were getting sick and dying. Nobody could understand what had
happened. My own family died, one after the other. There was misery all
around.

"Everyone who died did so in pain and agony, going into convulsions.
At first the bodies turned red, then after death they turned black."

More than one hundred persons died within a few days after the attack.
The affected area was closed to the public and remained sealed off until the
1960s, when it was ascertained positively that there was no further risk of
infection.

Government records still existing in China show the results of the
plague attacks and the deaths which followed. A Chinese specialist on
disease prevention and plague tells how he kept the disease from spreading
to other areas.

"On the twenty-ninth, three days after the Japanese plane came, I
entered the Ningbo area that had been attacked. The first thing I did was
separate the people seriously affected, those lightly affected, and the healthy
ones. Then, I encircled the infected area of the attack zone with a wall about
a meter deep and a meter and a half high, so that rats could not escape. Six
hundred people were moved south. When November came, we burned

everything in the enclosed area, and in this way we stopped the plague from
spreading. According to my records, ninety-seven people died."
Then, in September 1942, another attack was carried out by the two
units, with Ishii himself commanding the operation. A survivor reports: