In another experiment, doctors drilled through the skull of a live prisoner, apparently to determine if epilepsy could be treated by the removal of part of the brain. Other airmen had parts of their organs removed, with one deprived of an entire lung to gauge the effects of surgery on the respiratory system. The last kamikaze: two Japanese pilots tell how they cheated death. Inside, university doctors, at the urging of local military authorities, began the first of a series of experiments that none of the eight victims would survive.Īccording to testimony that was later used against the doctors and military personnel at the Allied War Crimes Tribunals, they injected one anaesthetised prisoner with seawater to see if it worked as a substitute for sterile saline solution. I did wonder if something unpleasant was going to happen to them, but I had no idea it was going to be that awful.” “Two soldiers stood guard outside the room. “One day two blindfolded prisoners were brought to the school in a truck and taken to the pathology lab,” Tono said. But over the following three weeks, they were to be subjected to a depraved form of pathology at the medical school – procedures to which Tono is the only surviving witness. The prisoners were led to believe they were going to receive treatment for their injuries. There, Watkins endured beatings at the hands of his interrogators, and is thought to have died in his native Virgnia in the late 1980s. The squadron’s commander, Marvin Watkins, was sent to Tokyo for questioning. The remaining airmen were rounded up by police and placed in military custody in the nearby city of Fukuoka. Toshio Tono, who now heads a maternity clinic. “The B-29s crews were hated in those days,” Tono, now the 89-year-old director of a maternity clinic in Fukuoka, told the Guardian in a recent interview. Local people, incensed by the destruction the B-29s were visiting on Japanese cities, reportedly killed another two airmen on the ground. On landing, another opened fire on villagers before turning his pistol on himself. One of the estimated 12 crew died when the cords of his parachute were sliced by another Japanese plane. The US plane, part of the 29th Bomb Group, 6th Bomb Squadron, had been returning to its base in Guam from a bombing mission against a Japanese airfield. In early May 1945, just weeks after he began his studies, a US B-29 Superfortress crashed in northern Kyushu island after being rammed by a Japanese fighter plane. As Japan prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of its wartime defeat on Saturday, speculation is building over how, or if, Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister, will apologise for his country’s wartime atrocities.Īmid widespread criticism, including in the US, that under Abe Japan is attempting to expunge the worst excesses of its past brutality from the collective memory, Tono believes his “final job” is to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in his country’s modern history.
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