World War Unit 731

The Japanese Imperial Army’s research facility, Unit 731, has been one of the best keep secret of the second world war. Just like the Nazi’s experiments on the captivates in the some of the concentration camps, the Japanese experimented on humans in many inhumane ways that went against all ethnical codes. Although Ishii did many individual experiments on humans, Unit 731’s primary use was to create biological weapons to use in war and to eventually use them to defeat the United States. This paper will discuss the types of biological and chemical warfare that this unit created and experimented on the Chinese. When the Japanese Army invaded Manchuria in 1931, the army established a research unit to develop biological weapons for warfare. The …show more content…
To test the biological weapons, Ishii built special facilities which included: testing grounds, an arsenal, and its own small air force unit. The biological weapons were mainly developed through field trials. During the Nomonhan Incident of 1939, the Japanese first tested biological warfare against Soviets, by putting pathogens into the nearby river. The results were not clear, but they concluded that casualties were not widespread. This was due to the germs losing their effectiveness in water. 6 Ishii and his team also infected the Chinese with diseases, in similar ways. They used simply every day items, such as water and food, to infect the Chinese people. One of the experiments that was performed on the Chinese population, was the infection of Manchurian around one thousand water wells with typhoid virus. The virus did devastated some entire villages around Manchuria, but the outbreak was limited to either individual deaths or a small number of deaths.7 The Japanese people also vaccinated the cholera germ into Chinese people, by telling them that it the antidote for the illness. Ishii even infected a POW camp’s food with viruses and handed out chocolates to children filled with anthrax. Not only did they infect food, they even infected items such as pens and walking sticks in hopes that the citizens would take the “abandoned” items home and …show more content…
The largest bomb attack took place in city of Ningbo, which is in central China. The bombers dropped fleas, grain, and cotton that were infected with the plaque. The attack resulted in 106 deaths in the city of Ningbo, which made it the most deadly attack on a Chinese city by Ishii and Unit 731. After the attack Ningbo, the Japanese Army had a great failure in their next trial, Jinhua. The attack on Jinhua resulted in no causalities. Even though they failed to infect the people of Jinhua, the Japanese continued the aerial attacks the next year, but the flea bombs were still not as effective as they were in Ningbo. In 1942, the Japanese began targeting battlefields to use and test their biological weapons. There most successful attack was during the Zhejiang campaign. The campaign was a massive biological attack, which used mainly cholera germs. The attack resulted in the deaths of more than 10,000 deaths, but most of the victims were Japanese soldiers, which lead this be a failure for Ishii. After another failure with the germ bombs, the Japanese researchers were losing their confidence in the biological weapons. Instead of giving up, they tried a new approach, which involved the packing of the germs and diseases into bombs or artillery shells. By 1938, the Japanese had already started developing plaque bombs for weapons of war. Instead of the standard metal container bombs, the