Inferno - Max Hastings [271]
Though Mao deluded some Americans into supposing that his guerrillas were making war effectively, for much of the conflict he maintained a tacit truce with the Japanese, and indeed became secret partners with them in the opium trade. While the Nationalists recorded 3.2 million military casualties during the Japanese occupation, the communists acknowledged only 580,000. Latterly, Chiang devoted as much military energy to holding his ground against Mao as to fighting the Japanese. He was unembarrassed by his own equivocations. He said: “The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the heart.”
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 (they called the puppet state they create there Manchukuo); its North China Area Army was based in Beijing; and the headquarters of the Central China Expeditionary Forces was in Shanghai. All estimates are unreliable, but it seems reasonable to accept the figure of 15 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 using porcelain bombs 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