In Manchuria (34 page)

In his prison diary, Brigadier General W. E. Brougher wrote: “Happy time for Prisoners of War—the end to our
3
½ yrs of misery!” In one of his last entries from the camp, on August
18
, he noted: “Getting too much to eat! Great danger of prisoners doing themselves harm by overeating after
3
yrs of starvation.” A jerky black-and-white newsreel showed the liberated prisoners laughing, playing guitar, and making the Japanese fill in their foxholes to make a baseball diamond.

For Hal Leith, however, the game was far from over. Missing from the nearly
1
,
500
freed men were
34
of the highest-ranking officers, including generals Percival and Wainwright, and the governor of the Dutch East Indies. Leith learned that for the past year the men had been sequestered at an unheated, run-down barracks in a town named Xi'an (present-day Liaoyuan). Communications with the camp had been cut off since the Soviet advance and Japanese surrender, air services were grounded, and road travel was unsafe.

With another Cardinal soldier and a Japanese interpreter, Leith set out by train, unarmed. On the ride north, he met a family of White Russians standing on a station platform, wondering where to flee next now that the Red Army had arrived. At the Xi'an camp, the Japanese commander greeted Leith in English; he was a graduate of Oregon State. All the prisoners, he said, were alive.

General Wainwright, gaunt and wearing threadbare clothes, looked like a scarecrow. “He was puzzled at being liberated by the OSS, an arm of service he had never seen,” Leith said, laughing.

Three days later the convoy arrived in Shenyang at
12
:
30
in the morning to find their hotel filled with drunken Red Army soldiers. Many had been under siege at Stalingrad before shipping to Manchuria. A lieutenant told Leith he had been demoted for killing German prisoners of war. In wartime, soldiers became a nation's diplomats, he said, adding, “There are good diplomats and bad diplomats.”

A Cardinal report described a binge of Soviet raping and looting across Manchuria, “payback” for Japan's defeat of Russia forty years before. Revenge extended to the erstwhile Manchukuoans: “Roving Chinese mobs beating and killing Japanese civilians indiscriminately.”

Leith witnessed a crowd attack a twelve-year-old Japanese boy, which he stopped by berating the crowd for behaving like their former occupiers. “Some of the Chinese took my side,” he wrote in his diary. “And some commented on my good Chinese accent.” After he carried the boy to a hospital, Leith returned to break up the mob, seizing their clubs while keeping his pistol holstered. His language ability helped: “The people in the mob again all commented on my being an American and on my good Chinese accent. A number of Chinese sided with me and bawled out the other misbehaving Chinese.”

There were screams at night, and machine-gun fire, and the smell of smoke from torched Japanese homes and businesses. Soviet forces, an OSS officer reported, began shipping home “(a) all motor vehicles—even broken ones; (b) all gasoline; (c) small machinery and motors; (d) lumber.” The Russians even took vaccine cultures, leaving locals defenseless against outbreaks of typhus and pneumonia.

Twelve days after its launch, news of Operation Cardinal reached America. Leith's mother, living in San Francisco, received a phone call from a local reporter asking for her thoughts on the courageous actions of Staff Sergeant Harold Leith. “That can't be my son,” she replied. “He doesn't do things like that.”

In Los Angeles, Leith's wife, Helen, read the wire story and said aloud: “That's my Hal.”

In October
1945
the Soviets offered Leith a choice: leave immediately or get a free trip to Siberia. William Donovan, the head of the OSS, seethed, “When did Manchuria become part of Russia?” In fact, the Soviets would remain in the railway zone and Port Arthur until
1955
. Leith departed but reappeared in Manchuria soon after. Code-named Mr. Williams, he was America's first intelligence agent in China's northeast. After a year in the field, the Communists expelled him for good in
1946
. I met him at his home in Golden, Colorado.

With ex-POWs, he had returned to the former camp twice—in
1989
and
2003
—to publicize the Shenyang city government's announcement of a museum at the prison site. On my visit I avoided the guard dog by sliding a dead bolt open and sneaking through a side door. The former barracks hall was garlanded with exposed wiring and pocked with standing puddles. A purple banner said:
PRESS CONFERENCE OF VETERANS REVISITING SHENYANG WW
II ALLIED POW CAMP
. The words faced rows of orange plastic chairs occupied by piles of dust.

After the war, the camp's factory was repurposed into an electrical plant and surrounded by worker's housing blocks. Now they were being replaced by high-rises whose billboards promised, in English,
LOW DENSITY OF THE HONEY LIFE
. Across a ten-lane expressway loomed a new mall anchored by a Pizza Hut.

In Chinese and English, a sign posted outside the camp told nothing of Operation Cardinal, but informed that “only the help of kind-hearted Chinese fellow-workers provided any comfort” to the prisoners. It concluded that the camp “deeply illustrates one aspect of Japanese fascism.”

The English translation of the conclusion had been sanded over, however. Since its groundbreaking a decade before, the museum project started and stopped from disagreements over what it would show, what lessons it would teach, what patriotic education really entailed. Construction was ongoing.

 

After I visited the tombs of Japanese settlers in Fangzheng, a Japanese newspaper interviewed a sixty-two-year-old retired elementary school teacher who the local government had commissioned to write the county's war history. Standing on the Songhua River docks where Japanese mothers had placed their children onshore, then drowned themselves, the teacher told the reporter, “What occurred here reflects the essence of civilian victims of war. Preserving this place can only help the healthy development of Sino-Japanese relations.”

He had sought permission to post a plaque retelling the events here and at a nearby tributary, which women had attempted to cross by clinging to torn and knotted kimonos before being swept away. Officials said: “In present circumstances, the plaques are impossible to approve.” But, the teacher noted optimistically, “circumstances change.”

The Japanese invasion caused
14
to
20
million Chinese deaths, and while Japanese officials continued to pay respects at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine—where the nation's honored dead included convicted war criminals—some former Japanese soldiers returned to China to record oral histories of their wartime actions. Others even took the stand. In a Tokyo courtroom in
2002
, a veteran soldier testified in a lawsuit brought by the families of
180
Chinese who had been killed by a secret Japanese army unit in Manchuria. For the first time a Japanese court found that its Imperial Army had, in fact, conducted germ warfare in China. Under international law, the victims were not entitled to compensation, but the verdict ended a half century of official denials.

“Forgetting history means betrayal,” reads the display at the Japanese Invading Army Unit
731
Museum. “The fascistic guilt of Unit
731
brooks no denial.” Japan's biggest bacterial warfare research unit experimented on live Chinese, Russian, Mongolian, and Korean prisoners in a suburb fifteen miles south of central Harbin. Here, Japanese doctors subjected
maruta
—logs, as they referred to the prisoners—to hypothermia, amputation, bullet wounds, and a range of disease and bacteria, noting at which level of suffering a person finally expired.

The museum stood in what remained of the base's seventy-six buildings—covering four square miles—after retreating Japanese had torched all they could. Inside the dimly lit halls, visitors pace past gas masks, bone saws, and viscera hangars. Outside, signs mark the footprint of the Cave for Manufacturing Germ Shell Cases, the Frostbite Laboratory, and the Nursery of Yellow Rats. Children's shouting and laughter carries over the high brick wall from the grounds of the adjoining Number
25
Middle School.

Over thirteen years, an estimated three thousand prisoners were gruesomely killed at this site, in addition to the seven to nine thousand who died in Unit
731
–affiliated bases across occupied China under the cover of being “anti-epidemic water supply units”—which, in turn, poisoned local wells, a sickening echo of the mind that thought to post
Work
Makes
You
Free
at the entrance to Nazi concentration camps.

Japan's version of Josef Mengele was a doctor and lieutenant general named Ishii Shiro, who began his bacterial warfare research in
1932
. As the Soviets invaded in August
1945
, Ishii ordered Unit
731
and other research bases destroyed and the remaining
404
prisoners killed. It took three days to burn their bodies, after which the ranking officer on-site said, “Now the Emperor will not be hanged.”

Ishii and his top staff fled to Japan with crates of files. American troops found him hiding in his home village, where residents had placed a newspaper story saying he had been shot to death and had even held a mock funeral. Ishii was not placed under arrest, only brought to Tokyo for questioning. After nearly two years of off-and-on interrogation of Ishii, a U.S. Army Basic Sciences chief wrote to his commander:

 

Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which have been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. Information has accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.

 

The letter concluded by noting that the army funds spent investigating Ishii's work in China was “a mere pittance by comparison with the actual cost of the studies.”

In
1948
the United States granted Ishii and eighteen subordinates immunity from war crimes prosecution. None were ever charged, let alone punished. For three decades the deal was kept secret before it was uncovered by an American journalist. Ishii was said to have opened a clinic in Japan, treating children, before dying of throat cancer at age sixty-seven.

 

His Majesty the Emperor, Puyi, read the notice dissolving Manchukuo on August
17
,
1945
. For the second time in his life, Puyi abdicated, then fled his palace. Soviet forces nabbed him at an airfield, boarding a plane bound for Japan. They packed him away to detention in Siberia, where he pleaded not to be returned to China, certain that he would be killed the moment he crossed the border.

In
1946
the Soviets brought him to Tokyo to testify at the war crimes tribunal. Looking frail beyond his forty years, Puyi talked to save his life. Wearing an expensive brown suit and speaking Chinese, he put on a good show: China's last emperor on the stand, striking a patriotic chord. “The people in Manchuria were complete slaves of the Japanese,” he averred. “It is almost impossible to describe the pain of the Chinese people in Manchuria. They could not obtain necessities and they could not even get clothing in severe weather. It would be an offense if a Chinese had in his possession any high-grade rice. The Chinese did not have the freedom to say anything without fear of facing death. Manchukuo was a completely darkened country during the term of Japanese rule.”

Previously, the looting of his family's imperial tombs by Chinese soldiers had made Puyi vow revenge, hastening his decision to cast his lot with the Japanese. But they had not even allowed him to visit those tombs to make an annual sacrifice. “I had better not go,” a general had told him, “because, since my ancestors were all Manchurians, if I went there to worship it would look as if Manchurians stood out unique among other groups of people in Manchukuo.”

Why hadn't he told the League of Nations' visiting Lytton Commission investigators the truth and asked for help? “The situation was like myself being kidnapped by bandits, and now my neighbors try to come to my rescue, yet in their presence I could not tell them what actually happened because after my rescuers left I was liable to be killed by the bandits.”

So he had bided his time over the next fourteen years, waiting for the right moment to rise against the occupation. “That was my ideal, and so I entered the mouth of the tiger.”

In his autobiography, written two decades later, Puyi admitted: “I now feel very ashamed of my testimony . . . I said nothing about my secret collaboration with the Japanese imperialists over a long period . . . I maintained that I had not betrayed my country but had been kidnapped . . . I covered up my crimes in order to protect myself.”