Early Experimentation: The Legacy of WWII
- John Zek
- May 19
- 8 min read
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
-Winston Churchill, 1940: The Finest Hour
World War Two Death Camp Experiments
The coming of WWII changed the nature of human testing and warfare forever. Within the vast system of concentration camps Nazi doctors and scientists were uninhibited from ethics and morals, given free rein to test on prisoners, comprising of all manner of people, men, women, children and disabled. For years they practiced abhorrent and ghoulish ‘experiments’, much like the Japanese 9000 kilometres away who set up the infamous Unit 731 in the Chinese city of Harbin to test BCW.
In Nazi Germany the earliest experiments were aimed at how more efficiently exterminate their opponents, they tested mobile gas chambers and other forms of mass murder[1]. Other experiments cruelly tested weapons and military equipment on live human subjects. Decades after WWII data gathered in these experiments are still used in research, for example data gained from hypothermia experiments in which prisoners remained submerged in freezing water until death. There is considerable debate on using ‘ethically tainted’ data and most experiments conducted in the camps were scientifically unsound. [i]
Other experiments were little more than torture dressed in scientific language. Dr. Mengele, known as ‘Angel of Death’, was one such doctor. His preference was twins as he could infect one twin with a virus or bacteria and when that twin died could kill the other as a ‘control’. Alongside these BW tests he performed bizarre experiments such as sewing a pair of gypsy twins together to ‘make Siamese twins’ another he tried to transfuse blood to “make boys into girls and girls into boys.’[ii] What Annie Jacobsen labels: “bad science for bad ends.”[iii]
The Japanese Unit 731 experiments similarly were a psychotic mixture of practical and sadistic, the Japanese BW capabilities were the most sophisticated at the time and by the early 40s they had stores of different diseases such as the plague, botulism, cholera, typhoid, and smallpox. The tests were as shocking as those in Auschwitz, one common test was the infection with a disease such as cholera, once the disease was at a stage the doctors wanted to observe the prisoner was held down and vivisected alive, often with no anaesthetic as they believed it might interfere with the pathogen response. [iv]
On the other hand, these experiments included brutal sadism, as one visiting Japanese medical student when interviewed years later chillingly noted:
“Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity: ‘What would happen if we did such and such?’ What medical purpose was served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play.” [v]
By 1942 the Japanese army conducted the largest BW campaigns in history, aimed at disrupting supply lines of Chinese troops and exterminating the Chinese civilians. As one Japanese Captain wrote, in August they:
“Spread fleas and rats on Shangrao, Guangfeng [county] they carry plague germs already. Put the dry plague bacteria on rices at Yushan. At Jiangshan, either put cholera bacteria into the well, or on foods, or injected into fruits”.[vi]
In early May in the town of Baoshan they inflicted a cruel new method of civilian slaughter, forty-four flying bombers dropped a combination of explosive, incendiary and ceramic-shelled germ bombs. The aim was to infect the population and destroy their homes, resulting in infected refugees scattering to new regions bringing contaminated food, clothes, and items. [vii]
The death toll from these co-ordinated outbreaks is staggering, the 2002 Internation Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare claims a minimum of 580,000 deaths. Epidemics of cholera from BW in Yunnan killed 210,000, in Shangdon 200,000, in Peking, Nanking, Changchun and Canton 150,000 died from various BW attacks. 20,000 are estimated to have been killed in the assorted army field hospitals and death camps around the country. Even after the defeat of the Japanese outbreaks of typhoid, plague and cholera were occurring in regions that previously suffered attacks up until 1948. Baranblatt claims rats and mice continue to test positive for antibodies of the plague bacillus spread by Unit 731 and 1644. [viii]
Allied CW Tests
The Allies were not above tests involving human experiments either, but they were nowhere near as horrifying using enlisted personnel for their tests[2]. Testing programs were extraordinarily secret, and it was decades after WWII before veterans came forward with accounts of testing.
The British were some of the most enthusiastic to test CW, possibly for good reason; they have one of the oldest BCW facilities, the infamous Porton Down, hidden away on 7,000 acres of beautiful Wiltshire countryside. From 1916 through to 1989 scientists at Porten Down experimented on an estimated 20,000 human subjects (all within the Defence forces), there is little evidence informed consent was provided to many of these test subjects.[ix]
Prior to WWII, the largest trial conducted by Porton Down, was the Rawalpindi [3] experiments on Britons and Indians in which over the course of a decade around 500 ‘volunteers’ were placed in gas chambers with mustard gas with virtually no protection: a respirator and a khaki uniform. Porton scientists wanted to find out if mustard gas inflicted greater damage on Indian skin compared with British skin, the results were many soldiers ended up in hospital with severe burns. Similar race-based science was conducted on thousands[4] of ‘volunteers’ in Panama due to the similarities in climate to the Pacific, these troops were Black, Puerto Rican and Asian-American. Rollins Edwards, a veteran of the tests recalls the experience of a mustard and lewisite gas test:
"It felt like you were on fire… Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally they opened the door and let us out, and the guys were just, they were in bad shape."[x]
The fierce resistance the Japanese put up in the defence of Pacific islands shocked the U.S defence officials. The battle of Betio Island in late 1943 saw nearly 4690 Japanese fight to the death with only 17 captured. U.S fatalities were equally high: 3000 dead and some 1000 wounded. If the Japanese fought so hard for a tiny rock in the Pacific what would happen when the Japanese home islands were under attack? It was here that one general argued the use of CW might have lowered allied fatalities, the sprawling bunker facilities were ideal for gas dispersion.
From this came a battery of tests on Allied soldiers, many of whom were coloured. Susan Smith, a medical historian suggests the U.S military were looking for the "ideal chemical soldier", if Black, Asian or Latinos proved more resistant to gas than they could be sent ahead of whites. [xi]The British tested across the Commonwealth reminding countries of their ‘Imperial responsibility’; Australia was of particular focus for several reasons. The military wanted to assess the effects of mustard gas in tropical conditions and Far North Queensland provided an ideal location along with the attitude of volunteers, according to one British officer Australian soldiers were ‘keen as mustard’.
Australian soldiers ability and morale were highly regarded by the U.S and they believed were comparable in ferocity to their enemy the Japanese. One U.S observer noted:
“It is important to keep in mind the keen individual pride in physical prowess inbred in each Australian…. The men who are classed as casualties here are truly casualties”.[xii]
Some accounts of mustard gas tests display this devotion to duty and lack of self-preservation: in December 1944 one test involved men marching through bombed section of jungle with mustard gas, John Henry Roche a volunteer slipped and fell into a pool of congealed mustard gas and in his words:
"I was a bit concerned. I told them I slipped and they told me not to worry but to leave my clothes on. The next day I came up in like a bad sunburn. They still kept putting me on route marches. The idea was to keep going for as long as possible."[xiii]
He wore his khaki uniform soaked in mustard gas the whole week during the test and continued to march through the jungle until he could no longer walk. Despite his severe injuries he spent only two weeks in hospital and when he returned to his unit he volunteered for more trials.[xiv]
The tests revealed that the tropical environment caused the effect of mustard gas to be four times more powerful than in temperate zones. Ultimately and thankfully the Allies decided not to use CW in warfare against the Japanese, despite stockpiling more than a million tonnes in Australia. There were multiple reasons it was not used: the general negative attitude for using CW, the effectiveness in certain conditions and the belief the Japanese might retaliate with their own CW. Last, logistics and storage issues were multiplied in humid conditions, humidity quickly corroded shells and became a strain on supplies. [xv]
Allied test subjects faced ongoing issues from their exposure to CW: respiratory problems such as emphysema, rashes that never healed, nervous conditions and cancers. Many were not compensated for their effort either as they did not serve in overseas fighting. Often members of the public perceived them as not doing enough for the war effort as they were sworn to secrecy which meant they could not publicly discuss what happened until decades later. [xvi]
[1] One of them, Walter Rauff, later fled to Latin America and became an advisor to the Chilean government, see Chapter 4.
[2] Which can be argued as non-consensual.
[3] Situated in present day Pakistan.
[4] There are no total estimates of those tested in the U.S during wartime, several different test sites recorded numbers, Edgewood Arsenal tested 1,002 soldiers. Navy Research in Washington recorded tests on 1,931 servicemen. One report state up to 60,000 were tested upon by the Navy. (From Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, page 32.)
[i] Berger, Robert L. 1990. “Nazi Science — the Dachau Hypothermia Experiments.” New England Journal of Medicine 322 (20): 1435–40. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm199005173222006.
[ii] Mozes-Kor, E. The Mengele Twins and Human Experimentation: A Personal Account. In: Annas, G.J. & Grodin, M.A., eds., The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation, Oxford University Press, NY, 1992. page 4-5
[iii] Jacobsen, Annie. 2015. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2014. page 43
[iv] Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation. New York: HarperCollins 2004. pages 44-45
[v] Yonezo, Nakagawa. Professor emeritus at Osaka University. In: Gold, Hal. Japan’s Wartime Human Experimentation Program: Unit 731 Testimony. New York: Tuttle Publishing, 1996. p. 222.
[vi] Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare Operation. New York: HarperCollins 2004. page 158.
[vii] Ibid, page 165-166
[viii] Ibid, 173-175
[ix] Evans, Rob. “Military Scientists Tested Mustard Gas on Indians.” The Guardian, September 4, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/01/india.military.
[x] Dickerson, Caitlin. “Secret World War II Chemical Experiments Tested Troops by Race.” NPR, June 22, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/06/22/415194765/u-s-troops-tested-by-race-in-secret-world-war-ii-chemical-experiments.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Freeman, Karen. “The Unfought Chemical War.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 47, no. 10 (December 1, 1991): 30–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.1991.11460053. page 32
[xiii] Young, Ned. The Mustard Gas Men. Virtual War Memorial, n.d. https://vwma.org.au/collections/home-page-stories/the-mustard-gas-men. and Dunn, P. ARTILLERY PRACTICE AND CHEMICAL WARFARE TRIALS AT MISSION BEACH IN FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND IN AUSTRALIA DURING WWII. Australia at War. 2015. https://www.ozatwar.com/chemicalwarfare/missionbeachcw.htm
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Siossian, Emma. “More Families of Servicemen Involved in Top-secret WWII Australian Mustard Gas Trials and Storage Speak Out.” ABC News, March 5, 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-06/world-war-two-secret-mustard-gas-trials-families-speak-out/13168834.
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