Authors: Michael Meyer
According to the county government
“War Proves a Mixed Blessing for Some Japanese,” Xinhua, August 12, 2006.
The cemetery’s roots date to
1963
Ibid. See also Pulvers; Chan, p. 22; and Itoh, p. 187.
“The people of Japan and the settlers”
Pulvers. I am reminded of the oath some pioneer farmers took before leaving Japan: “I shall not let my family interfere with my decision. I shall sacrifice my life for our colony. I shall make every effort to settle down permanently in Manchuria.”
A Japanese officer, expressing guilt
Itoh, p. 40.
“We have to ask them not to plant any more”
The caretaker’s name is Zhang Lin.
The previous week, five Chinese nationalists
au. Itoh (p. 187) wrote that the cemetery has a caretaker due to previous vandalism.
“Our economy profits thanks to people who went to Japan”
Nishimura 1. The county has one of the largest amounts of foreign currency being exchanged by a local government, as migrants remit money home in yen.
Once this site had been an Allied prisoner of war camp
In Chinese, it’s called
er zhan meng jun zhan fu jizhongying jiuzhi
, and it’s located in Shenyang’s Dadong district, southeast of the intersection of Pangjiang Jie and Zhulin Lu.
Now age ninety-two, Leith remembers
I met him after finding his self-published book for sale online, which he mailed to me inscribed: “Dear Michael Meyer! I hope you enjoy my memoirs! I would like to talk with you so call me on the phone.” I’m grateful to his wife, Helen, and son Mike for welcoming me into their home in Golden, Colorado, and assisting with the reproduction of photographs Hal Leith took on his mission. Leith passed away on Christmas Eve 2013.
Also: beat the advancing
Yu, p. 231.
Dubbed Operation Cardinal, it was one of eight
The others: Operation Magpie (Beijing), Duck (Weixian), Flamingo (Harbin; aborted due to Soviet advance), Sparrow (Shanghai), Pigeon (Hainan Island), Raven (Vientiane), and Quail (Hanoi). The latter was headed by a young captain with the enviable name Archimedes L. A. Patti, who came face-to-face with Ho Chi Minh and found himself calming the five French soldiers who were part of his team and itching to begin a fight with the guerrilla Communist leader. (Imagine if they had.) Ho would soon launch a war of independence against the French colonizers. Ibid., p. 232.
One of these OSS operations would end with the execution
Ibid., pp. 236–41.
Chinese Communist forces were angered by the Yalta agreements
Historians debate whether Franklin D. Roosevelt “sold out” Manchuria at these talks, which restored Russia’s rights to the Northeast’s railroads and shipyards at Dalian/Port Arthur, which it had lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. General Albert Wedemeyer, commander of U.S. forces in China, felt the Yalta agreement was a betrayal of Chinese sovereignty, as did the American ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, who tried to convince Winston Churchill to assuage Stalin by ceding control of Hong Kong. Churchill balked, saying the colony “would be taken out of the British Empire over my dead body.” Ibid., pp. 241–42.
The nearest American forces were stationed nine hundred miles away
Clemens, pp. 73 and 77.
“If we are not in Korea and Manchuria when the Russians get there”
Yu, p. 231.
He ordered his agents
Clemens, p. 76.
The survivors of that battle had been shipped to Taiwan
Harris, pp. 162–64. The men were from the “hell ship”
Tottori Maru
.
There, the men were divided
Yardley.
Japanese stacked their frozen bodies
Harris, p. 165.
An improved camp
Brougher, p. 168.
The Japanese considered Hoten a model camp
Ibid., p. 168. Whereas the average death rate in a Japanese camp was 27 percent—compared to 4 percent in German-run camps—at Hoten, 12 percent of prisoners died, three of whom were executed in 1943 after trying to escape.
“It is entirely out of my expectations”
Yang Jing, p. 235. Professor Yang (of Shenyang University) reprinted Matsuda’s address, which the colonel had handwritten in cursive English.
“I am down
14
pounds”
Brougher, p. 179.
On August
8
, two days after the bombing
Ibid., p. 181.
August
15
: “Many rumors”
Ibid., p. 182.
August
16
: “Wildest kinds of rumors”
Ibid., p. 183.
At the sight of the dozen soldiers
The Chinese team member was named Cheng Shiwu and is lost to history. The Nisei doctor, Fumio Ito, lives in Hawaii.
In his prison diary,
Brigadier General
W. E. Brougher
Brougher, p. 183.
In one of his last entries from the camp
Ibid., p. 184.
General Wainwright, gaunt and wearing threadbare clothes
Clemens, p. 87.
A Cardinal report described a binge
Clemens, p. 95, and Yu, p. 244.
“Some of the Chinese took my side”
Leith, pp. 60–61.
Soviet forces, an OSS officer reported
Clemens, p. 99.
The Russians even took
“Changchun Mayor Inspires His City,”
New York Times
, March 11, 1946.
William Donovan
,
the head of the OSS
Yu, p. 245.
Standing on the Songhua River docks where Japanese mothers
Ishida.
Officials said
Ibid. The tributary is the Daluomi River, called “Siwangdu” (Ferry of Death) for those swept away and drowned when trying to cross.
The Japanese invasion caused
14
to
20
million
Mitter 1, p. 5, notes the former figure is a conservative estimate. On p. 363 he says “the numbers are not clear” and adds the latter figure. Mitter notes, too, that the war resulted in massive refugee flight. Official mainland accounts usually use the higher estimate of deaths.
In a Tokyo courtroom in
2002
Lewis and “China Alerted by Serious Soil Pollution, Vows Better Protection,”
Economist
,
April 17, 2014. The historian Sheldon Harris (see note below) died four days later.
Over thirteen years,
an estimated three thousand prisoners
Estimate given at the museum. Harris notes that the number actually underestimates people killed prior to the base’s inception, since Ishii had begun human experiments in Harbin nine years earlier, in 1932. Nor does the figure take into account the postwar death toll of civilians living around the camps (thirty thousand dead from plague in 1947, for example). Harris, pp. 86–87.
Which, in turn, poisoned local wells
Ibid., p. 99. Earlier, Harris notes that, with a perimeter of six square kilometers, the Pingfang camp rivaled Auschwitz-Birkenau in area (p. 43).
As the Soviets invaded in August
1945
Ibid., p. 245.
American troops found him hiding in his home village
Ibid., p. 246.
“Evidence gathered in this investigation”
Ibid., p. 263.
In
1948
the United States granted Ishii
Ibid., pp. 287–91 and 304–5. See also Drea, p. 37. It summarizes National Archives holdings on the matter, and also that Harris believed immunity was approved not only by Generals MacArthur and Willoughby in Tokyo but by their superiors in Washington.
For three decades, the deal was kept secret
The journalist John W. Powell was a veteran China hand who had published and edited the
China Monthly Review
from Shanghai until 1953. (His father had cofounded it in 1917 as the
China Weekly Review
. He lost both his feet to gangrene in a Japanese prison camp and died in 1947 at age sixty.) Powell had been unsuccessfully tried for sedition after claiming the United States used chemical weapons in the Korean War. His articles on Unit 731—and the American immunity deals—appeared in the
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
in 1980 and in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
in 1981 after mainstream media turned him down. See Fox.
The allegations were finally confirmed by the American historian Sheldon Harris, author of
Factories of Death:
Japanese Biological Warfare,
1932
–
45
and the American Cover-up
, published in 1994. The book influenced legislation, passed in 2000,
ordering American government agencies to release all information held on the Japanese Imperial Army that details evidence of war crimes. In 2007 the National Archives declassified 100,000 pages of records, prefaced with a 170-page guide to their contents, available free online:
http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/
.
Harris notes that the Chinese (KMT) judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal never mentioned Japan’s bacterial warfare, nor were Japanese prosecuted for it on the mainland; Harris reports that Japanese prisoners associated with bacterial warfare held by the Communists were not executed but returned home “singing the praises of their captors” for the leniency they received (pp. 315–16).
“The people in Manchuria were complete slaves”
Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 7: Interrogation of Pu Yi (Continued), p. 6.
“It is almost impossible to describe the pain”
Ibid. p. 9.
“I had better not go”
Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 6: Interrogation of Ai-Hsin-Cho-Lo Pu Yi (Henry Pu Yi), 1300–1500 hours, p. 1. At the time of Puyi’s testimony, the term
Manchurian
was popularly used in English, instead of today’s
Manchu
. The contemporary Chinese term for the ethnicity,
manzu
, had yet to be coined. I’m guessing that, in Chinese, Puyi referred to himself as a
manzhouren
, which literally translates as Manchurian, or a person from
manzhou
, Manchuria.
“The situation was like myself being kidnapped”
Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 5: Interrogation of Ai-Hsin-Cho-Lo Pu Yi (Henry Pu Yi), 0900–1200 hours, p. 8.
That was my ideal”
Ibid., Box 13, Folder 1, MSS 78-3, p. 1.
In his autobiography, written two decades later
Puyi, p. 329.
His memoir, published by the state press
Ibid, p. 306.
In
1967
, as the Cultural Revolution
Scotland, p. 10.
In its obituary
“Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China and a Puppet for Japan, Dies; Enthroned at 2, Turned Out at 6, He Was Later a Captive of Russians and Peking Reds,”
New York Times
, October 18, 1966.
In 1995 a private cemetery . . . paid his widow
Ho, Stephanie.
“The casualties were about the same”
Pomfret. In Chinese the siege is called
changchun weikunzhan
.
The colonel’s book describing the siege
Ibid. Pomfret reported that President Yang Shangkun delivered the verdict. By then the book had sold 100,000 copies but was pulled from stores in spring 1990. The book also alleged that Communist troops smuggled large amounts of opium during the civil war.
A Hong Kong–based researcher
acobs. The professor’s name is Lung Ying-tai, and her book is titled
Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of
1949
.
“Some refugees threw down their babies”
Christian Science Monitor
(translated excerpt from the book).
“Not allowing the starving city residents to leave”
Pomfret. “The author quoted cables from other officers asking that the army be allowed to save starving people. The requests were denied.”
Chinese schoolchildren
Jacobs.
China estimates that, since
1945
Monahan, and Xinhua reports. Japan disputes the number, saying estimates range from hundreds of thousands to millions (Yamamura, p. 290).
In Jilin province in
2004
Ibid.
Under its obligations
“China, Japan End Excavation of Chemical Weapons,” Xinhua, November 7, 2006. Xinhua 1.
A Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman
Monahan.
Chapter 14: Great Heat
In the New World, after two years of food shortages
Philbrick, p. 165.