A Plague Upon Humanity; The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation
New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xxv, [3], 260 pages. Illustrations. Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction, ten chapters, Endnotes, and Index. Ink date on fep. Ex-library with usual library markings. DJ is in a plastic sleeve pasted to boards. Daniel Barenblatt holds degrees from Harvard and UCLA. . A fascinating overview of Japan's biological warfare provides a historical context for the gruesome experiments on humans that began in northern China in the early 1930s, linked to Japan's military expansion and fathered by scientist Shiro Ishii, who figures prominently in the book. The accounts of experiments on humans and massive germ warfare attacks against civilians—more than 400,000 Chinese died of cholera after two attacks in 1943—include the testimony of Chinese victims and witnesses as well as some Japanese. While most atrocities were committed against Chinese and Koreans, some Westerners, including American prisoners of war, were also victims. The most thoughtful portions of the book explore how such atrocities "...coldly preserve medicine's scientific devices while annihilating all its high ideals." Shameful U.S. government efforts, spearheaded by MacArthur, to protect the Japanese perpetrators from prosecution in exchange for their research, even to the extent of characterizing the only war crimes trial that prosecuted perpetrators as propaganda, are well documented. Although many of the gruesome facts have been published before, Barenblatt brings together the many contexts of how Japan's war machine came to commit biological war crimes on a massive scale, with a final death toll of 580,000. (from Pub. Weekly). More