Japanese torture of American prisoners in WW2 revealed

by fulltimestudent 15 Replies latest social current

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  fulltimestudent

  This is not a new story. The Japanese military in WW2 were barbaric in the way they treated captured servicemen. I was about ten when my father's best friend came home from a Japanese prison camp. I wasn't allowed to see him, but for weeks my father would mutter, "The bastards, the bastards!"

  But those guys got off lightly. The worst treatment included all kinds of spurious medical experimentation.

  This story includes that type of thing:

  Japanese admit conducting wartime vivisection on captured Americans at Kyoto Imperial University
  Date
  April 9, 2015 - 9:43AM

  • Julian Ryall

  Tokyo: A university museum in Japan has broken a seven-decade taboo on discussing the dissection of live American prisoners of war by medical personnel.
  The museum opened on Saturday in the grounds of Kyushu University, in the city of Fukuoka, and details more than a century of innovation at one of Japan's foremost medical schools.
  But one small section provides details from the Second World War of a darker chapter in the university's history, according to Kyodo News.
  .....
  Nine of the crew were taken into custody, with Captain Marvin Watkins separated from his men and sent to Tokyo for interrogation. The remainder were handed over to a military physician and transported toKyushu's Imperial University College of Medicine, the predecessor of the modern-day institution.
  In testimony against 30 doctors and university personnel presented to a hearing of the Allied War Crimes tribunal in Yokohama in 1948, it was claimed that doctors gave the prisoners intravenous injections of seawater to test if it could serve as a substitute for sterile saline solution.
  Others had parts of their livers removed to determine if they could survive. Another experiment was to determine whether epilepsy could be controlled through the removal of part of the brain.
  None of the crew of the aircraft survived and their remains were preserved in formaldehyde until the end of the war, when the doctors attempted to cover their tracks by destroying the evidence.
  One doctor committed suicide in prison before the trial and charges of cannibalism were dropped due to a lack of evidence, but 23 people were found guilty of carrying out vivisection or the wrongful removal of body parts.
  Five were sentenced to death, four received life prison terms and the rest received shorter sentences.
  Two years later, General Douglas MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, commuted all the death sentences and reduced most of the prison terms. By 1958, every one of the people involved in the case had been released.

  Link: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/world/japanese-admit-conducting-wartime-vivisection-on-captured-americans-at-kyoto-imperial-university-20150408-1mh2i0.html
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  prologos

  no Hogan's Heroes in the east?
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  Bungi Bill

  With a grandfather who was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore's Changi Prison, and a father in law who (somehow) survived the Burma Railway, none of this comes as any surprise. Yet again more evidence that the human species is a cruel, violent creature!

  Bill.
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  truthseeker100

  The human species is cruel and also forgiving. I've known a few ww1(one only) and ww2 pow's one being my father in law.Never again!
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  Bungi Bill

  Your experiences may be different from mine, but I have seen very little in the way of forgiveness. My father in law certainly never did!

  Bill.
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  truthseeker100

  It's an amazing storry about my father in law. Locked in a work camp in Italy he was almost starved to death but some small german girl brought him food while he and others were starving. He gave my wife her name,
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  fulltimestudent

  As I said, its not a new story. (except maybe the bit about MacArthur issuing pardons)

  Here's another account of torturing Chinese in Manchuria. Written by a Japanese Professor.

  Why Japanese doctors performed human experiments in China 1933-1945
  - Takashi Tsuchiya
  Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
  Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan
  Email: [email protected]
  Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 10 (2000), 179-180.
  1. "Factories of Death"
  From 1933 to 1945, Japanese doctors in China performed thousands of cruel experiments on Chinese, Russians, Mongolians, and Koreans and killed all of them. At Unit 731 alone, at least 3,000 people were tortured and murdered. In addition, similar human experiments and vivisections were done at four branches of Unit 731, four other "Boeki Kyusui Bu" (Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureaus), "Gunju Boeki Sho" (Anti-Epizootic Protection Units) including Unit 100, the Manchuria Medical School, and army hospitals (1).

  These experiments and vivisections can be classified under the following four categories.

  
  (1) vivisections for training newly employed army surgeons
  At army hospitals in China, army surgeons did many vivisections on Chinese prisoners. These doctors performed appendectomies and tracheostomies on the prisoners, shot them and took bullets from their bodies, cut their arms and legs and sewed up the skin around the wounds, and finally killed them. This surgical practice was purportedly part of the training program of newly employed army surgeons to teach them how to treat wounded soldiers at the front lines. However, since in these "training" careful skill to avoid the patients' needless harm and death was not required at all, the main purpose seems to have been to make surgeons desensitized, rather than to make them skillful.

  
  (2) intentional infection of diseases
  At the research faculties of the "Boeki Kyusui Bu," including Unit 731, researchers infected prisoners with many kinds of diseases, for example, plague, cholera, epidemic (kidney) hemorrhagic fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, tetanus, anthrax, glanders, typhus, and dysentery. The purpose of this intentional infection was to seek the pathogen of the disease (for example in the case of epidemic hemorrhagic fever), to measure the infectiousness of the pathogen, to select more infectious strains, to investigate the effect of bacteriological weapons, etc. The subjects were dissected after their death or vivisected to death.

  
  (3) trials of nonstandardized treatments
  Many prisoners were killed during trials of nonstandardized, unestablished, and unusual "treatments." Many kinds of vaccines in the development stage were tried directly on prisoners, with no prior trials on animals. As another example, searching for treatment for severe frostbite, Dr. Hisato Yoshimura made the prisoners' arms or legs suffer severe frostbite and then warmed them with hot water. When the temperature of the water was over 50 degrees centigrade, the skin and muscles came off. Some other doctors tried horse blood transfusion, which was said to be developed for emergency transfusion to wounded soldiers at the front lines where there is no blood supply.

  
  (4) learning tolerance of the human body
  There were deadly experiments with airtight chambers at Unit 731, the same ones as those conducted at the Nazi concentration camps. Some prisoners were forced to breathe poison gas. Others were killed by lowering the air pressure. In addition, there were doctors who only wanted to know how much air could be injected intravenously, how much bleeding brought prisoners to death, how many days prisoners could live with no food or water or only water without food, or how high electric current or voltage human beings could bear. There were also many trials of newly developed weapons with human subjects.

  Reference: http://www.eubios.info/EJ106/EJ106C.htm
  
  
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  truthseeker100

  I have other stories about the ww2 vets that saved the world. They were an amazing bunch. My hat is off to them,
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  DwainBowman

  My dad spent most of WWII hiden in the jungles of the Philpines. Three times he was caught, the first time was by two men scout teams, the third time by a small company of groups. After he died, his sister told me of his experience in WWII. Some how he killed the first two groups that caught him, and escaped from the larger one. He was near death as the US army retook the Island's. He spents months in the hospital before being shipped back to the states. My mom met him at the train station. (Until the army found him, he was listed as MIA, likely dead) When he was last home he was 6' 175 pounds, full head of hair. When the army found him, he weight 75 pounds. When he got off the train, he was 95 pounds, bald, and toothless. My mom was looking for the man that had left. He walked up to her, and said, You don't know me, do you! !
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  prologos

  It all had to do with the view of prisoners. In the winter of 1944-45 I talked to some Russian POW.( a lot to be really pitied) they were scared of the advancing Red Army. Stalin had ordered all surrendering Russians to be shot as traitors, Russians committed suicide on English docks rather than board ships taking them back to the post-war soviet union. japanese detested surrender, and treated prisoners accordingly. Luftwaffe personnel tried to get to downed airmen quickly to prevent retribution by enraged civilians whose kids has been killed. I saw fresh flowers on new graves of dead B17 airmen that died in front of our eyes in their crippled bombers. (perhaps by a mother who hoped equal treatment for her son). A prominent military commander who shall be not mentioned by name because of his JW connection. admonished his troops to shoot surrendering enemy soldiers as seen on PBS. He declared the geneva convention not applicable because there were no german POWs, only surrendered enemy aliens. and most important of all, for an ancient Israeli soldier to be blessed, he had to listen and obey. to slaughter babies, the unborn, old men, scorched earth. It is in writing. follow your wt schedule. and then there is the holocaust. Rwanda, ISIS , mi-ly, Where have all the flowers gone?--