American Experience

Narrator: But in Japan, Americans were surprised by the ways that germ research surpassed what wartime intelligence had suggested. The name of one officer and physician kept coming up. One informant called him “the germ man.” Another said his entire career, “starts with germs and ends with germs.” He was Shiro Ishii, the driving force behind Japan’s secret biological weapons program.

Ishii was interrogated by Detrick investigators in May 1947. And what came out exceeded anything the British or Americans had imagined. Detrick researchers could now piece together the story of Japan’s no-holds-barred germ warfare program. Its headquarters was a facility called Unit 731 in a Japanese-controlled region of China. The site housed 3,000 Japanese personnel and included labs, a Shinto temple, a cinema and a brothel. Ishii, like his Allied counterparts, understood the need for the utmost secrecy. He operated under a cover as “Chief of the Water Purification and Epidemic Corps.”

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: He had tremendous access to human subjects, to mostly peasant Han Chinese. He would just pick people up out of their homes or off the street and bring them in and keep them captive, and also then perform on them really atrocious experiments equal to anything that was ever conducted in the Nazi death camps.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: The human experiments always ended in death. Even those who recovered from the disease were killed so that their autopsies could be completed and added to the files. They sought the scientific information so avidly, they often did the autopsy before the patient died so that the tissues would be perfectly fresh. If you look at the number of people who were murdered in the facility in experiments, there were at least three thousand, and more likely closer to ten thousand people.

Narrator: Ishii and his team infected people with germs causing plague, cholera, dysentery and typhoid. But they had a preferred lethal agent.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: They conducted human subjects experiments with anthrax — something that the United States and the United Kingdom scientists may have theorized, but they had never brought themselves to that actuality.

Richard Preston, Author: If you inhale anthrax spores into your lungs, you can come down with pulmonary anthrax. It’s a very bad disease that is very hard to survive. Your lungs fill up with fluid. Your skin turns blue. The lymph nodes inside the chest can swell up to the size of tennis balls and can rupture. It’s a very painful, grizzly death.

Narrator: The Japanese experiments were not confined to the laboratory. They also took place in Chinese cities.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: One of the weapons that Ishii developed were fleas that had been infected with the plague bacterium. These were released from airplanes and dropped over Chinese cities.

Narrator: Outside Ishii’s compounds, thousands of Chinese were infected with Black Death and other diseases spread by Japan’s forces. The extent of Ishii’s experiments amazed the American investigators.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: The more they learned about the Japanese program, the more they wanted to know about the Japanese program. The work that the Japanese did was beyond the experience of those American scientists.

Narrator: The Japanese had crossed an ethical line.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: All of the work in America had been done on animals. The Japanese data was a proof test. It showed that a weapon could kill people.

Narrator: Ishii had kept what appeared to be meticulous records, including autopsy diagrams and microscope slides of human tissue. In exchange for his human data, Ishii wanted immunity from war crimes prosecution for himself and his colleagues. His case came to the top allied commander in post-war Japan — General Douglas MacArthur. He took the matter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They gave MacArthur a free hand, but stressed the importance of hiding biowarfare information from the Soviets. By early 1948, the U.S. understood that it was fighting a Cold War with its former ally. Americans saw the Soviet Union, already in control of Eastern Europe, as a ruthless nation in pursuit of unconventional weapons.

That March, MacArthur formally approved a highly secret deal with Ishii. In Nuremberg, Germany, Nazi doctors had been convicted and hanged. The Tokyo War Crimes trial would play out differently. Not a single biowarfare case was prosecuted.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: The immunity deal was a disgrace. The Japanese workers deserved to be tried for their war crimes. If that had happened, there would have been a precedent against such things.

Narrator: Detrick researchers considered the deal helpful for the American germ program. It put unique human data in their hands. It suppressed testimony that might have encouraged Soviet scientists. And it offered something else just as important.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: The United States got secrecy around its own program. Think of it. If the Japanese scientists had been prosecuted in Tokyo, the world would have reacted with such horror that it would have been very difficult for Americans to move forward with an offensive biological weapons program.

Narrator: But thanks to the deal, the program was advancing once again — faster than ever. In the early years of the Cold War, many Americans — and Detrick workers in particular — feared the worst from the Soviets.

Bill Patrick, Microbiologist: We felt very strongly that the Soviet Union had a very strong program in biological warfare and that we were putting our lives at risk to work with all these nasty organisms.

Narrator: The U.S. military concluded it had to make plans, despite not knowing if the Soviets really had germ weapons.

Matthew Meselson, Biologist: If they do, do you need them yourself? If you had no nuclear weapons, I think the decision would have been, we’d better have a biological capability. And we would be in bad shape if we found out that they did, and had nothing of that sort ourselves.

Narrator: Because the U.S. still had few nuclear bombs, germ weapons got a boost.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: The biological weapons program was able to step up and at least claim that it could provide a weapon of mass destruction that would augment the atomic arsenal.

Narrator: With the American biological warfare program ramping up, Detrick researchers had high hopes for the human data from Japan. They were deeply disappointed.

Martin Furmanski, Pathologist: It turned out that Shiro Ishii was not the kind of scientist they wanted. What they wanted was a scientist who would tell them how many airborne bacteria would infect people a half a mile downwind. There was nothing like this in the Japanese documents.

Narrator: The U.S. had let war criminals go free in exchange for junk science. American bioweapons researchers now came to a sobering realization; if they wanted reliable human data, they would have to get it themselves.

On a sticky August day in 1949, technicians from Detrick visited the Pentagon on a secret mission. Disguised as maintenance workers, they used “simulants” — non-infectious bacteria — to assess the vulnerability of people inside large buildings to attack. Only a few of the Pentagon’s employees were aware of the test. A technical success, the Pentagon trial revealed the threat, and promise, of germs for sabotage. But the American biological program had ambitions beyond workers in buildings.

Matthew Meselson, Biologist: The characteristic of biological weapons is the ability to cover very large areas with windborne disease organisms. Automatically that tells you that if there is any utility to biological weapons, it lies in the attack of civilians.

Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: This is a great change in notions of conducting war, waging war in the twentieth century. You have to start thinking of the enemy civilian as aiding and abetting the enemy, as part and parcel of the aggression that you’re trying to overcome. So your victory may depend greatly on the killing of civilians.