Julian Ryall: Did the U.S. Wage Germ Warfare in Korea?
America denies using biological weapons in the Korean War. But North Koreans still claim the US dropped bombs containing disease-carrying insects and food.
In the winter of 1952, Yun Chang Bin recalls, the American bombers flying overhead had become a fact of life. The small detachment of Chinese 'volunteers’ stationed in his village, Hwanjin, 40 miles north-east of Pyongyang, was not a worthwhile target for the US forces supporting the South Korean regime, so rural life went on much as it had done for generations. Oxen ploughed the fields and the local people – those who had not been conscripted into the North Korean military – worked together tending to the rice crops.
But then, one afternoon in early March, Yun was walking home from school when he saw Chinese troops on their hands and knees in the fields. Standing close to the same spot today, he indicates with a sweep of his hand where they were collecting small objects from the frozen ground.
'There were about 30 or 40 of the Chinese volunteer troops spread out across the field,’ Yun, now 72, says. 'They were wearing masks and gloves and some of them had brooms. They were sweeping up something from the ground and others were picking it up and putting it on a fire.’...
During the First World War, Germany had an extensive biological warfare programme, although the use of such weapons was prohibited by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Despite the ban, the potential of fatal diseases as tools of warfare had been identified two decades before the Korean War by the Imperial Japanese Army, which operated a series of clandestine biological, bacteriological and chemical warfare teams throughout China and occupied East Asia from the early 1930s until the end of the Second World War, targeting both civilians and military units. The core research was conducted by one of these teams, Unit 731, in a series of buildings, some of which have been preserved, in the northern Chinese city of Harbin. Then part of Manchukuo, the puppet state in Manchuria that was ruled by the Japanese military, Harbin was well hidden from the prying eyes of the West.
Unit 731 was run by Lt Gen Shiro Ishii, the man said to be responsible for converting Manchuria into one huge biological warfare laboratory under Japanese rule. In September 1931 a section of the Japanese-operated South Manchuria Railway was dynamited; though blamed on Chinese dissidents the attack was engineered by Japanese militarists, an exercise now known as the Mukden Incident. Having annexed the Korean Peninsula more than 30 years earlier and looking to take control of a larger slice of China, Japan now had the excuse to respond with force. The following year, Manchukuo was created. As well as vastly increasing Imperial Japan’s territory, the move provided its military and scientists areas in which they could experiment without scrutiny.
In 1933 Ishii set up the Department of Immunology at the Army Medical College in Tokyo, but was not satisfied with laboratory tests on animals. A year later, he secured funding to transfer his operations to Harbin, where he built the Ping Fan laboratory.
Ishii and hundreds of his colleagues in a dozen similar units roamed across China for 13 years, carrying out experiments planned at Ping Fan. They dropped from aircraft ceramic bombs that contained infected insects; they deliberately discarded food contaminated with pathogens, aware that local people would eat it when they left; mundane objects such as pens and walking sticks were reportedly impregnated with viruses that would then be passed on to anyone who picked them up.
Chinese researchers now believe that two million Chinese people died from Japanese germ weapons used in combat or against civilians. About 6,000 people died in human experiments in Harbin and satellite units throughout the Imperial Japanese Empire; POWs were also reportedly used in some of the experiments – Russian troops captured on the frontier and some downed air crew – although none of them survived their incarceration to tell their tales.
Today, 65 years after Harbin reverted to Chinese control, part of the sprawling two-square-mile Ping Fan laboratory complex remains, despite Japanese efforts to destroy the evidence of what went on. Vast chimneys loom gaunt against the skyline, a guardhouse stands at the main gate and the main office complex has been turned into a museum, with gruesome recreations of what took place at the site....
After Japan’s surrender, researchers from Washington’s chemical and biological warfare projects were among the first to arrive in Tokyo, and, along with teams of war crimes investigators, were keen to track down senior members of Unit 731. Reports soon appeared in the international press about POWs and civilians being administered infectious agents in medical tests, along with news of Ishii being located by US forces on January 12 1946 (despite rumours that he had been shot dead and his family staging an elaborate 'funeral’ in his home town). Even then he was not arrested but merely confined to his Tokyo home while the investigation against him continued....
Masataka Mori, a professor of history at Shizuoka University in Japan, who has studied the activities for Unit 731 for many years, believes that Japan’s biological warfare programme was not fully investigated for good reason: Unit 731’s scientists, he says, were granted immunity in return for sharing the fruits of their research with the Americans....
Prof Mori first visited North Korea in 1990 and has returned three times since to carry on his research. He has visited nine sites that reported germ weapon attacks by American forces during the war and interviewed more than 30 survivors. He says there are striking similarities between the diseases and weapons used by the Japanese military in China and those said to have been deployed by the United States against targets in northern Korea. 'The bombs found on the Korean Peninsula were made of metal, while those used in China were ceramic,’ he says, 'but the symptoms reported in North Korea are very similar to those witnessed in China.’...
It is not difficult for the West to dispute anti-American claims emanating from North Korea. The world’s only communist dynasty, headed since its foundation by Kim Il-sung (who died in 1994) and Kim Jong-il, father and son, is, after all, a country widely acknowledged to counterfeit foreign currencies and manufacture synthetic narcotics to sell overseas in return for hard currency that is then spent on developing nuclear weapons and missiles. At present, intelligence estimates that North Korea’s military has between six and eight nuclear weapons, and the Taepodong-1 missile, based on the Scud, can deliver a payload to a target 1,500 miles away. Development of the Taepodong-2 is said to be under way, although a test in 2006 failed. When it is operational, the missile will have a range of about 5,000 miles, which would give it the capacity to hit the mainland United States....
The US military has not changed its stance over allegations that it used biological weapons in Korea. In response to a list of questions submitted to the Pentagon for this article, Major Maureen Schumann issued a brief statement: 'The long-standing US position is that allegations of biological weapons use in the Korean war is “the disinformation campaign that refuses to die”. Our position has not changed. The allegations have proven baseless time and time again.’
Prof Mori shrugs his shoulders. 'The use of germ weapons in war is a breach of the Geneva Convention and I think that is why they are refusing to admit the allegations. The criterion for my judgment is not whether North Korea’s claim is correct or the American claim is right; the criterion is whether the incidents actually happened or not. I went to North Korea and met people who had suffered the effects of germ warfare. They told me their stories, shedding tears and grimacing with anger. They told me what actually happened and I cannot question that.’...