All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [269]
Nonetheless, the occupation of half of China constituted a massive drain upon Tokyo’s resources, and cost Japan 202,958 dead between 1941 and 1945, compared with 208,000 men killed fighting the British, and 485,717 army and 414,879 naval personnel lost in combat with the United States. The country was vast: even if organised opposition was weak, large forces were indispensable to make good Tokyo’s claims on territory, and to control a hostile and often starving population. In the north, Japan’s Kwantung Army held Manchuria, the puppet state of Manchukuo; its North China Area Army was based in Beijing; the headquarters of the Central China Expeditionary Forces was in Shanghai. All estimates are unreliable, but it seems reasonable to accept the figure of fifteen million Chinese wartime dead as a direct consequence of Japanese military action, starvation or plagues, some of these deliberately fostered by biological warfare specialists of the Japanese army’s Unit 731.
The Japanese were the only large-scale wartime users of biological weapons. Unit 731 in Manchuria operated under the supremely cynical cover name of the Kwantung Army Epidemic Protection and Water Supply Unit. Thousands of captive Chinese were murdered in the course of tests at 731’s base near Harbin, many being subjected to vivisection without benefit of anaesthetics. Some victims were tied to stakes before anthrax bombs were detonated around them. Women were laboratory-infected with syphilis; local civilians were abducted and injected with fatal viruses. In the course of Japan’s war in China, cholera, dysentery, plague and typhus germs were broadcast, most often from the air, sometimes with porcelain bombs used to deliver plague fleas. An unsuccessful attempt was made to employ such means against American forces on Saipan, but the ship carrying the putative insect warriors was sunk en route.
That the Japanese attempted to kill millions of people with biological weapons is undisputed; it is less certain, however, how successful were their efforts. Vast numbers of Chinese died in epidemics between 1936 and 1945, and modern China attributes most of these losses to Japanese action. In a broad sense this is just, since privation and starvation were consequences of Japanese aggression. But it remains unproven that Unit 731’s operations were directly responsible. For instance, over 200,000 people died during the 1942 cholera epidemic in Yunnan. The Japanese released cholera bacteria in the province, but many such epidemics took place even where they did not do so. It was difficult, with available technology, to spread disease on demand with air-dropped biological weapons. Yet even if Japan’s genocidal accomplishments fell short of their sponsors’ hopes, the nation’s moral responsibility is manifest.
Between 1942 and 1944 big battlefield encounters in China were rare, but Japanese forces conducted frequent punitive expeditions to suppress dissent or gather food. One of the most ferocious of these took place in May 1942, designated by the Japanese high command as an act of vengeance for the USAAF Doolittle raid on Tokyo. More than 100,000 troops were dispatched into Chekiang and Kiangsi provinces, with support from the biological warfare unit. By September, when their mission was deemed fulfilled and the columns withdrew, a quarter of a million people had been killed. Throughout the war, Chiang’s capital of Chonqing was routinely bombed by Japanese aircraft, and raids inflicted heavy civilian casualties in several other cities.
The files of the medical branch of the Tokyo War Ministry show that in September 1942, enslaved ‘comfort women’ were servicing Japanese soldiers at a hundred stations in north China, 140 in central China, forty