A Trial in Siberia
" Unit 731," twelve of whose officers are being tried as war criminals by a Russian military court at Khabarovsk, was the section of the Kwantung Army which dealt with chemical and bacterio- logical warfare. It is said to have been 3,000 strong, but its influence on the course of military operations in the last war seems to have been as negative as that of its counterparts in other armies, including the Russian. Some of the accused (all of whom have pleaded guilty) claim that various forms of germs were dropped or sprayed from aircraft over China ; and there is reason to believe both that there is some truth in this, and that the operations were largely if not wholly ineffective. It is also claimed, and is probably true, that experiments of a callous and brutal kind were carried out on prisoners. The Americans deny that any of the victims were, as the Russians and the Japanese assert, American prisoners of war ; if they had been we should almost certainly have heard something about it before now. An organisa- tion which admits to having evolved a " walking-stick filled with plague-carrying fleas " can hardly be held to have been animated by the highest ideals of chivalry ; but neither, on the other hand, does its misplaced ingenuity cause our blood either to curdle or to boil. The execution of justice is—at best—a secondary consideration in Russian trials which arc publicised outside the country. Moscow's purposes may be conjectured as (a) to reaffirm the thesis that the Red Army saved the Western Powers no less decisively in Asia than in Europe, (b) to distract attention and sympathy from the 376,000 Japanese prisoners of war the question of whose whereabouts is seriously embarrassing the Russian representative on the Allied Council in Tokyo and (c) to accuse the United States of being over- lenient to Japanese war criminals. Pravda has already charged General MacArthur with holding back evidence of Japanese atrocities. General MacArthur might—if he could take this affair seriously—feel entitled to ask what the Russians had been doing with the dossier on Unit 731 during the last four years.
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