Biological Weapons Use and Testing During World War II

Biological weapons evolved as well during World War II. Countries that participated in this research were Japan, American, England, Canada, France, Italy, and Hungary. Out of these seven countries, only four produced enough research to be mentioned. Those four are America, Canada, England and Japan. These four all worked on the research pertaining to anthrax. England, Canada and America worked together during the war to produce anthrax cakes that were intended to be feed to enemy livestock, but were never used even though over five million were produced.

England was the only one of the three to produce a bomb capable of deploying anthrax. These bombs were detonated on Gruinard Island as the testing ground. This island remained infected for over fifty years until finally being decontaminated by the British government.

Japan was the only country that actually used biological and chemical weapons during the time of 1932-1945. During Japan’s invasion of China, many chemical weapons and biological weapons were used. Most notable of the chemical weapons used was nitrogen mustard. The use of biological weapons was anthrax, typhoid fever, dysentery, cholera and plague.

  They were the country doing the most advanced research at the time. Mostly impart because they were doing this research on humans. This research was confined to three facilities that are known of to this date, unit 100, unit 731 and Ei-1644. Ei-1644 was a Chinese hospital that was turned into a test lab, but Chinese seeking medical assistance did not know this. These units did some of the most unimaginable and disgusting things to human subjects to date. I will only mention those that pertain to biological and chemical testing in this article. These experiments involved infecting subjects with previously discussed toxins, poisons and chemicals in order to see what the reaction would be on the individual. While the subject was still alive, an autopsy was conducted to see what reaction the subject had to the tests. Others that had survived the test trial were killed in other horrendous manners. At least ten-thousand prisoners died in these labs. These prisoners were Chinese civilians, Chinese resistance fighters, Russian and American prisoners of war as well. Of all these prisoners, it has been told by members of the research teams that not a single person was let survive.

These tests were not limited to just laboratory settings. The researchers also did field studies in cities surrounding the labs. These included giving children chocolate bars laced with anthrax, poisoning of wells and rivers, the release of plague infected fleas over large cities and the release of bacterial clouds.

Talal Asad wrote about the use of cruel behavior and torture. In his writing, he defines the meaning of cruelty as degrading and physical treatment of those that are seen as less than human. He then proceeds to use the example of children and defeated enemies in this definition as being less than human in the eyes of the persecutor. I would say that you can draw a comparison between this theory and the Japanese thoughts of the Chinese and prisoners of war during these acts.

These studies were tests of their newly developed weapons, the uji bomb and the ha bomb. The uji bomb contained plague fleas that were released when a small charge exploded the porcelain container holding the fleas. The ha bomb was a bomb that when detonated released shrapnel that had been infected with anthrax spores.

The final number victims for these experiments number in the area of 250 thousand. This number cannot be confirmed because the majority of the research has not been released to this date. Any researchers that were captured by the American army were charged with crimes but then the charges were dropped in exchange for the information that had been documented on the human test subjects. Japan has only recently acknowledged the exisistance of these labs in 2002. Some nurses that had worked at the labs have come forward about the crimes committed as well in 2006.