Biological Warfare during the Korean War

Part 1 - Development and Testing

Biological weapons were seen by many governments as a more attractive option than Nuclear bombs during times of war due to the fact that they do not destroy the infrastructure of a country. Only the people.

Actual development of US biological weapons started during the Second World War. In fact, even the British were on the brink of using them against the Germans:

Summer 1944: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill approves an order of 500,000 4-pound anthrax bombs, to be built in the United States. The war ends before the order is completed.

Apart from anthrax, there was further research into brucellosis, psittacosis, tularemia, and glanders.

By the end of WW2, the Biological Weapons project had the second largest budget after the secretive Manhattan project.

The initial allocation in 1942 for the WRS totals $200,000. Meanwhile, the Chemical Warfare Service receives millions of dollars to construct research facilities.

After negotiating the Japanese Surrender, the US had gained all the results of the highly advanced Japanese Biological Weapons Project.

From Sanders's first investigation in the autumn of 1945, MacArthur acceded to granting immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for data of research on biological warfare. He also inculcated on Sanders to keep silence on "human experiments."

www.centurychina.com...

By all accounts, their experiments with Weaponised Anthrax was highly successful and by

January 1946: The War Department publicly releases a notice that the United States had developed a biological weapons program, secret information until that point. The press release attempts to assuage concerns about the program's overall safety record, offering statistics on accidental infection of personnel involved with the effort.

Link

Part 2 - Korea

After the Second World War, most people thought there would be no more wars for quite some time. Unfortunately, the Korean War flared up soon after and turned out to be a battle of ideologies - Capitalism versus Marxism.

By the time the Korean War started in 1950, the U.S. had five anti-personnel agents and two anti-crop agents, tested in cluster-bombs. In 1952, the U.S. Air Force requisitioned 23,900 of these cluster-bombs. U.S. scientists were also experimenting with the use of flies, fleas, lice, mosquitoes and ticks, to spread germs. Between 1951 and 1953, during the Korean War, the U.S. spent $345 million on research into biological warfare (about $2.2 billion in current dollars).

Link

Eventually the war became reminiscent of WW1 with both sides entrenched in positions, fighting small but deadly battles for small gains in territory.

It was then that China began to make claims that the US were using Biological Weapons against them.

During the Korean War the Communist Bloc alleged that the United States had engaged in biologic warfare against North Korea and China using anthrax and other agents. The United States categorically denied these allegations and dismissed them as propaganda. Recent reevaluation by scholars, however, reveals that the Chinese leadership firmly believed the allegations then and continues to believe them today.4,5 Paramount in cementing this conviction was the Chinese experience of Japanese biologic warfare during World War II and the subsequent U.S. protection of the Japanese war criminals involved in biologic warfare in exchange for their expertise.

New England Journal of Medicine

Over 2.5 million Chinese and North Korean soldiers and civilians were hastily given anthrax vaccines. Why?

Chinese investigators issued 600 pages of documentary evidence about U.S. biological warfare in Korea. This included reports of sudden deaths from plague, anthrax and encephalitis (brain inflammation resulting from a viral infection), and eyewitness accounts of US aircraft dropping strange objects, including soybean stalks, feathers and cardboard packages containing live insects, rotten fish, decaying pork, frogs and rodents. Fleas from these airdrops tested positive for plague, which had not been reported in Korea since 1912. And insects, spiders and feathers were found to be carrying anthrax.

James Endicott, was a Canadian minister who first brought these allegations to the media during the Korean war:

Endicott returned on a visit to China in 1952, during the Korean War and, on his return to Canada, charged the United States with using chemical and biological weapons during the war. His charges led him to be vilified in the Canadian press as "public enemy number one" and he was censured by the United Church for his support of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists.[1] He was condemned by Canadian politicians, including Lester Pearson who had been a college friend. Pearson called him the "bait on the end of a Red hook" and a "Red stooge" while John George Diefenbaker called his statements "damnable," and Conservative leader George Drew referred to Endicott as a "jackal of the Communists."[1] The government threatened to charge him with treason and sedition, but did not follow through, while others called for him to lose his passport and mailing privileges.[1][4]

James Endicott

His son, Stephen, continued the investigation and published a book entitled The United States and Biological Warfare.
He concluded there was small-scale use of germ warfare against the North Koreans and Chinese

Ooops, this was posted in the wrong forum. Can a Moderator please move it to the correct forum (my guess would be Conpiracies).

Thanks.

Nice research you've put together. There is alot more to uncover I assure you. I've been studing the same to find out why my mom and here sisters
are suffering from the same diseases. There father was in the Korean War and WWII, and was known for using chemical warfare. I believe he may have passed on something to them. So far it mimics brucellosis type symptoms.

reply to post by Alchemst7


Thanks Alchemist ... I didn't want to make the OP too exhaustive in order to encourage discussion and replies like yours.
I am very interested in the anecdotal evidence of Korean Vets and deliberately did not include the "confessions" of the US POW's because they recanted their confessions stating they were tortured.

This is a whole other conspiracy thread on it's own.

Part 3 - Unit 731

This section goes back a bit in time to the Second World War. It has already been established that member of the notorious Japanese Unit 731 were granted freedom from prosecution of war crimes.

I believe that giving men like this (as well as certain Nazi scientists) immunity was a deal the US should never have made. It started a belief that the US must protect herself by any means necessary.

Biological Testing
The Japanese actually started their testing on Chinese and Malaysian POW's and civilians.
The Allied POW's were just more test subjects:

Unit 731, the imperial Japanese army's notorious germ warfare unit, killed thousands of Chinese civilians and Allied PoWs at its sprawling complex in Harbin, northern China, from the late 1930s until the end of the war. The victims, named "logs" by their torturers, were injected with typhus, cholera and other diseases. They died during the experiments or were executed to prevent them from talking about their experiences.

Shiro Ishi was the man tasked with leading the Japanese Biological Weapons program. A man without any moral or scruples, he was extremely successful. Some estimate that his efforts caused millions to die.

1942 -- Ishii begins field tests of germ warfare on Chinese soldiers and civilians. Tens of thousands die of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases. U.S. soldiers captured in Philippines are sent to Manchuria.

Dissection of US Pilots by Japanese doctors

"I could never again wear a white smock," says Dr. Toshio Tono, dressed in a white running jacket at his hospital and recalling events of 50 years ago. "It's because the prisoners thought that we were doctors, since they could see the white smocks, that they didn't struggle. They never dreamed they would be dissected."

The prisoners were eight American airmen, knocked out of the sky over southern Japan during the waning months of World War U, and then torn apart organ by organ while they were still alive.

Horrific, unimaginable and totally covered up. Many of these Japanese doctors were never prosecuted, nor were their crimes made public. Instead they were granted immunity and became experts in the US Biological Weapons Program. I wonder what the relatives of the POW's would have done had they known?

How Teddy Ponczka died is in dispute. According to U.S. military records, he was anesthetized during the operation, and then the gas mask was removed from his face. A surgeon, Taro Torisu, reopened the incision and reached into Ponczka's chest. In the bland words of the military report, Torisu "stopped the heart action. "
Tono remembers events differently. The first experiment was followed by a second, he says. Ponczka was given intravenous injections of sea water, to determine if sea water could be used as a substitute for sterile saline solution, used to increase blood volume in the wounded or those in'shock. Tono held the bottle of sea water. He says Ponczka bled to death.

Then it was the turn of the others.

The Japanese wanted to learn whether a patient could survive the partial loss of his liver. They wanted to learn if epilepsy could be controlled by removing part of the brain. According to U.S. military records, physicians also operated on -the prisoners' stomachs and necks. All the Americans died.

There were reports of cannibalism too, but never proven:

Thirty people were brought to trial by an Allied war crimes tribunal in Yokohama, Japan, on March 11, 1948. Charges included vivisection, wrongful removal of body parts and cannibalism - based on reports that the experimenters had eaten the livers of the Americans.

The Final Insult

In September 1950, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as supreme commander for Allied Forces, reduced most of the sentences. By 1958, all those convicted were free. None of the death sentences was carried out.

Love those comfortable Green Cross shoes you wear?

Several former Unit 731 officials went on to enjoy prominent careers in medicine, academia and business, including its former leader, Dr Masaji Kitano, who headed Green Cross, once Japan's biggest pharmaceutical company.

General MacArthur was a hero back home, but his crime was never revealed:

1946 -- U.S. makes a deal with Ishii for germ warfare data based on human experimentation in exchange for immunity from war-crimes prosecution.

References
Dissection of US Pilots by Japanese Doctors
Japanese Veteran admits vivisection on POW's
Unit 731

On a topic like this, I have to make one comment. Call it a nudge, if you will -

If I had uncovered evidence of Russian, Iraqi, Iranian, Israeli complicity in Biological Warfare, people would have been all over this post like fleas on a dog (excuse the pun).

However, it is my belief that because I have posted about the dark side of the US war effort, the subject matter is merely ignored in the hope that it will go away.

One does not expect the last Bastion of Freedom to indulge in such blatent crimes against humanity.
But they did then, and it is becoming painfully clear that they still do.

Let me make it clear that there are very few countries that are innocent. I am not specifically blaming the USA as the sole perpetrators of this kind of warfare, but I am sick to death of the holier-than-thou attitude.

There is a nice shiny new thread about this topic by AeonStorm:

ATS Thread Link

During the second Sino-Japanese War and World War II the Japanese military formed an infamous secret squadron whose goal was to research and develop biological and chemical warfare. This unit showed no remorse and carried out some of the most heinous experiments in human history on men, women, children, and infants. More than 10,000 civilian and military personnel were subjected to human experimentation. The West knew about it but said nothing.

Reply to post by deltaalphanovember

Good post sir. The brutal truth of history needs to be remembered. Al jazeera has a doc on the bio weapons used on Korea.


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

reminds me, i was pissed when US grant amnesty to Japanese Unit 731 scientists. All of those people who died there would be mad about this.

reply to post by dl2one


Thanks, If I was family of the murdered servicemen, I would have made a lot of noise. Nobody deserves to die they way they did, and not to have the fact acknowledged publicly, is an extreme insult to their memory.