The Devil's Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners of War

218 Pages·2012·2.3 MB·English

by  Mark Felton

For Fang Fang
and William

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright © Mark Felton, 2012
9781783032624
The right of Mark Felton to be identified as Author of this Work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset in 11/13pt Palatino by
Concept, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
Printed and bound in England by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword
Aviation, Pen & Sword Family History, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen &
Sword Military, Pen & Sword Discovery, Wharncliffe Local History,
Wharncliffe True Crime, Wharncliffe Transport, Pen & Sword Select,
Pen & Sword Military Classics, Leo Cooper, The Praetorian Press,
Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing.
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Seeds of Death
Chapter 2 - Paris of the Orient
Chapter 3 - Blood Harvest
Chapter 4 - The Camp
Chapter 5 - Forced Labour
Chapter 6 - Guinea Pigs
Chapter 7 - Precedents and Paper Trails
Chapter 8 - Flamingo
Chapter 9 - Reaping the Whirlwind
Chapter 10 - Operation ‘PX’
Chapter 11 - Dark Harvest
Conclusion
Appendix A - British Prisoners-of-War, Mukden Camp
Appendix B - Some Key Characters
Appendix C - Japanese Army Chemical and Biological Warfare Units
Appendix D - Asia-Pacific War Timeline
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
I should like to express my gratitude to the following individuals, institutions
and organisations who have given so freely of their time in answering my
questions and aiding my research for this book. Many thanks to Lieutenant-
Colonel Jonathan Knowles of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps Association;
Justin Saddington of the National Army Museum; Michael Hurst, MBE, the
Director of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society; Rod Suddaby and
Simon Offord at the Imperial War Museum in London. My particular thanks go
to Pat Wang and the Mukden Prisoner of War Remembrance Society which has
managed to preserve the remnants of the Mukden Camp as an excellent and
informative museum with the assistance of the Chinese authorities in Shenyang.
Shelly and Sue Zimbler of the Mukden Survivors’ & Descendants Group have
been wonderful, and I should like to thank them very much. The assistance of
Ron Taylor and the Far East Prisoners of War Association has been, as usual,
invaluable during the course of researching this book, and both you and your
organisation have my warmest gratitude. Many thanks also to Maurice Christie,
author of Operation Scapula. My wife Fang Fang has acted as a brilliant research
assistant and translator during the course of this project, enabling the Chinese
side of the Unit 731 debate to be more fully explored, and Chinese academics
and writers consulted. She did all of this in the midst of her busy career as well
as finding the time to listen to my many ideas and theories, and has helped me to
stay focused during the gestation of this book. Many thanks to Shirley Felton
who has acted as an unpaid research assistant in Britain and tracked down
innumerable published sources and very kindly sent so much material to me in
Shanghai. Finally, my warmest thanks to Brigadier Henry Wilson, Matt Jones
for all their hard work on this project and the excellent team at Pen & Sword
Books, and my editor Sue Blackhall.
Introduction
We removed some of the organs and amputated legs and arms. Two of the
victims were young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it but we opened
up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew little about women – it
was sex education.
Unit 731 veteran Akira Makino, March 2007

With their breath streaming like smoke into the freezing air, a small group of
American prisoners bundled up in winter coats and caps, stacked the bodies of
their comrades like cordwood in a long wooden hut. The bodies had been
wrapped in dirty sheets and taken directly from the camp’s rudimentary hospital
to the storeroom. There they would reside for the remainder of the harsh
Manchurian winter and be denied a Christian burial on the orders of the Japanese
camp commandant. Something unseen was stalking the prisoners at Mukden
Camp, a collection of dilapidated Chinese barracks that had been turned into a
temporary prisoner-of-war camp by the Japanese in 1942; an as yet unidentified
disease that was carrying off American inmates with horrific regularity. Each
day the senior British officer in the camp, Major Robert Peaty, concealed
himself quietly inside his bunk and carefully recorded the numbers of deceased,
normally between one and three young men a day. The men had all developed
severe diarrhoea, had sickened and died quickly. Peaty had also noted the
strange visits to the camp by teams of Japanese doctors, and the barrage of
hypodermic injections all the nationalities inside the camp had received.
Come the spring, and the same team of American prisoners who had gently
placed their dead comrades bodies into winter storage on the orders of the
Japanese, were now told to bring the defrosted cadavers out of the hut and place
them carefully on to a table that had been set up under the crisp spring sunshine.
The naked bodies were unwrapped and carefully examined by murmuring
Japanese Army surgeons. Without preamble, incisions were made, organs
removed and samples carefully marked, as the Allied prisoners stood silently