by Jack Demlow

    It is well known in the American popular consciousness that Japanese Imperial Army at the time of World War II abhorred the idea of being taken prisoners in war, leading to suicidal attacks by Japanese soldiers and utter contempt for any enemies that they took prisoner. Additionally, though Japan officially stated that the terms of the Geneva Convention would be followed so far as it was possible, Japan had itself never ratified it. Following the Convention “so far as it was possible” meant it would not be followed very far at all, for excuses of cultural difference and necessity for labor would be used by the state as an external pretense to mask the Japanese military’s total antipathy regarding their prisoners’ well being; The Imperial Army violated at least 5 different articles of the Geneva convention with regards to the trial and execution of Allied POWs alone, not to mention further violations with regard to treatment of prisoners in the camps and using prisoners for labor. It is also worth noting that the disciplinary culture within the Imperial Army was extremely severe, and an institution that encouraged beatings for its own soldiers would hardly be expected to protect prisoners of war. Common means of execution were bayoneting, beheading with the sword, and by firing squad, while in fewer cases prisoners were drowned or immolated en masse.

    While the behavior of Japanese soldiers and camp guards showed disturbing callousness towards the lives of defeated Allied soldiers, sadism was not reserved for prisons and camps: on several occasions, surrendering Allies were bayoneted or shot en masse on the spot. In

Hong Kong and Singapore, wounded soldiers were killed in their beds or penned up alongside civilian doctors and nurses for execution later. The captured defenders of Amboina Island (nearly 300 men) and both the civilian and military crew of the Vynor Brook (also around 300 persons) provide additional examples of mass slaughter, their executions seemingly ordered to prevent them from being a “drain” on the resources and manpower of the Japanese military.

    Allied airmen were a unique case, for they were especially despised by their Japanese captors. After the “Doolittle Raid” bombed several cities on the Islands of Japan as a reprisal for Pearl Harbor, the Enemy Airmen’s Act was created by the Japanese government as a deterrent to Allied air strikes: in essence, the act declared that any Allied airmen who were found guilty of attacking civilians, private property, nonmilitary objectives (beyond what was unavoidable) or committing ‘violations of war-time international law’ would be prosecuted as war criminals and could be given the death penalty or ten years imprisonment. Three captured Doolittle pilots would be executed for such “offenses,” with their trials being little more than formal fronts for state-sponsored revenge. In the case of the Doolittle flyers, and many others that would be executed throughout the war, the impossibility of determining which plane was responsible for the destruction of which buildings did not stop the Imperial Army from finding them guilty. As the war progressed and more and more airmen were captured in greater numbers, trials were often dispensed with and prisoners were executed straight away. Regardless of whether or not they were given an official trial, their “guilt” was already determined by the flags on their uniforms.

    As for the Allied soldiers who were not executed immediately or charged with war crimes and executed later, their fates were notoriously bleak and uncertain. They might be tortured or worked to death, murdered on the whim of a Japanese guard, or they might survive long enough to fall victim to another cruelty: mass execution to prevent their rescue by the Allies. Not only were these mass murders aimed to spite their foes, but in some cases, the executions were carried out to silence witnesses to the Imperial Army’s atrocities. Massacres on Formosa and Palawan took place while the war was still raging, with the events on the latter island being particularly chilling: the prisoners were fooled into thinking that an Allied bombing run was on its way, and then when they were all huddled in bomb shelters the Japanese soldiers lit the structures on fire and hosed them down with machine gun fire. Allied soldiers held on Wake Island and Fukuoka were murdered when their captors heard about Japan’s surrender, final acts of cruel defiance by men who were taught that defeat was anathema.


Sources:

Francis, Timothy Lang. ""To Dispose of the Prisoners"." Pacific Historical Review (1997):

496-501. Journal Article.

MacKenzie, S. P. "The Treatment of Prisoners in World War II." The Journal of Modern History

(1994): 487-520. Journal Article.

Russel, Edward Fredrick Langley. The Knights of Bushido. New York: Skyhorse Publishing,

2016. Paperback.​

by Kelly Suen 

Unit 731 was a biological and chemical weapons research and development unit of the Japanese Army. It operated covertly for ten years since 1935 in Harbin, China, and was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by Imperial Japan, due to its extensive use of lethal human experimentation. With science and medicine as its stated purpose, Unit 731 was called upon to develop cures for sexually transmitted diseases, which had begun to spread among the Japanese army due to soldiers’ rape of civilians and sex with comfort women. To study STDs, Unit 731 prisoners were used as human test subjects. Female prisoners, for example, were infected by syphilis either by forced sex with an infected male prisoner or by injections. These women were forced to become pregnant for use in STD experiments, and the babies born to these women were also used in experiments.
Pregnant women were infected with syphilis and other STDs for use in studying the effect it may have on the fetus. Female prisoners were systematically raped, sometimes by doctors, resulting in a large number of babies born in captivity. Babies born to women with syphilis were tested on the moment they were born. These babies were personally delivered by doctors instead of nurses, as it normally would be the case. Blood flow from mother to child would be stopped and released intermittently to take multiple blood samples. This was done to determine the intensity of syphilis transmitted from mother to child, and to study the progression of the disease from the time of birth.
Some women were forced to have sex to study the transmission of STDs. When the infection of STDs by injection was abandoned, the researchers started forcing prisoners to have sexual intercourse with each other. The process was handled by four or five Unit 731 members, dressed in white laboratory clothing which would cover the body entirely, leaving only eyes and mouth visible. A male and female, one infected with syphilis, would be brought into a cell together and forced to have sex with each other, under threat of getting shot if anyone resisted. Once the healthy partner was infected, researchers closely observed the progress of the disease to determine, for example, how far it advanced the first week, the second week, and so forth. Instead of looking for external changes, such as the condition of sexual organs, researchers performed live dissections to investigate the effect of the disease on the internal organs at different stages of the disease. Unsurprisingly, some women were impregnated from these sexual encounters.
Babies, whether born outside or in Unit 731, were also made use of in experiments. The ones born in Unit 731 were the results of rape. A few months after being impregnated, women would be dissected and their fetuses removed while they were awake. On one occasion, a pregnant woman was infected with syphilis, and when her child was born, they were both dissected. Another experiment conducted on children was for a frostbite cure. A temperature sensing needle was inserted into the hand of a three-month-old baby and the infant was immersed in ice water, then temperature changes were recorded. 
With the prevalence of syphilis and other STDs among Japanese soldiers, Unit 731 was sought out to create cures. Unit 731 performed experiments that had caused the deaths of many female prisoners. Atrocities such as vivisections and forced pregnancies were committed for science. Women were infected with syphilis, and some were also forced to become pregnant. They were infected and impregnated by rape or forced sex with male prisoners. Scientists utilized pregnant women as well as the children they would later give birth to in their STD experiments. Pregnant women, women with syphilis, and babies were dissected alive. Despite knowledge of a large number of children born in Unit 731, there are no records of survivors. It is likely the children were killed along with other prisoners at the end of the war. 

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kann20c/classweb/dw2/page1.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5703193/True-story-Japans-WWII-human-experiments-Unit-731.html
http://english.cntv.cn/2015/08/13/VIDE1439466249542418.shtml
Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II by Peter Williams, David Wallace pg. 41
Unit 731: Testimony By Hal Gold​

by Jack Demlow

The Fall of Singapore was a military disaster contemporary with Pearl Harbor, but it led to division and finger-pointing instead of rallying the Allies further against Japan. The Japanese invasion of Malaya (today’s Malaysia) began December 8th, 1941, landing troops on its shores and pushing south through the peninsula. The combined British, Indian, and Australian forces under General Arthur Percival’s command had great difficulty stalling the Japanese attack, and in two months the struggle was over: Japan had taken all of Malaya and the surrender of Singapore 130,000 Allied soldiers was being negotiated. This defeat was called “the worst disaster and the largest capitulation in British history” by British prime minister Winston Churchill, and the British generals that had led the defense were not viewed very graciously. Most of the popular blame for the capture of Singapore would fall on General Percival, though arguably this was unjust given lacking support for fortifying the region and a number of his generals who held him in contempt and inhibited smooth military operation. 
Among these belligerents, General Henry Gordon Bennett, commander of the Australian 8th Division, was a notable case. He already had a reputation as a courageous frontline commander in WWI: Bennet had been wounded on his first day of battle, but he escaped the hospital ship as soon as he had a chance (not permission) and went right back to the front lines. This reputation was bolstered on many other battlefields, but it gained some unpleasant dimensions as Bennet was found to be argumentative and had a sensitive ego when working with other officers. Additionally, Bennet was not a full-time soldier in peacetime and had a poor opinion of officers who served in the military full-time, a position he vocalized frequently and even worked into a number of newspaper articles in 1937. This drew enough attention to Bennet for him to face Censure by the Military Board, which doubtless only worsened his relations to other officers.
When WWII began, Bennet was the third-highest ranking officer in the Australian military, but he was passed over for command in the field on three separate occasions. A courageous soldier Bennett may have been, but his touchy ego and dislike of regular officers would have harmed Australian capability to work jointly with British forces that were also operating in the Pacific. The promotion of the commander of the 8th Division, Major General Vernon Sturdee, finally gave Bennet a position to fill in the field. Bennett's performance as a commander against the Japanese advance through Johore was as strong any of his fellow commanders in Malaya, but it was not enough. Aside from a successful ambush at Gemas, his Australian and Indian units were pushed back along with the rest of the defending line. Malaya fell in early February, as did Singapore. 
Bennet was known as a brave and enthusiastic soldier, no matter his pettiness with his peers and superiors, but his actions during the surrender of Singapore marred that reputation in the eyes of many. Allegedly having sufficient knowledge of Japanese tactics to provide an advantage later on in the war, Bennet gave up his command to Brigadier C.A. Callaghan and escaped Singapore alongside civilian evacuees. Bennett’s claim to possess valuable intelligence did not save him from rebuke for leaving his troops, and his senior officers kept him out of field command for the rest of the war. Bennett, and extended his defense to include criticism of the other commanders of the Malayan campaign in his book Why Singapore Fell. At the end of the war, Bennett found himself under military investigation for his flight from Singapore after the now-released General Percival accused him of unlawfully vacating his command. The investigation’s conclusion condemned Bennet’s actions as unjustified, no matter his intent or his degree of personal courage. Bennett returned to civilian life with his military reputation tarnished, though not in tatters, and he continues to be a controversial figure in the history of WWII.

Sources:
Austrailian War Memorial. Lieutenant General Henry Gordon Bennet. n.d. web page. 27 June 2018.
Bell, Morgan. Gordon Bennet. n.d. web page. 27 June 2018.
Diamond, John. General Arthur Percival: A Convenient Scapegoat? 17th June 2016. web page. 27th June 2018.
Lodge, A.B. Bennett, Henry Gordon (1887-1962). 1993. web page. 27 June 2018.​

by Sophie Hammond

by Jack Gray 

by Kelly Suen

by Jack Gray

by Sophie Hammond

In 1936, the Japanese built Unit 731—the administrative center of the top secret biological warfare project of the Imperial Japanese Army—in the isolated Pingfang District of the city of Harbin in Manchuria. At the time, Harbin was a city with a large Russian minority population, and writer Morimura Seiichi has hypothesized that of the 3,000 prisoners experimented on at Unit 731, up to 30% were Russian.
Harbin was built in the late nineteenth century as part of the Russian Empire’s colonizing effort. In 1896, China sold Russia the right to build the Chinese Eastern Railway across Manchuria, from the city of Chita in Eastern Siberia to the city of Vladivostok, an important Pacific port for the Russian Empire. This deal made Harbin, where three train lines now met, a major rail hub. Immediately an influx of Russian engineers, refugees, and criminals began. The relationship between the new immigrants and the Asian ethnic groups already living in Manchuria was rarely smooth—according to anecdotes, some of the arriving Russian soldiers would shoot out of train windows at locals as they sped past. Later came Russian Jews, to whom the Czar promised freedom from anti-Semitic laws if they served as Russian colonists in Manchuria. Anti-Communist White Russians fled to Harbin en masse during and after the Russian Civil War. By 1922, the Russian population of the city had soared to over 100,000. Artists, writers, and political refugees created a cosmopolitan, Russianized culture in the city they called their “Paris of the Far East”.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese and the Soviets fought over who should run the Chinese Eastern Railway. In 1924 China and the Soviet Union agreed to manage the CER together, with the Soviet Union acting as the dominant partner. Soviet citizens emigrated to Harbin to work on the railroad and caused friction with the White Russians already working there. Over most of the next decade, China and the Soviet Union battled for control over the railroad, and by extension, over Harbin.

These disputes ended when Japan invaded Harbin in 1931. The Soviet Union sold the CER to Japan four years later, and thousands of Soviet railroad employees left Harbin. Non-Soviet Russians also emigrated quickly. By 1939, some sources say that only 28,000 Russians lived in Harbin. Russians who stayed often faced the loss of their jobs to Japanese settlers and were vulnerable to arrests by the Kempeitai, a branch of the Imperial Japanese Army who patrolled the streets of Harbin like a police force. They had the power to arrest anyone accused of being a Communist sympathizer, an anti-Japanese saboteur, a spy, or a “vagrant”. Fearing the charge of vagrancy, some Russian families never let their children leave home after 5 pm.

Unit 731 got the vast majority of their Russian prisoners from those Russians arrested by the Kempeitai. Most prisoners of Unit 731 were brought there after having been charged and convicted of capital crimes, usually without even the pretense of a trial. However, when the supply of victims was running low, the Kempeitai were authorized to send even “vagrants” straight to Unit 731.
Very little information remains about who these Russian victims were or what they suffered. One account mentions a Russian mother and daughter trapped in a gas chamber, the mother frantically trying to shield her daughter from breathing in the gas as researchers safely on the outside of the chamber timed their convulsions. A Japanese Youth Corps member training at Unit 731 gave later testimony that among the subjects for syphilis testing were two Russian women with their children, a girl of four or five and a boy of six or seven. A former Unit 731 medical worker stated that he once saw a white man cut length-wise and pickled in a six-foot-high jar of formaldehyde, a man the worker assumed was Russian. Some of the Russian victims were not actually citizens of Harbin but Soviet prisoners of war captured in border skirmishes. One researcher later admitted to being personally responsible for the deaths of at least forty Soviet citizens in experiments at Unit 731. While details are far and few between, it is certain that all of the Russians held prisoner in Unit 731 suffered greatly and that none of them survived. In the last days of the war, any remaining prisoners were killed and buried.

In the end, it was the Soviet Union, in response to so many Soviet and Russian victims, who subjected the Unit 731 researchers they had captured to an open trial for war crimes. The other researchers made a deal with United States occupation authorities for immunity in exchange for their research data. The Khabarovsk War Crime Trials of 1949 found all eight Japanese researchers and four military servicemen guilty of biological warfare and sentenced them to work in Soviet labor camps for two to twenty-five years. As part of a political compromise, the remaining Japanese prisoners were released and returned to Japan in 1956, and historian Sheldon Harris thinks it is likely that the researchers gave the Soviets information about Unit 731’s research data in exchange for leniency. But while the week-long Khabarovsk Trials were at least partly for propaganda purposes, Harris in his book Factories of Death accepts the accuracy of their findings, saying, “Evidence introduced during the hearings was based on eighteen volumes of interrogations and documentary material gathered in investigations over the previous four years. Some of the volumes included more than four hundred pages of depositions....Unlike the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s, the Japanese confessions made in the Khabarovsk trial were based on fact and not the fantasy of their handlers.”  

To learn more about Unit 731 itself, see these blog posts:
http://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/the-experiments-of-unit-731-torture-in-the-name-of-warfare
http://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/members-of-unit-731
http://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/background-of-unit-731
http://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/unit-731-the-secret-japanese-military-testing-facility-for-biological-warfare
http://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/marutas-in-manchuria-imperial-japanese-biological-warfare-1931-1945


And check out Pacific Atrocities Education’s book about Unit 731:  http://www.pacificatrocities.org/unit-731-ebook.html​

Works Cited
Clurman, Irene, and Dan Ben-Canaan. “A Brief History of the Jews of Harbin: How a Manchurian Fishing Village Became a Railroad Town and a Haven for Jews.” JewishGen KehilaLinks, JewishGen, 2007, kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/harbin/Brief_History.htm.
Dreyer, Jacob. “Ghost Town: Searching for Remnants of Russia in the Chinese City of Harbin.” The Calvert Journal, 20 Aug. 2014, www.calvertjournal.com/opinion/show/3018/russia-china-harbin-legacy.
Gold, Hal. Unit 731 Testimony. Tuttle Publishing, 2011.
Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945 and the American Cover-Up. Routledge, 2002.
Kristof, Nicholas D. “Unmasking Horror—A Special Report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Mar. 1995, mobile.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html.
Lisenko, Alexander. “Harbin—A Russian Enclave in Manchuria.” The Orthodox Vision, 2006, pp. 4–10.
McCurry, Justin. “Unit 731: Japan Discloses Details of Notorious Chemical Warfare Division.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Apr. 2018, www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/japan-unit-731-imperial-army-second-world-war.
Morimura, Seiichi. The Devil’s Gluttony. Kobunsha, 1981.
Nie, Jing-Bao. “The West’s Dismissal of the Khabarovsk Trial as ‘Communist Propaganda’: Ideology, Evidence and International Bioethics.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 1, Apr. 2004, pp. 32–42., doi:10.1007/bf02448905.
Pawlowicz, Rachel, and Walter E. Grunden. “Teaching Atrocities: The Holocaust and Unit 731 in the Secondary School Curriculum.” The History Teacher, vol. 48, no. 2, Feb. 2015, pp. 271–294., www.societyforhistoryeducation.org/F15Preview.html.

by Jack Demlow