* * * * Mr. Walter Lippmann makes this week
a point about the germ warfare charges in Korea which I am surprised no one has made before. He points out that one of '‘the two types of bomb alleged by 'the Chinese to have been used by the Americans for dropping infected insects is a small porcelain container, known to have been manufactured by the Japanese in factories in Manchuria which are now under Chinese control. He then recalls (and so do I, for I was in China at the time) that in March, 1942, the Chinese accused the Japanese of dropping infected objects on a town in Hunan a few months previously and causing six deaths from bubonic plague. He believes that the propaganda campaign against the Americans is simply a revival or re-hash of its ten-year- old prototype. Certainly the Heath Robinson methods which the Chinese say the Americans have used (a) correspond closely with the methods attributed to—and conceivably employed by—the Japanese, and (b) bear no relation to any of the modern techniques of bacteriological warfare, to which the Americans have given considerable study, and which—if they resorted to that form of warfare—they would be unlikely to discard in favour- of obsolete and ineffective devices. I believe that if anybody was in a position to look up the report of the. Chinese investigations into the Hunan incident—and it must be on somebody's files—they would find in it many close parallels on matters of detail with the evidence produced by the Communists in North Korea.
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