A Concealed War Crime: U.S. Anthrax Bombings of China During the Korean War

The following article provides shocking details and facts about the U.S. biological warfare campaign undertaken during the Korean War, and in particular, the use of anthrax as a biological weapon against China, which had entered the Korean War in late 1950.

Most of what has been published in the U.S. about this in subsequent years is filled with disinformation, or mere dismissal of the charges. Those involved in covering up U.S. germ warfare counted on the suppression of evidence surrounding the covert campaign of biological weaponry attack.

It’s taken nearly 70 years, but two events have changed all that. First, there was the 2018 online release of the long-suppressed report by the International Scientific Commission (ISC), chaired by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, of a three-month investigation into the germ warfare allegations. Now, in 2020, we also have the publication of declassified CIA Communications Daily Reports from the Korean War, documenting reactions of Communist military units to biological weapons attack. The cover-up has failed.

This article is based on both original documents and secondary sources. Due to the amount of government propaganda over the years, diligent readers will have to check this documentation for themselves. In essence, this article serves as an introduction to one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.

A Schoolteacher Contracts Anthrax

Wang Shu-chih taught primary school in the town of Liu-ehr-pu in Liaotung Province, China (today usually referred to as Liaodong Province). She was 23 years old, healthy, and happily married for 5 years to her husband, who also taught at a nearby Teachers Training College.

Witnesses who knew her said she was a dedicated teacher. She and her husband also had a 2 year old daughter, said to be “so plump as to be hard to carry.”

It was early Spring 1952. The ground was still cold. Nevertheless, according to Chinese and North Korean governments, U.S. planes, part of the United Nations forces that had invaded Korea, had flown hundreds of sorties utilizing various kinds of biological attack since the beginning of the year. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as plague, cholera, encephalitis, and others.

Wang was an avid collector of insects, working after school as late as 10pm, trying to find, collect, and help destroy insects that she and others feared were being used by the American Air Force to spread disease among the population.

Little did the young mother know that she would fall victim to a horrific attack by one of the most feared biological weapons agents of all — anthrax.

Her demise was grisly. Wang had gone out the night of March 27, after a second attack on her town took place. She’d stayed out late hunting and gathering the beetles that had fallen from U.S. planes. But it wasn’t until April 6 that she felt any symptoms, namely dryness in her throat, along with hoarseness of voice. In addition, she had headache and joint pain.

Nevertheless, Wang continued to work at her school on April 6 and 7, until on the morning of April 8 she was discovered unconscious in the school’s toilet. Her fingers had turned bluish. She was having trouble breathing, and there was “white frothy discharge mixed with blood escaping from her mouth.” She died only an hour and a half after she was discovered.

An autopsy took place the next day at the Department of Pathology, National Medical College, Shenyang. The diagnosis was “Acute hemorrhagic anthrax meningitis. Bronchopneumonia of the right upper lung. Pulmonary edema.”

In addition, “In the pathological sections large Gram positive bacilli with square morphologically identical with B. anthracis were found. So the diagnosis of anthrax infection is beyond any doubt.”

Investigators were surprised that she, and others who died from the attacks in the region, had developed respiratory or inhalational anthrax, an extremely rare form of the disease. Latter day analysts in the West also found it strange, and also compelling, but we will get to that part of our story another time.

Western investigators invited to China by the Academia Sinica to investigate the germ warfare charges in 1952 (from the International Scientific Commission on bacterial warfare) gathered evidence of over 6,000 autopsies performed in the region in the years leading up to the death of Wang, and then four other victims of inhalational anthrax after March 1952 air sorties by U.S. planes.

“In all these records, there was not one single case of acute pulmonary anthrax or acute haemorrhagic anthrax meningitis,” the ISC wrote. In Wang Shu-chih’s home district, “with a total population of 61,372 persons in 14,029 families no case of anthrax has ever been discovered in the past 10 years.”

The investigators did note, “Everyone in and around the school was a bit scared at these events,” adding, “The Commission did not close this session without offering its deepest sympathy to the bereaved.”

According to testimony from her landlady — identified by investigators only as Mrs. Liu, “an old lady of nearly sixty” — Wang usually wore the mask and gloves that insect collectors were mandated to wear. They weren’t supposed to touch any insects directly, but use “twigs with sticky ends” to move them or pick them up.

Yet, the old landlady thought Wang “was young and impetuous.” She wasn’t sure Wang always took the proper safety precautions.

In all, eleven witnesses were interviewed by the full ISC commission in the matter of Wang’s death. There may have been other witnesses interviewed by individual ISC members as well.

Using Beetles to Deliver Anthrax Exposure

The attacks on the Liu-ehr-pu area in Liaotung first took place on March 20. Lu Li-tsun, a 42 year old farmer in the area, heard planes overhead around 6pm in the early evening and went outside to try and see them. The sun had set. There was no wind.

Lu couldn’t see the planes. His sister-in-law, who followed him outside, told investigators she didn’t hear or see anything. If these witnesses to the attack had been coached in fraudulent narrative, as later American critics maintained, why would some say they couldn’t see anything, or in one case, hear anything?(3)

But Jen Wan-k’u, a 38 year old sergeant in the militia on his way out to patrol, did see the airplanes, which were later identified by China’s Air Observer Corps as two U.S. F-86 fighter jets. Jen also saw something else very suspicious. He told investigators he watched as an object approximately “the size and shape of a large thermos flask, red in colour” fall from the planes. “As it fell, it turned flame-red or orange” as it exploded with a “puff” about 9 to 12 meters above the ground, and 3 to 4 meters above the rooftops of buildings some 160 yards from where he stood.

There was only a “very slight” sound of explosion. Jen smelled “a disagreeable burning smell as if of burning animal skin, or horn (or feathers).” At least two other independent witnesses also saw the canister fall and explode.

When Jen and some other witnesses reached the area under the explosion, they saw a “mass of insects… underneath where the container had seemed to fall.”

One of the other witnesses, was a 15 year old schoolboy, Wang Hua-ming, who was lying on his k’ang bed. He saw the explosion, but when he first went to investigate outside saw nothing. But, as he told investigators, “after he lit the lamp in the house, he noticed insects thickly gathered on the exterior of the window-panes. They were as big as a large rice-grain, and had a ‘hard shell’ and two long feelers. Remembering what his schoolmaster had said about bacterial warfare, he assembled the family and neighbours, who collected as many as possible of the insects, using masks or handkerchiefs tied over the mouth.”

The insects gathered in the Liu-ehr-pu attack were all beetles, later identified as the species Ptinus fur, which were known to infest stored grains and other dried foods, but also appear in libraries, where they eat paper materials. Rarely were they known to appear in such numbers outside of their normal habitat of infestation.

When the beetles that weren’t immediately destroyed were turned over to Chinese bacteriologists, they found them to be contaminated with anthrax, particularly on the insect’s bristles.

Back at the Pathological Laboratories of the National Medical College in Shenyang (Mukden), entomology professor Lu Pao-ling remarked that “the elytra of this beetle were exceptionally abundantly covered with chitinous bristles, which on breaking off could readily enter human respiratory passages, where they would act as inoculation needles.”(4)

Other Cases of Reported U.S. Anthrax Attacks

A few weeks before the attack on Liu-ehr-pu, at least two men had died of respiratory anthrax in Shenyang and in Ssuping (modern day, Siping, in Jilin province, west of the border with North Korea). One of these was a middle-aged railway foreman, who had helped collect flies in an area near the Man Ching Station. The other man was a 47 year old tricycle-rickshaw driver in Shenyang.

On March 16, 1952, 55-year-old Chü Chan-yun, a stout railway foreman, was out with fellow railwaymen Li Tso-hsiang and Liu Chung-ko catching and killing flies in an area north of the Man Ching Station in Ssu-ping City. U.S. planes had been seen in the area a few days earlier.

Liu Chung-kuo had seen quantities of flies on and beside the railway line when walking with his foreman Chü. As releated in the report of the International Scientific Commission, both of them “thought that it was very odd to find so many flies in such cold weather.” Liu returned to the train station to report the discovery, while “Chü remained and started to collect the flies, picking them up with his bare hands.”

That was likely a fatal mistake. In any case, when Liu returned, he, Chü and others gathered the flies with “forceps, improvised chopsticks, and masks,” and “poured petrol on straw and burnt all the flies up.” Despite the fact that Chü had been the only one to gather the insects bare-handed, and also didn’t wear a mask himself, a sanitary official sprayed him with insecticide and told him “it was all right for him to go home.”

Three days later, on March 19, “Chü Chan-yun became ill with fever, headache and aching in the limbs. On March 21 he was admitted to the Railway Hospital when he also developed cough, nausea, vomiting and insomnia, mental confusion and rigidity of neck.”

A day later, Chü died. The medical report concluded, “Cough, leucocytosis and the finding of large Gram positive bacilli in the sputum clearly point to anthrax infection of the respiratory tract.”

Then there is the case of 47-year-old Wang Tze-pin, a single male, bicycle-rickshaw driver in Shenyang. His sister-in-law told ISC investigators how one day, Wang took a fare out to a suburb of the city. There, he got caught up in the insect-catching activity. She couldn’t say whether he wore a mask or not, or whether he used any other precautions.

Like the other anthrax victims in northeast China at this time, Wang had no history of the typical environmental exposures to anthrax. He and all the others had no history of contact with diseased farm animals, no contact with furs or leather, no history of use of a new tooth-brush or shaving brush (which might have been infected with contaminated animal hair bristles), no neighbors who had suffered anthrax, or contact with manure. Nevertheless, on March 20, not long after U.S. planes had been observed over the Shenyang area, Wang developed a “general malaise.”

The ISC report continues: “Next day he was confined to bed. On April 22 aching in legs, general weakness, upper abdominal discomfort, nausea and headache were felt. He was slightly better in the morning of April 23 but got worse by the afternoon. Until 6 a.m. April 24 he was still conscious and could move about. However since then he sank progressively into coma with restlessness. Neck was rigid. Kernig’s sign was positive. Death occurred at 9 a.m. April 25. Autopsy was done by Prof. Chu Feng-ch’un and assistant Wang Hung-lieh of the National Medical College with the diagnoses of hemorrhagic anthrax meningitis, anthrax bronchopneumonia of right lower lobe, peribronchitis, interlobular cellulitis, suppurative hemorrhagic anthrax lymphadenitis of hilum glands, pulmonary oedema, pleural effusion, pericardial effusion and multiple punctate necrosis and ulceration of intestinal mucosa due to anthrax infection. (No enlargement of mesenteric lymph glands.) The pathological diagnosis was confirmed by Professors Wu Tsai-tung and Li Pei-lin. Anthrax bacilli were isolated from the brain tissue, heart blood and spleen by bacteriologists Chu Chi-ming and Liu Shih-ming and confirmed by bacteriologists Hsin Chun and Cheng Keng.”

Unit 731

None of those who died from inhalation anthrax in spring 1952 worked in occupations where anthrax exposure was known to occur. In fact, anthrax cases were quite rare in the region, in either animal or man.

The region had seen biological attack before, namely by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii’s Unit 731 and associated bacterial warfare units during the war between Japan and China. Imperial Japan’s use of biological weapons — including anthrax — and the terminal experiments used on prisoners in order to perfect these weapons, was a closely held secret by the Japanese and U.S. governments for decades after World War II ended. Reports contemporaneous with this period of the Korean War had Ishii and his men working with the Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and even coming to Korea.(1)

Secret or not in the West, the Unit 731 biological warfare experiments and attacks were well-known in the regions of China that had suffered such attacks. In late 1949, the Soviet Union put some key members of Ishii’s team on trial in the city of Khabarovsk in northern Manchuria. Despite releasing an English version of some of the trial proceedings, authorities in the West denounced the Kharbarovsk proceedings as false propaganda. Today, we know that the charges of war crimes by Unit 731 were all too true.

Back in the early 1940s, the United States military had gotten wind of the Unit 731 biological warfare actions. By August 1943, according to research recently published in a new book by Nicholson Baker, Ft. Detrick personnel had initiated a “study of certain arthropods as potential BW agents for the destruction of food crops.” In 1950, two years before the attack that felled Wang, U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories were working on “Insect Dissemination of BW Agents.”(2)

While Wang and the others may or may not have known about Unit 731, they very likely knew that on February 22 the front page of China’s People’s Daily had carried news about biological warfare by the U.S. Only the day before, secretly, Chinese Premier Mao Zedong had sent a telegram to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, informing him that the U.S. appeared to be using biological weaponry.

MacArthur’s Doctor Rehabilitates Unit 731

This was not the first time there were charges of U.S. use of biological weapons. On April 9, 1951, the U.S. magazine Newsweek reported on “the secret mission of a Navy epidemic-control laboratory ship to Wonson Harbor on the east coast of North Korea.” The article asserted that U.S. Navy landing parties were seizing “Chinese Reds” from “tiny islands of the harbor” and taking them back to the laboratory ship to be tested for bubonic plague. The ship was described as “an infantry landing vessel with a laboratory installed, complete with mice and rabbits.” The headline for the article was “Bubonic Plague Ship.”

[ADDENDUM, October 10, 2021] The Navy lab ship was commanded by Brigadier General Crawford F. Sams. Sams admitted he had undertaken a secret mission to kidnap a North Korean patient from a hospital to test for smallpox, a kidnapping he claimed never came off.

According to Japanese historian Takemae Eiji’s highly regarded book, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (2002, Continuum, New York: NY), Sams was General MacArthur’s head of the Public Health & Welfare Section (PH&W) of GHQ/SCAP (allied occupation in Japan). He was loyal to MacArthur and retired after MacArthur was removed from command on April 11, 1951.

Eiji wrote: “In late 1946 or early 1947, Sams directed the Welfare Ministry to establish the National Institute of Health (NIH) partly in order to oversee vaccine production…. A key role in the establishment of the NIH was played by its first Deputy Director Kojima Saburō, an Ishii collaborator, who recruited former Unit 731 personnel for the new Institute. Between 1947 and 1983, seven of the eight NIH directors and six of eight vice directors either were members of the Ishii network or had assisted in in some way during the war. Their grisly medical experiments had made these men leaders in the field fo immunology, and it was to them that Sams and his staff turned to supervise the production of biologicals.

“Sams and others in PH&W not only knew of these men’s sordid pasts but actively solicited their cooperation to further PH&W goals…. PH&W and the Far East Command’s Medical Section (which replaced PH&W in mid-1951) commissioned research from former Ishii scientists in the NIH on the tropical tsutsugamushi mite and typhus, areas where Japanese expertise was unrivaled. These projects were coordinated through the US Army’s 406 Medical Laboratory set up in 1946…. When haemorrhagic fever broke out in Korea in April 1951 and again in May and June of 1952, the 406 Medical Laboratory sought help from Ishii stalwart Kasahara Shirō, an expert from Manchurian days.” (pp. 425–426)

Eiji also describes how in November 1946, Sams undertook experiments on prisoners regarding the spread of typhus. These “ medical trials reportedly replicated those conducted by Kitano Masaji on Chinese prisoners awaiting execution in wartime Manchuria, some of which had involved vivisections. The PH&W tests were benign compared to the murderous work of Ishii and Kitano, but they illustrate once again the readiness with which American authorities turned for help to those involved in Japan’s bio-war programme. Sams and his staff became, in effect, co-conspirators after the fact in those wartime crimes.” (pp. 645–646)

According to researcher Neil O’Brien, “As early as January, 1951, the front page of the North China Daily News… noted that germ weapons production in Japan had been stepped up by SCAP, which had built a BW facility in the mountains north of Tokyo that was in constant touch with Camp Detrick, Maryland. Reportedly, the Americans had placed the Japanese facility under the direction of Ishii Shiro, who had led Unit 731 in China during World War II, and production had been ‘intensified to an unprecedented degree.’” (3)

Top Secret Communications Intelligence Intercepts

Heretofore highly secret electronic communications intercepts, only released by the CIA ten years ago, reveal that the claims of biological warfare were not simply a propaganda show, as generations of Americans have been told by Western historians and commentators. On March 3, 1952 one U.S. intercept described an unidentified Chinese communist unit reporting on February 26 about “a real flood of bacteria and germs scattered from a plane by the enemy,” and asking for a supply of DDT as quickly as possible.

While the U.S. intelligence analyst, describing the Chinese unit, cynically relegated the report to “‘proof’… to support a propaganda campaign,” in fact there is no evidence that such individual reports were used as propaganda. Since Chinese military units cannot know that their reports were being successfully intercepted by U.S. signals intelligence, there is no reason not to believe these were authentic reports from the field. In fact, there were many more such reports made at this time, corroborating the fact the Chinese and North Korean militaries were experiencing attack by biological weapons.

These communications intelligence reports are described in more detail in another article, but consider, as a second example, one intercept from an unidentified North Korean regiment division, which reported on March 30, only a week before schoolteacher Wang Shu-chih showed symptoms of anthrax, “the enemy is actively dropping bacterial weapons in general now.” The same U.S. SIGINT report also described a Chinese artillery division as forming a five-man “‘health program’ committee ‘in an attempt to check the spread of bacteria.”

During the presidential debate of Democratic candidates for President of the United States, a number of politicians said they felt China was the biggest threat to U.S. national security.

Meanwhile, a real trade war is underway with China, initiated by President Donald Trump, who has tweeted numerous times that China has been unfair to the United States, costing the latter billions of dollars.

The bellicose stance towards China is mirrored by military moves by both sides in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits. China is also a key ally of North Korea, with whom the U.S. remains in a technical state of war since the early 1950s.

Despite the heightened relevance of U.S.-China history, very few Americans even know that U.S. and Chinese troops faced off during the Korean War. Indeed, the Korean War often has been labeled the “Forgotten War.”

This article has described a particularly gruesome episode of that war pertaining to United States use of biological weapons during that war. In particular, we examined three instances of use of anthrax as a biological weapon against the Chinese, as documented by the 1952 report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (ISC).

The ISC was headed by famed British biochemist and embryologist Joseph Needham, who later went on to write an acclaimed history of scientific practice in China over the centuries. The documents embedded at the end of this article are excerpted from the 1952 ISC report, of which he was the prime author.

The lobby pushing the idea of a massive conspiracy by China-North Korea-USSR is closely associated with the U.S.-financed Woodrow Wilson Center and its Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). By now, an entire generation of historians and journalists have accepted their “proof” of a BW “hoax,” while not producing even one in-depth analysis of the documents from which the “hoax” theory supposedly derives.

One CWIHP report describes a purported memoir from a Chinese military doctor, who claims that there was not one death from any supposed biological warfare attack, which he labeled a “false alarm.”(5) Yet there is plenty of evidence of deaths. The documents upon which this article is based show that there indeed were deaths from U.S. biological weapons attack. (You can read and download the pertinent documents at the end of this article.)

This establishment-financed and supported Cold War lobby has relied on the fact that until recently, information about what really occurred has been too difficult to obtain for average Americans. Indeed, it took me some years to track down the documents upon which this article is based, and which I reproduce here for the world to read and analyze for themselves.

Hopefully we can learn something from the deaths of Wang Shu-chih, Chü Chan-yun, Wang Tze-pin, and others, and help avert another disastrous war, one which surely will involve weapons of mass destruction, biologically or chemically based, nuclear-armed, or some combination of them all.

Endnotes

(1) According to purported Chinese document, published by Cold War scholar Milton Leitenberg, a February 21, 1952 letter from Mao to Stalin read, in part, “Three of the five prominent Japanese war criminals involved in bacteriological warfare who were mentioned in the Soviet Government’s note of 1 February 1950 — namely, Ishii Shiro, Wakamatsu Yujiro and Kitano Masajo — are currently in Korea. They took with them all the equipment necessary to conduct bacteriological warfare, including bacilli carriers of cholera and plague as well as gases that act to destroy human blood, and also a variety of equipment to disseminate the bacilli carriers.”

The letter was translated by Mark Kramer, Director, Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, and published with a series of documents that in their main are supposed to document an alleged hoax by Soviet, Chinese and North Korean officials to falsely portray the U.S. as undertaking biological warfare. There is a long literature at this point on this subject. I refer readers to comments in response to Leitenberg and others’ fraud assertions made at various points in the main section of the Medium.com article above, and to the work of Thomas Powell, for example, see “Korean War Biological Warfare Update,” Socialism and Democracy, 2017, Vol. 31, №3, pp. 123–137.

(2) Nicholson Baker, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, Penguin Random House, 2020, p. 217. See also my review of Baker’s book.

(3) O’Brien’s research was published in his biography of U.S. reporter and publisher John William Powell, American Editor in Early Revolutionary China (Routledge, 2014). Powell, his wife, and an associate were famously charged for sedition in the mid-1950s for publishing articles in their journal China Monthly about the North Korean/Chinese charges of biological warfare. The charges were dropped in the early years of the John F. Kennedy administration.

(4) The ISC report gave detailed biographies regarding the bona fides of the scientists who they quoted in the report. Entomologist Lu Pao-ling, for instance, was described as “Assistant Professor of Entomology, Peking College of Agriculture.” He received his B.S. at B.S., Soochow University in 1938, and his M.S. at Tsing Hua University in 1941. He had previously served as Lecturer of Entomology, Peking University, College of Agriculture (1946–1949), and Lecturer of Entomology, Peking College of Agriculture (1949–52). He was said to have published nine papers on entomology, though none of these was listed. But an internet search shows that other references to a Luh Pao-ling, also an entomologist, can be found in scattered scholarly works up into the 1980s. Here’s one such example.

(5) The purported Wu Zhili “memoir” has been subjected to critical analysis recently in the article by Thomas Powell, “On the Biological Warfare ‘Hoax’ Thesis,” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 32, №1, March 2018, URL: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/76/biological-warfare-%E2%80%9Choax%E2%80%9D-thesis (accessed October 6, 2020)