UNIT 731

In 1918 the Japanese created a special group out of the Army called Unit 731, which was dedicated to develop biological weapons.

Two experimental grounds for this unit was the POW camps established by the Japanese at Sandakan, Borneo and at Manchuria, northeastern China. The medical experiments carried out there, designed primarily to develop effective biological weapons, were not fully acknowledged until the early 1990s. The atrocities at the Sandakan camp, however, were never suppressed; there were simply too few survivors to remember them.

The Japanese military command transferred 1,500 Allied prisoners of war to Sandakan in 1942, with orders to construct an airfield. Chosen for its suitability as a fuel stop for Japanese warplanes returning home, Sandakan would become the most brutal POW camp in the Pacific region.

The Japanese military used Allied prisoners not only as free labor, but also as test subjects for Japanese medical "researchers," whose studies were an attempt to determine the best recipe for germ warfare. Unit 731's largest experiment was conducted on 1,485 Allied POWs in Manchuria. Told they were being inoculated against various tropical diseases, prisoners were in fact receiving injections of different pathogens. Witnesses and survivors also tell of prisoners being given lethal injections and dumped into mass graves after their death throes were observed, timed, and recorded.

Unit 731 was also charged with developing ways for the army to perform more effectively on the battlefield. In one experiment, researchers positioned Chinese prisoners on a mock battlefield under machine gun fire and lobbed shells containing mustard gas at them. Other prisoners were forced to drink mustard gas in liquid form. In each case, prisoners were monitored and their reactions to the gas measured.
By: Jan Olofsson, June 2001 <<back | top