Secret Weapons (21 page)

The Allies maintained huge stockpiles in case gas weapons were used by the Axis forces against the Allied troops. Australia secretly and illegally imported a total of one million chemical weapons from the British throughout the war, and at the end of hostilities there were large stockpiles of poison gas around the world. Mustard gas weapons were later used against Yemen by Egypt in the 1960s and by Iraq in their war with Iran as recently as the mid-1980s.

Lewisite is a similar blistering gas that was first developed from an idea found in a research chemistry thesis at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC. It was developed further as a top-secret weapon by the United States military and experiments were carried out in the 1920s, when it was known as the Dew of Death. A total of 20,000 tons of Lewisite were produced by the Americans but by the end of World War II it was obsolete and, in any event, a British discovery, dimercaprol, was an effective agent to counteract its effects and became known as British Anti-Lewisite. During the 1950s, most of the United States’ stockpiles of the weapon were neutralized and dumped into the Gulf of Mexico though some were kept as a more modest reserve. Indeed, Lewisite from World War II has turned up in the United States capital, Washington DC, as recently as 2011. The Army Corps of Engineers, while digging out a site near the American University, found glass storage vessels filled with Lewisite dating back to the 1940s. More are awaiting discovery. The problem of poison gas, it seems, is still with us today.

But the most dangerous secret chemical weapons of all were the nerve-gas agents developed in Germany. The first was tabun, discovered in 1937, and sarin, first synthesized in 1939. Both were discovered by Dr Gerhard Schrader, a research chemist at the IG Farben Company in Frankfurt am Main. These deadly agents were followed by soman, invented in Heidelberg by a Nobel Prize laureate, Dr Richard Kuhn, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research early in 1944. These light liquid agents were the making of terrifying secret weapons with appalling effects on victims. Nothing may be observed after exposure for up to half an hour. Early effects include a runny nose followed by intense pain in the eyeball and blurred vision. The chest becomes tight and breathing difficult; the victim starts to perspire profusely and vomit. Twitching and convulsions occur in the muscles, the victim hallucinates and a sense of fear becomes overwhelming. These gases act by interfering with the transmission of impulses along the nerve pathways of the whole body, and so breathing become impossible and the patients die in unimaginable distress.

During the 1950s, NATO recognized sarin as a useful weapon of war and large amounts were stockpiled by the Soviet Union and the United States. Experiments in chemical warfare also secretly continued in Britain at Porton Down, Wiltshire. In 1953 a young volunteer, who had been asked to participate in tests to ‘cure the common cold’, was killed by being exposed to British-made sarin. Both Chile and Iraq have subsequently been reported to use sarin. The regime of Saddam Hussein used this gas in attacks against Iraqi Kurds in 1988. It was manufactured from raw materials supplied by the United States.

These agents arose from German research into insecticides during the 1930s. We know that Germany was, for many decades, the world’s leader in chemical innovation. During the post-war years, further research at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Britain led to the discovery of other potent agents. They were too toxic to be released for general use as insecticides, but the toxicity was of immediate interest to the secret weapons scientists at the Porton Down research facility. The result was a new, even stronger class of nerve poisons, the VX agents. Within a few years, the British officially renounced chemical and biological weapons and their research on the VX weapons was passed to the United States under a technology exchange scheme. Throughout the 1960s, large amounts of the VX agents were manufactured in the United States and stockpiled.

Many of the warmongers during World War II looked on their subjects as inferiors, as persons who hardly warranted the category of fellow human being. We know that they were conscripted to become slave workers; but many were also used for terrible medical experiments. Some were used for vivisection and for experiments of obscene brutality, and all because the aggressor had constructed a culture of invincible and inhuman superiority. Although the name of Dr Josef Mengele comes immediately to mind, the dawn of medical experimentation lies not with Germany, but with Japan.

In the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Japanese occupied Manchukuo in north-eastern China. There are stories told to this day of disease-infected fleas and of bombs of bacteria that were used by the Japanese against their Chinese foes during these invasions of Chinese territory. As many as 50,000 Chinese are believed to have died as a result of these biological attacks, and it is said that some areas are still regarded as dangerous, lest there be a further outbreak caused by germs lying hidden in the ground.

In the Pingfang district of Harbin the Japanese organized scientific research through a body code named Unit 731. It was embraced by the Kwantung Army, and was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department. The authorities of the Empire of Japan set up this Unit under the Kempeitai military police with the covert purpose of developing weapons that could be used against the Chinese, Koreans and other peoples whose territory they wished to invade. Although it was officially designated as an institute focusing on the health of the population, it was really devoted to the development of top-secret chemical and biological weapons.

The institute was the brainchild of Dr Shiro Ishii of Kyoto University, and he was given unlimited resources to build his research laboratories, such as Unit 731. The design of the building was of the highest specifications, with the very best of materials and the latest equipment. Harbin was chosen for its remoteness from the rest of China, and the local workers who were erecting the buildings were told that it was to be a timber mill. The best local craftsmen were used, and the highest quality materials brought in, regardless of expense.

For decades, little emerged about the work, though it was widely believed that thousands of people died as a result of these grotesque medical experiments. Not until 2002 was a formal academic meeting held that examined the surviving documents in detail. Their revelations were deeply disturbing: over half a million people died as a result of Japan’s medical experimentation in camps like Unit 731. The clue to the importance of this research, exactly as in the case of the Treaty of Versailles, lay in international legislation enacted specifically to prevent it. Historian Daniel Barenblatt has put his finger on the dawn of this practice in Japan, when Ishii read a report on the Geneva Convention, published in 1925, which stated:

Ishii had long tried to convince the Japanese authorities of the value of bacteriological weapons in war, and they had never taken him seriously. Here was the evidence he needed – if bacteriological warfare was regarded as such a threat as to warrant an entire section of the Geneva Convention, then that proved how valuable it could be to Japan. By prohibiting germ warfare, the Convention had clearly documented its potential importance.

To Ishii, the enemy were different – he saw them, as increasing numbers of Japanese were to do, as inferior beings, subservient to Japan, and there only to be used at the will of the conquering Japanese Empire. Unit 731 was the first and main establishment, and others soon followed, including Unit 100 (Changchun), Unit 200 (Manchuria), Unit 516 (Qiqihar), Unit 543 (Hailar), Unit 773 (Songo unit), Unit Ei 1644 (Nanjing), Unit 1855 (Beijing), Unit 8604 (Guangzhou) and Unit 9420 (Singapore).

The experimental subjects were treated worse than livestock. They were brought in from areas occupied by the Japanese in China and Korea, and were held in enclosures. Some were criminals and bandits, others were military prisoners, more still were women – some pregnant – and children, together with the old. One of the stories circulated to explain the new institutes was that one was a lumber mill. It gave rise to the Japanese nickname for the inmates of ‘logs’. As military historian Sheldon H. Harris has said, ‘they were regarded as logs – you could cut them or burn them with impunity’. In consequence, these hapless prisoners were frequently subjected to vivisection, having limbs or organs removed to study the effects. Men had their extremities frozen until they became gangrenous, so the course of the agonizing fatal infection could be studied. Women were cut open so that their foetuses could be studied; others had limbs cut off so that death through blood loss could be observed. People had air let into veins, to study how they died; some were hung upside down to see how long they survived, others were treated in high-pressure chambers, were spun until dead on giant centrifuges or injected with urine and seawater. Prisoners were also tied to posts and subjected to weapons testing and used for target practice. Others were blown apart by grenades, burned alive with flame throwers and doused with caustic chemicals. The records were written up in meticulous detail, so that Japanese troops – when injured by blast, chemicals or intense cold – could be treated with a better insight into how their wounds would progress. Other victims were injected with disease agents including syphilis or infected with disease vectors like fleas, to see how the diseases were transmitted. Cholera, plague and anthrax were deliberately spread among civilian populations to facilitate ethnic cleansing and to investigate the potential of these diseases as biological weapons.

Secret biowarfare agents resulted. Planes flew low over Chinese cities to spray infected fleas in huge amounts. There were epidemics of bubonic plague spread by this means. Infected food was dropped for starving villagers, epidemics of dysentery, typhoid and even cholera were caused deliberately. Doctors and technicians in protective suits would move among the populations to observe how they died. The International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare concluded in 2002 that the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army in their medical experiments was around 580,000.

As the war entered its closing phase, Soviet troops invaded Manchukuo in August 1945 and the medical experimentation staff returned to Japan. All were issued with cyanide pills to take in an emergency, and Ishii instructed everyone that they should never speak of what had happened. A few staff remained on site with instructions to blow up the buildings as the enemy troops approached. In the event, the buildings had been constructed too strongly to be so easily demolished, and most were unaffected by the explosives. Today some are museums.

When the Empire of Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur, was given the responsibility or restoring peace to Japan. The work at the secret camps had all been well documented, and the research scientists and doctors were all known to the Allies as being among the most sadistic and inhuman individuals of the entire war. They were all immediately categorized as culpable war criminals. Those who had been apprehended by the Soviets were prosecuted at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials. Twelve of the top researchers and commanders were prosecuted for their crimes. One was the Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army that occupied Manchuria. He was General Otozo Yamada, in charge of the biological warfare research. He was sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian work camp but was released to return to Japan in 1956. Meanwhile, the Soviets went on to establish a biological research institute in Sverdlovsk that was founded on the findings from Unit 731.

The researchers who were captured by the Western Allies, or surrendered to American forces, were treated very differently. Ishii had lengthy discussions with the Americans and was treated well during his confinement. In May 1947, General MacArthur entered a plea bargain with the Japanese. He informed Washington that, if the perpetrators were guaranteed immunity from prosecution, the United States could benefit from all their findings. The results would not be made available to any other nation. The deal was agreed and, when the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal convened to try Japanese war criminals, only one case of human experimentation was brought before the courts. This was the alleged use of poisonous serum against Chinese civilians, and the case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence. Large numbers of those Japanese workers who had carried out the inhuman research were offered freedom in exchange for their findings, and went on to hold positions of importance in academia, politics and business. Many of them practised medicine after the war. One became the head of the leading Japanese pharmaceutical company; another became president of a prestigious American medical school.

And the infamous Dr Shiro Ishii? It is believed that he went to live in Maryland, where he continued his work on bio-weapons for the American military, and died in Japan of throat cancer aged 67. Some of the chemicals agents used in the experiments were carcinogenic. It might have been poetic justice.

Germany began experimenting on human subjects from the outset of the war. Top-secret medical experimentation was under way in 1939 at Sachsenhausen, and many other concentration camps were to follow. The buildings remain, and I have found these sites to be a disturbing reminder of state-sanctioned cruelty. The first experiments included tests of poison gas against human subjects. Mustard gas and Lewisite were applied to the bodies, causing severe blistering and burning. The subjects’ wounds could be treated in different ways, in order to ascertain which approach gave the best results.