Doctors in Unit 731 examined the first stages of disease on organs. A former member of Unit 731 described the process: “As soon as symptoms were observed, the prisoners were taken from their cells and into the dissection room, he was stripped and placed on a table, screaming, trying to fight back. He was strapped down, still screaming frightfully. One of the doctors stuffed a towel into his mouth, then with one quick slice of the scalpel he was opened up.” Witnesses reported that, without anesthesia, the victims let out horrible screams when the first cut was made and that the cries stopped soon thereafter.
Under the auspices of weapons development and intentional infection of diseases, prisoners were injected with various biological agents including plague, typhus, cholera, anthrax, and syphilis.
To test the effectiveness of dispersion methods for military purposes, victims were staked to crosses with their vital organs and heads protected. Various types of bombs and agents were then dropped or sprayed from specially modified planes to test the survivability of the agents and their ability to infect the subjects. Community water and food sources were also contaminated. To determine the results, mobile vivisection units were set up in the field near the infected communities.
The Imperial Japanese Army also allowed its physicians to perform vivisections on living subjects to train them in the treatment of battle wounds—procedures that are too gruesome to describe in detail.
Tests that could have real medical value were also conducted, such as finding the best method to deal with frostbite. But even here Japanese doctors chose to perform the experiments in the most merciless ways possible.
Conventional weapons tests were also carried out. Victims were tied to stakes and used to determine the operational range of flamethrowers, grenades, and various kinds of shells and bombs.
But this was hardly the extent of the tests to which the prisoners were subjected. Sheldon Harris, author of Factories of Death, stated, “They just killed people with no inherent purpose other than to see how they reacted to being killed.” People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death.
Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death or injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms. Another test consisted of taking blood samples, at least 500 cm³ (slightly more than a pint) at two- to three-day intervals. Some victims became debilitated; still, the blood drainage continued.
When the human guinea pigs could no longer serve as lab material, they were abused in various manners: injected with poison, killed for their vital organs (brains, lungs, or liver), subjected to violent surgeries (e.g., amputation and reattachment of the limbs to the opposite sides of the body, resection of the stomach to attach the esophagus to the intestines). Electrical shocks were administered until the person slowly roasted to death.
Some experiments had no medical purpose whatsoever except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners’ kidneys. The doctors of Unit 731, like the Nazi doctors at Dachau and Buchenwald, indulged any perversion they could imagine.