of the Kwantung Army, through which Dr. Ishii received a substantial amount of funding from the Japanese government to spend on Unit 731. Under his orders, Unit 731 found a permanent home on a four-square-mile complex with hundreds of laboratories, a cinema, and its own railway line to go along with a crematorium and operating rooms.


Vivisection of hundreds of civilians occurred on the campus, with a lack of anesthesia and a live specimen believed essential to this group of scientist soldiers due to their desire to study the body prior to decomposition. In addition to opening up the bodies, the scientists often removed organs to observe the effect on an individual. At least one experiment removed a prisoner's stomach and then connected the esophagus to the intestines ofthe subject.

Unit 731 also performed forced inseminations and gave doses of syphilis under the guise of a vaccination. The group also observed how live human bodies froze in real time and how the body crumpled in extreme pressure experiments.


Several successful attacks carried out by the Imperial Japanese Army used plans devised by Unit 731. The plan consisted of dropping ceramic pots containing rice and wheat mixed with fleas carrying the plague on villages in Southern China. The pots, attached to parachutes and tossed from planes, indirectly killed hundreds of thousands Chinese civilians.

During the height of World War II, Unit 731 planned similar biological attacks for the United States. One early proposed mission involved a small kamikaze plane launched from a submarine that would unleash the plague upon the