Unit 731 -GRAPHIC

Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) of World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Imperial Japan. Unit 731 was based at the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China).

It was officially known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army.

Gruesome and unthinkable horrors were performed daily at Unit 731. Hidden under the guise of an epidemic prevention and research facility, experiments for germ warfare and its effects on the human body had been covered up by the Imperial Japanese army for decades. Those responsible for the torture and torment of hundreds of thousands of victims lived out full lives surrounded by the wealth that they acquired during these dark times. Many of these sick bastards were awarded with medals or compensated with prestigious jobs or positions within the Japanese government in return for their keeping the facility a secret. Japanese authorities adamantly denied the atrocities that took place at unit 731, the truth only started coming to light in 1984 when photographic evidence began to surface.

Up to 10,000 people per day were murdered at this facility, recent research estimates nearly 600,000 lost their lives under unimaginably horrific circumstances. 95% of these victims were Chinese or Korean, many were civilians but some were soldiers, the remainder was mostly represented by prisoners of war taken by Japanese Allies.

Tortures ranged from psychological to any and all forms of physical abuse that can be imagined. The lightest of the experiments took place in the rape room where Fathers were forced to rape daughters and sons were forced to rape their mothers in hopes that pregnancy would ensue. Those that didn’t become pregnant suffered through some of the most gruesome mutilation of genitalia that could ever be imagined, and that was before they were murdered. Those that did become pregnant would be tied down and were forced to watch these ghoulish doctors cut the babies from them all while unsedated. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the mothers would then be forced to watch as the doctor’s would murder the infants by performing living autopsies.

Other prisoners were infected with deadly diseases like anthrax, cholera and the Bubonic plague. The Japanese were very creative, it’s not like all of these folks were just injected, some of the subjects were staked to the ground and covered with plague infested fleas or contained in small cells to be bitten by infected lab rats. These evil bastards would wait until the disease took effect on the subject, and once their health began to deteriorate, the fiendish doctors would perform vivisections on the unsedated victims. That means that they would cut them open in order to examine the effects of the diseases on the subjects vital organs, all without any form of sedation.

And then there was the frostbite unit, also part of the complex. Prisoners would be staked to the ground during the coldest part of winter. They’d remain there until nearly frozen solid, when their limbs could be broken from their body they were taken to the frostbite unit in order for the doctors to experiment and better understand the effects of frostbite in hopes of finding better forms of treatment.

Then there was a pressure chamber. Victims would be crammed into these chambers and the gauges were cranked up, all just to find out how long the human body could maintain under immense pressure.

So out in the courtyard, prisoners would be staked to the ground within close proximity to experimental explosives. After the bombs were detonated the subjects remains would be examined in order to discover the effects of the blast.

Quite often, limbs would be cut from unsedated subjects then reattached to other places on their body. Sometimes these twisted doctors would cut the subjects open and rearrange their internal organs just to study the effects. Gangrene was prompted by the doctors as well, in order to closer examine it’s effects on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was thought that the death of the subject would affect the results.

Other subjects fell victim to their share of other sordid tortures, some were starved to death, burned to death, injected with animal blood or sea water to study the effects. Some were burned to death or buried alive and some were spun to death on massive centrifuges. All of this in the name of science in order to better establish what is known today as germ warfare.

Some tests had no medical purpose at all with instead intent to administer excruciating pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys

The totality of Unit 731’s research was in support of their larger mission, which by 1939 was to develop horrific weapons of mass destruction for use against the Chinese population, and presumably American and Soviet forces, if the time ever came.

To this end, Unit 731 cycled through tens of thousands of prisoners at several facilities across Manchuria, which had been occupied by imperial forces for years. Inmates of these facilities were infected with several of the most lethal pathogens known to science, such as Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic and pneumonic plague, and typhus, which the Japanese hoped would spread from person to person after being deployed and depopulate disputed areas.

To breed the most lethal strains possible, doctors monitored patients for rapid onset of symptoms and quick progression. Prisoners who pulled through were shot, but those who got sickest fastest were bled to death on a mortuary table, and their blood was used to transfect other prisoners, the sickest of whom would themselves be bled to transfer the most virulent strain to yet another generation.

When the plague bacillus had been bred to what was felt to be a sufficiently lethal caliber, the last generation of prisoners to be infected were exposed to huge numbers of fleas, Y. pestis’ preferred vector of contagion. The fleas were then packed in dust and sealed inside clay bomb casings.

On October 4, 1940, Japanese bombers deployed these casings, each loaded with 30,000 fleas that had each sucked blood from a dying prisoner, over the Chinese village of Quzhou. Witnesses to the raid recall a fine reddish dust settling on surfaces all over town, followed by a rash of painful flea bites that afflicted nearly everyone.

From contemporary accounts, it is known that more than 2,000 civilians died of plague following this attack, and that another 1,000 or so died in nearby Yiwu after the plague was carried there by sick railway workers. Other attacks, using anthrax, killed approximately 6,000 more people in the area.

In August 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had both been bombed, the Soviet Army had invaded Manchuria and utterly annihilated the Japanese Army, and the emperor read his infamous surrender declaration over the radio, Unit 731 was officially disbanded.

Its records were mostly burned, destroying any useful information the team had managed to generate in 13 years of research. Researchers mostly slipped back into civilian life in occupied Japan as if nothing had ever happened, many of them becoming prominent members of university faculty.

To this day, Japan has not apologised for, and China has not forgiven, the countless atrocities Japanese forces visited upon China between 1931 and 1945. As the last witnesses to this history grow old and die, it’s possible that the matter will never be addressed again.

That bomb had to be dropped.

You need a very strong stomach to Google images of this. I knew the Japanese were cruel but I hadn't realised how cruel until I read this. I know people to this day who had relatives who suffered in POW camps who say they can never forgive and hate Japs with a vengeance.

HoratioTarr wrote:That bomb had to be dropped.

er yeah

you only just learning about this??

HoratioTarr wrote:That bomb had to be dropped.

Yes it did. Did you never see the film Empire of The Sun? Read some of the survivor accounts but I warn you, it’s harrowing.

The Japanese were a very martial, racist and emotionally repressed society. Very much like the Prussians who were in control of the German Armed Forces in both WW1 and whose legacy trickled down into the Freikorps and hence to the Nazi party.

smelly-bandit wrote:

HoratioTarr wrote:That bomb had to be dropped.

er yeah

you only just learning about this??

So what if she is? At least she is expanding her knowledge on this.

At least she is trying to understand the events around WW2 and quite frankly. The attrocities by the japanese always takes second fiddle to the Holocaust. Which i think is wrong. The japanese also butchered millions and like the nazi's conducted countless abhorant experiments.

Like Cass, has just said, the Japanese culture had been formed over centuries and was formed of a hybred form of extremist Neo-Confucianism. The Japanese were as racist as the Germans and where many countries intially hailed to the Japanese as liberators from colonialism. They soon realised they had been replaced by another imperialistic colonialist empire. Racist in thinking that treated the peoples of the conquered territories appallingly. This shows again the problem of radical religious ideologies, of which the Japanese were very much formed of over centuries, based again on a cast and class elitist system.

smelly-bandit wrote:

HoratioTarr wrote:That bomb had to be dropped.

er yeah

you only just learning about this??

Of course not, you patronising twat.

Its odd that during the first world war the Japanese treated their German and Austro- Hungarian prisoners quite well , spending as much money to the feeding and welfare of the prisoners a in the normal wage in Japan at the time. Prisoners were taken on 'outings' twice a week, there were concerts and camp newspapers, at some camps there were no restrictions on the prisoners interacting with the locals.

Vintage wrote:Its odd that during the first world war the Japanese treated their German and Austro- Hungarian prisoners quite well , spending as much money to the feeding and welfare of the prisoners a in the normal wage in Japan at the time. Prisoners were taken on 'outings' twice a week, there were concerts and camp newspapers, at some camps there were no restrictions on the prisoners interacting with the locals.

Not odd at all in my opinion. As I mentioned above they both had a very similar historical background. The fact that the both hated the Russians was another common point. This led them directly into a partnership in WW2. Both believed they were superior races in their respective geographic areas.