Unit 731, otherwise known as Manshu Detachment 731 or Kamo Detachment was a covert unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that conducted gruesome biological and chemical experiments on live test subjects during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) and World War II.
Although Unit 731 started as a normal public health agency that investigated the effects of disease and injury on the fighting ability of the military, it gradually evolved into something sinister as this excerpt explains: "Unit 731 eventually grew into an assembly line for weaponized diseases that, if fully deployed, could have killed everyone on Earth several times over. All this “progress” was, of course, built on the limitless suffering of human prisoners, who were held as test subjects and walking disease incubators until Unit 731 disbanded at the end of the war."
The goal of Unit 731 was to develop weapons of mass destruction to be used against the Chinese as well as the United States as this excerpt explains: "It is becoming evident that the Japanese officers in charge of the program hoped to use their weapons against the United States. They proposed using balloon bombs to carry disease to America, and they had a plan in the summer of 1945 to use kamikaze pilots to dump plague-infected fleas on San Diego."
The live test subjects referred to internally as "logs," were mostly Chinese prisoners including children and pregnant mothers.
According to reports, some of the horrific experiments carried out disease injections, controlled dehydration, hypobaric chamber experiments, biological weapons testing, vivisection, amputation, and weapons testing.
Although an accurate number of the people killed as a result of their "field testing" is not available, it is well known that as part of their germ warfare testing, clay bomb casings each packed with 30,000 fleas carrying the plague bacillus were dropped over the Chinese village of Quzhou on October 4, 1940. An estimated 2,000 people died as a result, not including the additional 1,000 in a nearby village who were also infected. Another 6000 people in the area were killed in anthrax attacks.
Following the end of the war, those who perpetuated these atrocities largely returned to civilian life in Japan and some even became esteemed faculty members.
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