Page 67 - Unit 731 Testimony

4

End and Aftermath

Attempted Biological Warfare Against the Americans

Only six months after Pearl Harbor, the battle of Midway in June 1942
marked the end of Japan's string of victories in the Pacific. From that point
on, the territory under her control continued to ebb away. As the situation

grew darker, Tokyo began considering measures as desperate as the position
in which it found itself. Ishii looked to biological warfare, which had had
devastating effect against the Chinese, as a weapon that could help Japan
make a comeback against Allied forces.

In 1944, the United States attacked Saipan, an island in the western
Pacific. For the Japanese, it was vital that the island remain out of American
hands, for it would make a perfect staging ground for large-scale bombing
raids against Japan itself. Ishii dispatched a special team of about twenty
men equipped with biological weapons, under the command of two army
medical officers from his alma mater of Kyoto Imperial University, to
launch an attack of plague and perhaps other diseases against the enemy.

Their ship was sunk en route, however, and the pathogens never reached the
battlefield.
As 1945 arrived, the Japanese waited for an American landing on

Okinawa. Not all the defense preparations were taking place near the
prospective battlefield, however; in far-off China, the Ishii organization was
making plans to meet the invaders with plague bacteria. Ironically,
Okinawans themselves never heard anything about these plans until January
1994, when the Unit 731 Exhibition opened there.

While the touring exhibition spread shock among Japanese wherever it
opened, it hit home especially hard and deep for Okinawans. Fifty years
after they were educated to sacrifice every man, woman, and child to repel
the invaders, in a place where civilians armed with bamboo spears and
indoctrinated into dying for the emperor charged into guns, news of yet

another Japanese betrayal broke. A seventy-one-year-old former member of