Officially known as The Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Realizing that they would be behind the west in technology for weapons, particularly in the nuclear field, the Japanese turned to experimenting on humans to discover biological and chemical weapons to tip the balance of the war in their favor. Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army.
It was located in Harbin, in Manchuria. This was outside of mainland China and where a steady supply of Chinese prisoners could be experimented on.
It is estimated that 250,000 people (men, women and children) perished in Unit 731’s experiments. Most were Chinese, Korean and Mongolians. There were also a handful of Allied (Australian, British and American) POWs sent there, in order to make sure various diseases worked the same on Caucasians.
Biological warfare is the use of infectious agents or toxins to incapacitate or kill humans, plants or animals. As long as there has been warfare, humans have used biological warfare in various forms.
The problem with biological weapons has always been that they are indiscriminate. They kill the side employing them as much as the side they are used against. The Japanese were working on ways to target certain ethnic groups.
