In the town of Kweiyee soldiers raped the mayor’s niece twelve times, tied her naked to a post, and burned her body with cigarettes. Troops in Nancheng tore the hair off the head of an albino child, while others in Samen sliced off the noses and ears of villagers. “I cannot tell you the full story of the brutalities inflicted on these helpless people, on men, women and children, even upon babies,” Smith recalled. “No civilized mind can conceive the tortures which were inflicted on all. Whole towns of from 15,000 to 20,000 people were wiped out, the populace killed and the homes and places of business leveled by fire.” Father George Yaeger recounted similar atrocities. “The whole countryside reeked of death in every form,” he later told reporters. “From some of the villagers who had managed to escape death we heard stories far too brutal and savage to be related. Just one charge was not heard—cannibalism. But outside of that take your choice and you can’t miss the savage nature of the Japanese army.”
The Japanese refused to spare religious institutions or the clergy. Troops beat and starved French priest Michael Poizat so badly that he died within a month. “You want to go to heaven, don’t you?” soldiers asked Father Joseph Kwei before cutting his head off with a sword. The Japanese looted or wrecked two-thirds of the Vincentian’s twenty-nine missions or parishes, many burned or totally destroyed. On the wall of one torched church the Japanese chalked, “Christ is defeated.” Vandenberg would describe the destruction he found on his return to Linchwan. “It was a fearful sight,” he said. “Our priests house, schools, and orphanage had been burned. Our stone church was still standing but its interior was a shambles. The Japs had chopped up the altars, torn down the pulpit and wrecked the sacristy. The feet and the hands of statues of Christ, Mother Mary, and the saints had been slashed off and the eyes gouged out.”
The Japanese reserved the harshest torture for those discovered to have helped the Doolittle raiders. In Nancheng soldiers forced a group of men who had fed the airmen to eat feces before lining up a group of ten for a “bullet contest,” testing to see how many people a single bullet would pass through before it finally stopped. In Ihwang the Japanese found Ma Eng-lin, who had welcomed injured pilot Harold Watson into his home. Soldiers wrapped him in a blanket, tied him to a chair, and soaked him in kerosene. The Japanese then forced his wife to torch him. Troops likewise burned down the hospital of a German doctor who had helped set Watson’s arm. “Little did the Doolittle men realize,” the Reverend Charles Meeus later wrote, “that those same little gifts which they gave their rescuers in grateful acknowledgement of their hospitality—parachutes, gloves, nickels, dimes, cigarette packages—would, a few weeks later, become the tell-tale evidence of their presence and lead to the torture and death of their friends!”
A missionary with the United Church of Canada, the Reverend Bill Mitchell traveled in the region, organizing aid on behalf of the Church Committee on China Relief. Mitchell gathered statistics from local governments to provide a snapshot of the destruction. The Japanese flew 1,131 raids against Chuchow—Doolittle’s intended destination—killing 10,246 people and leaving another 27,456 destitute. Enemy forces likewise destroyed 62,146 homes, stole 7,620 head of cattle, and burned 30 percent of the crops. “Out of twenty-eight market towns in that region,” the committee’s report noted, “only three escaped devastation.” The city of Yushan, with a population of 70,000—many of whom had participated in a parade led by the mayor in honor of raiders Davy Jones and Hoss Wilder—saw 2,000 killed and 80 percent of the homes destroyed. “Yushan was once a large town filled with better-than-average houses. Now you can walk thru street after street seeing nothing but ruins,” Stein wrote in a letter. “In some places you can go several miles without seeing a house that was not burnt. Poor people.”
But Japan had saved the worst for last, summoning the secretive Unit 731. A clandestine outfit, Unit 731 was led by Major General Shiro Ishii, a fifty-year-old doctor and army surgeon who specialized in bacteriology and serology. Flamboyant and outgoing, Ishii once developed a field water filtration system, demonstrating its effectiveness by urinating in it and then guzzling the output. He was one of Japan’s early proponents of bacteriological warfare. The operation that had begun almost a decade earlier in an old soy sauce distillery in Manchuria had since grown into his personal bacteriological empire, occupying a three-square-mile campus near the town of Pingfan. Shielded from prying eyes behind towering walls and electric fences, some three thousand scientists, doctors, and technicians toiled in the secret compound that boasted its own powerhouse, rail access, and even airfield. To disguise the true nature of the unit, the Japanese publicly labeled it the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit of the Kwantung Army.
Researchers with Unit 731 focused on such diseases as anthrax, plague, glanders, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera, determining which ones would be best suited for bacteriological warfare. At full capacity Ishii’s so-called death factory could crank out more than 650 pounds of plague bacteria a month, 1,500 pounds of anthrax germs, 2,000 pounds of typhoid, and more than 2,200 pounds of cholera. To test these awful germs, Ishii’s scientists experimented on humans, from bandits and communist sympathizers to spies and the occasional Russian soldier. The Japanese often kept kidnapped subjects in a special holding cell under the consulate in Harbin, transferring them to the unit headquarters at night in vans. At Pingfan, Ishii’s older brother Takeo ran the secret two-story prison, through which six hundred men and women passed each year. As a macabre souvenir the Japanese even kept one Russian subject pickled in a six-foot jar. “No one,” recalled one of the unit’s senior leaders, “ever left this death factory alive.”
Experiments ran the gamut from pressure chambers and frostbite to injecting humans with horse blood, but most focused on bacteriological warfare. Researchers fed prisoners cantaloupes injected with typhoid, chocolate laced with anthrax, and plague-filled cookies. At other times the Japanese staked prisoners down and set off nearby bacteria bombs. In one of the more horrific practices, pathologists autopsied living prisoners without anesthetic, which doctors feared might affect the organs and blood vessels. A former medical assistant later recounted the autopsy of a Chinese prisoner infected with plague. “The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down,” he said. “But when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then he finally stopped.”
Researchers struggled to devise the best delivery mechanism for a bacteriological attack. Strong air pressure and high temperatures generated by bombs killed many germs, making it difficult to use common ordnance. During his travels before the war in Europe, Ishii had developed a fascination with the plague, which had spread via fleas, a natural yet effective delivery system. Since the plague still occurred throughout Asia, Ishii realized that by employing it he could disguise a biological attack from the enemy. Researchers at Unit 731 set out to breed fleas in some 4,500 nurseries or incubators that allowed the parasites to feast on rodents, churning out as many as 145 million fleas every three to four months. Ishii tested those theories in the summer of 1940 around the Chekiang Province port of Ning-po, dropping some 15 million plague-infested fleas from a low-flying airplane. Of the ninety-nine people ultimately infected, all but one died. A thrilled Ishii released a documentary film of the operation.
The Doolittle Raid provided Ishii with another chance to target Chekiang and surrounding provinces. After returning from Tokyo in May, Ishii summoned his senior chiefs, informing them that the general staff had ordered the unit to prepare for a large expedition in China. The plan was to target the areas around Yushan, Kinhwa, and Futsin to coincide with the withdrawal of Japanese forces. In what was known as land bacterial sabotage, troops would contaminate wells, rivers, and fields, hoping to sicken local villagers as well as the Chinese force
s, which would no doubt move back in and reoccupy the border region as soon as the Japanese departed. Over the course of several conferences, Ishii and his divisional chiefs debated the best bacteria to use, settling on plague, anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid, all of which would be spread via spray, fleas, and direct contamination of water sources. For the operation Ishii ordered almost three hundred pounds of paratyphoid and anthrax germs.
In late June and early July 1942 about 120 officers and civilian employees left Pingfan for Nanking by rail and air. The mission was initially slated for the end of July, but the slow progress of the Japanese operation in the region pushed it back into August. Technicians filled peptone bottles with bacteria, packaged them in boxes labeled “Water Supply,” and flew them to Nanking. Once in Nanking, workers transferred the bacteria to metal flasks—like those used for drinking water—and flew them into the target areas. Troops then tossed the flasks into wells, marshes, and homes. The Japanese also prepared three thousand rolls, contaminating them with typhoid and paratyphoid. Guards handed out the rolls to hungry Chinese prisoners of war, who were then released to go home and spread disease. Soldiers likewise left another four hundred biscuits infected with typhoid near fences, under trees, and around bivouac areas to make it appear as though retreating forces had left them behind, knowing that hungry locals would devour them.
The region’s devastation made it difficult to tally who got sick and why, particularly since the Japanese had looted and burned hospitals and clinics, cutting off means for many to seek treatment. The thousands of rotting hogs, cows, and humans that clogged wells and littered the rubble only contaminated the drinking water and increased the risk of diseases. Furthermore, the impoverished region, where villagers often defecated in holes outdoors, had been prone to such outbreaks and epidemics before the invasion. Anecdotal evidence gathered from missionaries and journalists shows that many Chinese fell sick from malaria, dysentery, and cholera even before the Japanese reportedly began the operation. Chinese journalist Yang Kang, who traveled the region for the Takung Pao newspaper, visited the village of Peipo in late July. “Those who returned to the village after the enemy had evacuated fell sick with no one spared,” she wrote. “This was the situation which took place not only in Peipo but everywhere.”
Kang recounted how a pallid and clearly ill woman answered the knock on the door of her home. “Everybody is sick,” the woman told Kang. “All are sick people.” “She was perfectly right,” Kang wrote. “She herself was sick. Her daughter was having malaria. Her elder grandson was having dysentery and the younger one’s face was pallid and swollen.” In Tsungjen, Kang asked a child on the street what ailed him. “Belly ache,” the boy responded. “Belly seems burning.” “His eyes and nose were so swollen that they seemed to have disappeared altogether,” she wrote. “He was about eleven and there are bigger and smaller ones as sick as he all along the road.” Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett accompanied Kang on her travels, finding that outbreaks of disease had left entire cities off limits. “We avoided staying in towns overnight, because cholera had broken out and was spreading rapidly,” Burchett wrote. “The magistrate assured us that every inhabited house in the city was stricken with some disease.”
In December 1942 Tokyo radio reported massive outbreaks of cholera, and Chinese reports the following spring revealed that a plague epidemic forced the government to quarantine the Chekiang town of Luangshuan. “As a note of some interest,” an American intelligence report stated, “previous to the Sino-Japanese war, bubonic plague had never been known to appear south of the Yangtze River.” Chinese authorities knew better. “The losses suffered by our people,” one later wrote, “were inestimable.” Some of Unit 731’s victims included Japanese soldiers. A lance corporal captured in 1944 told American interrogators that upward of ten thousand troops were infected during the Chekiang campaign. “Diseases were particularly cholera, but also dysentery and pest,” the report stated. “Victims were usually rushed to hospitals in rear, particularly the Hangchow Army Hospital, but cholera victims, usually being treated too late, mostly died.” The prisoner saw a report that listed seventeen hundred dead, most of cholera. Actual deaths likely were much higher, he said, “it being common practice to pare down unpleasant figures.”
The three-month campaign of terror across Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces infuriated many in the Chinese military, who understood that local farmers and villagers were raped, murdered, and poisoned as a consequence of America’s raid, one designed to lift the spirits of people thousands of miles away in the United States. None of Japan’s reprisals were unexpected by officials in either Chungking or Washington, who had purposely withheld details of the raid from Chiang Kai-shek, knowing the Japanese would surely retaliate, a vengeance that claimed an estimated 250,000 lives.
Chiang Kai-shek cabled the horrors to Washington. “After they had been caught unawares by the falling of American bombs on Tokyo, Japanese troops attacked the coastal areas of China, where many of the American fliers had landed. These Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman and child in those areas,” he wrote. “Let me repeat—these Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman and child in those areas.”
Lieutenant General Stilwell received his first report of the destruction in October after one of his aides visited the region. He blamed Chiang Kai-shek and what he viewed as cowardly Chinese forces. “It was even worse than we thought,” he wrote in his diary. “A bitched-up action at Ch’u Hsien, buggered completely by the Generalissimo, and then orders to retreat, which were thoroughly carried out. The ‘reconquest’ was merely reoccupation after the Japs had gone, allowing plenty of time to make sure.” Chennault noted that the Japanese had so thoroughly wrecked the airfields at Chuchow, Yushan, and Lishui that it would be easier to build new ones than to repair them. “Entire villages through which the raiders had passed were slaughtered to the last child and burned to the ground. One sizeable city was razed for no other reason than the sentiment displayed by its citizens in filling up Jap bomb craters on the nearby airfield,” he wrote. “The Chinese paid a terrible price for the Doolittle raid, but they never complained.”
The slaughter drew some notice in the American media when news trickled out in the spring of 1943 as missionaries who witnessed the atrocities returned home. A few major papers even published editorials, including the New York Times. “The Japanese have chosen how they want to represent themselves to the world,” the paper wrote. “We shall take them at their own valuation, on their own showing. We shall not forget, and we shall see that a penalty is paid.” The Los Angeles Times proved far more forceful, calling for vengeance and arguing that the destruction of the Japanese Empire would only partly atone for such atrocities. “To say that these slayings were motivated by cowardice as well as savagery is to say the obvious,” the paper argued. “The Nippon war lords have thus proved themselves to be made of the basest metal, and offer considerable evidence that the Japanese race is subhuman. It would be unfair to the lower animals to call it bestial. It might even be libelous to hell to call it demoniac.”
CHAPTER 23
I went through ninety-two days of hell and no words can adequately describe the mental and physical torture I had to endure.
—W. N. DICKSON, BRIDGE HOUSE PRISONER, AUGUST 31, 1945, STATEMENT
SKI YORK AND HIS CREW settled in at the new dacha near Penza, anxious to forget the three-week train ride across Siberia. The raiders enjoyed decent quarters and food, complete with plentiful Russian cigarettes and vodka. “Most important of all, we were near the capital,” Emmens wrote. “They would probably keep us here a few days and then slip us into Moscow and turn us over to the embassy, or maybe back to Kuibyshev. On the other hand, this present setup certainly did have an air of permanency about it. But why the secrecy, and why deny us the right to contact our own people?”
The raiders adjusted to a daily routine that began at 9:30 a.m. with breakfast followed by lunch around 1:30 p.m., a late-day s
nack of tea and sweet rolls at 6 p.m. and dinner at 9 p.m. Afterward the fliers listened to the radio until midnight. Outside of meals the men played chess or chatted with the guards and the female housekeepers, attempting to learn some of the language. Every other day the raiders bathed in a log hut with a copper tub and two showerheads. “We later learned,” Emmens recalled, “that the frequency with which we demanded baths astonished them.”
In an attempt to keep the airmen busy, the Russians brought movies and a projector, including the local films Suborov and a four-hour slog, Peter the First, as well as the American movie One Hundred Men and a Girl, the 1937 musical comedy staring Deanna Durbin. The Russians likewise provided a small gramophone and phonograph records, allowing the airmen to dance with the housekeepers, who taught them a few folk steps. “Always the thought was in the back of our minds: When?” Emmens recalled. “When will we see someone from our embassy? When will we be leaving?”
The long-awaited answer to that question came on May 24, 1942, with the arrival of Colonel Joseph Michela, the American military attaché, and Edward Page Jr., the second secretary of the embassy. The Russians had alerted the crew of the visit only the night before, prompting the airmen once again to shine boots and clean uniforms. “Now we would find out a lot of things. Had they received any of our messages in the embassy? Had they known we were in Kuibyshev that day we waited all day locked on the train? Would they have news of the rest of the Tokyo raiders?” Emmens later wrote. “And one very important thing—was I a father yet?”
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 47
