Page 84 - Unit 731 Testimony

evidence." In particular, immunity from prosecution "will result in
exploiting the twenty years experience of the director, former General
Ishii." Furthermore, acquiring information in this way would prevent it

from coming out in courtroom testimony, which would enable the Soviets,
among others, to gain access to it. This United States would become the
sole recipient of the information.
The same message also contains a brief item advising that adoption of
this method was "recommended by CINCFE. [Commander in Chief Far

East, or Mac-Arthur]." CINCFE also advised Washington that information
including plans and theories of Ishii and his superiors could probably be
obtained by granting written guarantees of immunity to Ishii and his
associates. Moreover, Ishii could assist in securing the complete
cooperation of his former subordinates. All of these ideas suggest that
MacArthur strongly supported the idea of determining war crime liability in

light of what potential defendants could offer in exchange for amnesty.
It is interesting that in almost all communications between SCAP and
Washington concerning these matters, the term "war crimes," with or
without capital letters, is enclosed in quotation marks. Critics have said

from the day of its inception that the military tribunal was a court of the
victors' judging the vanquished, rather than an objective judgment of war
crimes. Considering the selectivity with which subjects were chosen for or
excluded from trial, the U.S. military's casual treatment of this term
suggests that there is more truth to this accusation than many people are
willing to acknowledge.

New information also whetted the Americans' appetites for additional
data—and spurred them on to try to outmaneuver the Soviets. Actual copies
of the Soviet interrogations of Japanese officers who were captured from
Ishii's unit in Manchuria were handed over to the American military.
MacArthur's headquarters advised the War Department that preliminary

investigations "confirm authenticity of USSR interrogations and indicate
Japanese activity in (a) Human experimentation, (b) Field trials against
Chinese, (c) Large scale program, (d) Research on BW by crop destruction,
(e) Possible that Japanese General Staff knew and authorized program, (f)
Thought and research devoted to strategic and tactical use of BW . . .

[A]bove topics are of great intelligence value to US. Dr. Fell, War
Department representative, states that this new evidence was not known by
US."