Unit 731. Hal Gold

       2

       A New Type of Warfare

      The Fortress/Bacteria Factory

      The Manchurian city of Harbin was a railroad hub, and a multicultural, multiracial center of commerce, art, and music. It had been developed by the Russians just a few years before the Russo-Japanese War broke out. White Russians who had fled their country settled in Harbin. They were not well off, but at least they were not living in Russia, which seemed more important. Many of the women were beautiful, and a lack of other employment opportunities made them turn to prostitution. The racial and cultural mix made Harbin a fascinating city.

      In 1932, a few months after Japanese troops moved into Harbin, Ishii and his associates followed them. Meanwhile, the Japanese faced numerically superior Soviet troops along the Soviet-Manchurian border. An armed clash was expected, and Ishii planned to use his specialty to overcome his side’s disadvantage.

      Ishii’s operations started out in Harbin with a few hundred men, but too many eyes in an urban center were not what he and his confederates wanted. To maintain their facade of respectability, they had the Harbin facility concentrate on the socially accepted area of vaccines and other “proper” medical research. Meanwhile, for the work they wanted kept completely quiet, they soon found another place about one hundred kilometers to the south. The ever-dependable and expanding South Manchuria Railway provided a means of transporting equipment and, more important, human lab materials.

      The Japanese descended upon a poor neighborhood near an area known as Beiyinhe. There were about three hundred homes and shops there, with an extensive area of open land nearby to the south. Japanese troops came in and told the village headman that everyone had to clear out in three days; then Ishii and the army moved in. A large building of about one hundred rooms was kept for quarters while the facilities were being set up, and everything else was put to the torch. An area of five hundred square meters was designated a restricted military zone, and brick buildings started going up. The tract of land to the south was also forcibly appropriated and made into a Japanese military airport.

      Chinese laborers were recruited and driven hard at wages low even by local standards. Their Japanese overseers argued that low pay was sufficient because the cost of living was low. But with large families the general rule in China, the pay for construction workers was barely enough to feed the mouths that depended on them.

      With typical Japanese efficiency, the construction—comprising several hundred rooms—was finished in less than one year. Everything was veiled in secrecy. During construction, the laborers were under constant watch by Japanese guards, and their movements were limited. The number of laborers varied each day according to the work to be done. There were two sections to the complex. One contained offices, living quarters, dining areas, warehouses, and a parking lot. The other section contained the heart of the organization. In sequence as it concerned the victims, there were prisons, laboratories, and crematoria. There was also an area for munitions storage.

      The area containing the lab was especially restricted to Chinese workers, but at times they had to enter to carry in materials or large boxes. In such cases, precautions bordering on the comical were taken to assure that the Chinese would see nothing. They were ordered to get under huge willow baskets that covered their bodies. They would then pick up their loads, be led in by Japanese guards, deposit their burdens, and be led out of the restricted area. Then they could come out from under the baskets.

      The new facility was astounding to look at. It became known as Zhongma Fortress. (The character for fortress has also been translated as “castle,” and it does, in fact, have that meaning in Japanese. In the original Chinese, however, it is applied to an entirely walled-in fortress city, a protection against enemy attacks. This is surely what the Japanese facility must have looked like to the outsiders.) A three-meter-high wall was topped with barbed wire and high-voltage electric wire. A twenty-four-hour guard was posted outside. Twin iron doors swung open to a drawbridge. The road in front of the facility was declared off-limits to the citizens, and people had to take a long way around to get to their destinations. Trains passing by on rails about a kilometer away were required to have their shades drawn.

      One rumor told of a young boy who was curious about the Fortress and went out to have a look. His body was found the next day; he had been killed by gunfire. But even walls and guns could not keep rumors of cries of pain and anguish inside the Fortress from circulating through the village. And, by 1936, it was well known among the Chinese that this was not just a prison, but a production facility for bacteria, and a murder shop.

      Some of the information on the facilities came from a shop owner in the area who went into the buildings after the Japanese had abandoned them. He described about thirty cells, and it seems that there were always about five to six hundred prisoners being held at any given time: the facility had the capacity to hold about one thousand. Another Chinese from the region was interviewed in more recent years about the Fortress:

      We heard rumors of people having blood drawn in there, but we never went near the place. We were too afraid.

      When construction started, there were about forty houses in our village, and a lot of people were driven out. About one person from each home was taken to work on the construction. People were gathered from villages from all around here, maybe about a thousand people in all.

      The only thing we worked on were the surrounding wall and the earthen walls. The Chinese that worked on the buildings were brought in from somewhere, but we didn’t know where. After everything was finished, those people were killed.

      The prisoners wore leg shackles and sometimes hand shackles, as well. They were given a substantial diet, their staples being rice or wheat, with meat or fish and sufficient vegetables, and at times even liquor. The purpose was to keep them in a normal state of health to yield useful data when they were subjected to the tests. One of these tests consisted of taking blood samples. At least five hundred cubic centimeters was drawn at two- to three-day intervals. Some of the victims became progressively debilitated and wasted. Still, the blood drainage continued. Careful records were kept, and these experiments smack more of a combination of professional curiosity than of actual science: a simple, childlike curiosity to see how far a human being can be squeezed of blood until death occurs. Not all were drained to the point of death, though. Many were injected with poison when they could no longer serve as lab materials. Sometimes, when a subject was too weak to offer physical resistance, he would be killed with a blow to the head with an axe. The brain might then be used for further research.

      It is said that the life expectancy of prisoners at the Fortress was a maximum of one month.

      An earlier experiment tried to determine how long a person could live on just water. Food was withheld from prisoners, and some were given only ordinary water, while others received only distilled water. They were observed as they wasted away and died.

      By protecting its soldiers from disease in the Manchurian conflict thirty years earlier, Japan had earned international admiration by establishing itself as the world leader in military medicine. Now, the direction into which it channeled its medical energies had changed, and its ethics began to twist and mutate, as well. The leaders of Japan’s military during the days of the Russo-Japanese War would undoubtedly have been appalled.

End of the Fortress

      The escape from Zhongma Fortress in 1936 was a combination of clever planning, daring, and coincidental help from a natural phenomenon. It involved some forty people who had been imprisoned at Harbin, then transferred to Zhongma for blood drawing.

      A prisoner by the name of Li planned the jailbreak for the fifteenth day of the eighth month, a time of festivals marking autumn on the lunar calendar. The Japanese would be holding parties, and drinking, and prisoners would also be given special treats. Li knew that the Japanese guard would be bringing food and liquor, and after they were finished eating, the prisoners would hand the eating utensils out through the