Page 71 - Unit 731 Testimony

The officers working on the attack plan objected fiercely, but Umezu's
decision prevailed. There is little doubt that an American city would have
been another Ningbo on a larger scale.

Interestingly, about two weeks before the finalization of the plan,
America brought a new weapon into the war with an incendiary attack on a
large, lower-class neighborhood of Tokyo. Even among the almost
continuous air raids over Japan, the Great Tokyo Air Raid had been the
most devastating so far, with an estimated one hundred thousand civilians

burned to death by a combination of conventional incendiaries and
America's new contribution to modern weaponry, napalm. Even this failed
to deter Umezu from his veto of a germ attack on America.

General Umezu was later given the inglorious duty of representing
Japan's army in signing the instrument of capitulation aboard the U.S.S.
Missouri. At first he refused, then agreed to go only if it were considered a
direct order from the emperor. Umezu was later tried for and found guilty of
war crimes at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. His single-handed prevention
of the bacteriological attack on America never surfaced there.

In August 1947, the Chief of Naval Intelligence in Washington
released a top-secret, hundred-page-long document entitled "Naval Aspects
of Biological Warfare." It was produced in cooperation with the Biological
Warfare Section of the Intelligence Division of the War Department General
Staff to "present as accurate a picture as possible" of the material it covered.

It discussed biological warfare research in major countries such as the
United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
The report asserted: "It is doubtful if humanitarian principles have ever
been responsible for failure to employ man-made epidemics."

Ironically, the Naval Intelligence report came out about halfway
through the Tokyo trials, where Umezu was sentenced to life in jail. The
secret died with him at Sugamo Prison in 1949.

Covering the Traces

As the end of the war loomed, Japan came to expect a Soviet thrust
into Manchuria, and the facilities of Unit 731 and its branch units were
blown up to destroy evidence of their existence and the horrors they had
perpetrated. At Zhongma, the construction was so superb that its destruction
was difficult. Calling it a "fortress" was no exaggeration; while the