
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 15, 1995                   TAG: 9508150072
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER-TRIBUNE
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, CALIF.                                 LENGTH: Medium

MILITARY FILES ALLEGE JAPAN EXPERIMENTED ON U.S. POWS

At the time, Greg Rodriquez did not think twice when Japanese doctor held a feather under his nostrils. And Frank James was only a little suspicious when his captors ordered him to take the bodies of specific fellow prisoners to a table for dissection.

But Herman Castillo knew something was terribly wrong when men in white coats stuck needles in his arms, threw him into a tiny wire cage and said, ``Now you're a carrier for life.''

Now, a half-century after Japan's surrender ended World War II, a declassified U.S. military file provides for the first time clear evidence that American intelligence agents did not pursue abundant leads indicating U.S. prisoners of war in Manchuria, China were the victims of grotesque biological warfare experiments.

The file contains at least four documents from independent intelligence sources alleging that American prisoners were used as human research subjects. While the assertions are not proof this occurred, the file clearly shows that U.S. military officers maneuvered to suppress the reports. Their unwillingness to pursue the allegations apparently stemmed from a secret deal granting the Japanese immunity from prosecution in exchange for tissue samples and reports on human experimentation that might help give the U.S. a germ warfare advantage over the Russians.

The San Jose Mercury News obtained the 137-page counterintelligence file from Rodriquez's son, Greg Jr., 46, a Washington-based researcher who recently discovered it at the National Archives. It had been declassified two years ago after a Japanese researcher's Freedom of Information Act request.

The documents focus on Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army. Western historians think the unit killed at least 200,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians with ``field tests'' of germ warfare that included giving children chocolate laced with anthrax, an infectious and often fatal disease.

Historians have documented that the Japanese routinely used Chinese, Russian and Korean POWs for medical experiments. The live test subjects were called maruta - ``logs of wood'' - and were injected with bubonic plague, typhoid, cholera, syphilis and other diseases. The prisoners were often dissected alive without anesthesia to see the effect of the diseases on their vital organs.

Many of the 1,500 American soldiers who were captured in the Philippines and taken to Mukden, Manchuria, have long suspected that they, too, were victims of germ-warfare experiments. Dozens of Mukden survivors contend that Japanese and U.S. officials have covered up the experiments on Americans for 50 years.

Both governments, however, have maintained there is no evidence to support such an allegation - a position they still hold.

Evidence to the contrary is found in a file from the military's counterintelligence corps of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers, headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Its most damning documents make it clear that U.S. intelligence agents not only covered up war crimes against Americans, but also aggressively protected the architect of those crimes, Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii.

``What fascinates me the most about this file is that there was no visible interest expressed in following up about the Americans,'' said historian Gavan Daws of Honolulu, an authority on Allied POWs in the Pacific, who was recently shown the document by the Mercury News. ``And it's clear from the file that there is a wish and a directive that nothing should be done.''

by CNB