Page 95 - Unit 731 Testimony

both sides. This proposal, however, only brought accusations from North
Korea that the organization was merely a tool of American aggression and a
spy agency.

In the absence of concrete proof of biological warfare by the United
States, the overwhelming majority of U.N. member nations rejected the
accusations. U.N. commander Matthew B. Ridge way countered by
dismissing the Communist accusations as a coverup for the inability on the
part of China and North Korea to handle the epidemics that break out

seasonally within their borders.
If these allegations were true, they would certainly serve as further
evidence of the U.S. military's having acquired the results of Unit 731

research and field tests in what one could reasonably assume was a tradeoff
for immunity from prosecution. There were also rumors in Japan about
former Unit 731 members going to Korea with the American forces. A
bomb on permanent display in the Unit 731 Museum in Manchuria that was
one of the items on loan to Japan for the exhibitions carried a description
tag stating that it was found in Korea. There is, of course, no proof that this
is the case, and the bomb could very well have been recovered in some area

of China where the Japanese dropped it during World War II, then recycled
during the Korean conflict by the Communists for new propaganda
purposes.
On the other hand, epidemic hemorrhagic fever—the disease with

which Kitano Masaji did his best-known work—was not endemic to Korea
before the Korean War, and yet more than 2,600 cases of it were reported
among U.S. troops during three years of the conflict. Of these, 165 people
died. When the disease first struck the U.S. Army in 1951, it was practically
unknown to Western medicine. Some research on it had been carried out in
the Soviet Union, but Unit 731, with all its experience in developing it as a
tool for offensive warfare, was the world authority on the disease.

U.S. Army researchers looked to former Unit 731 members for help in
dealing with the problem. In the Annals of Internal Medicine for 1953,
Colonel Joseph H. McNinch, U.S. Army Medical Corps and Chief of

Preventive Medicine, Far East Command, writes, "At this time [summer
1951], attention was directed toward a disease which the Japanese Army
had encountered in Manchuria in 1939-1941, and which was written up in
Japanese medical literature." In other reports, written by researchers with