Britain considered attacking Tokyo with chemical weapons almost a year before the US bombardments that ended World War II in Asia, declassified records revealed on Friday.
The records at the National Archives, which have remained hidden from public view for 65 years, revealed clear proposals to use gas on civilians in 1944.
Although the plan was never put into operation, a detailed memorandum laid out measures to ensure any attack would have the most devastating impact possible.
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A Chemical Board note marked “secret” and signed by E.E. Haddon, Secretary, stated: “In his report on his discussions in America… Major General Goldnoy suggested that it might be worthwhile attempting to assess the probable effects of a C.W. (chemical weapons) bombing attack on Tokyo.
June 26th, 2009 at 6:09 am
I want links to documents please. Visit http://www.infowar.yolasite.com
June 26th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Who gives a shit about f*ckin stories from WWII. That was 60 years ago, move on already and give us info that affects us NOW!! Another lame story.
June 26th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Murdering innocent civilians is always a crime. Nothing justifies it. Didn’t anyone learn anything when Lot was saved from Sodom?
And the Japanese had all of their ports mined. They were starving and in terrible shape, and probably would have surrendered soon anyway.
June 26th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Considering and Doing are two different things. Every nations was considering some pretty evil things back then. It was a bad time in history that saw a lot killed.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
This latest revelation may sound evil to hypocrites. But hypocrisy heals no war wounds from the War in the Pacific with the Japanese military at all. I guess there are serious misunderstandings surrounding such a British plan of chemical attacks against the civilian population of Japan in 1945. So let me write some basic facts surrounding the Chemical Warfare the Japanese side was waging during the WW2 time.
Such a recent unfortunate revelation doesnt mean that the British side was planning an illegal and unprovoked Chemical Weapons use against the innocent Japanese civilian population in Tokyo or other places like Hiroshima back in 1945.
Japanese military was already using the same Chemical and Biological Weapons against the now-Taiwanese government of Republic of China by that time. Their development facility of these illegal weapons was called the Unit 731 and was based in the occupied Manchuria then. Japanese agents from this weapons lab also murdered Russian Jew civilians there probably trying to experiment the killing effect of their poisonous stuff so, naturally, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is also interested in the responsible Japanese gentlemen even today.
By the way, the Japanese military kept on kidnapping thousands of innocent women who happened to live in those Asian countries and locked them in their army brothels. These innocent women were of Asian or European origins. The Japanese government called them the Comfort Women in a very clean and hideous violation of the Geneva Convention. Their own Emperor Hirohito had signed the Geneva actually. The same Emperor had singed another Geneva protocol that banned the chemical and biological weapons as well. So the Japanese side knew clearly that their warfare using the chemical and biological weapons, made by the Japanese medical doctors such as Ishii and his Unit 731, was a clear and hideous war crime. They probably knew that, some day, their day of judement would eventually come to them. The remnants of the Unit 731 built a stone memorial in Tokyo for the victims after their country was defeated, apparently. But a mere memorial in Tokyo does not make a true atonement.
An old movie, The Last Emperor, tells the horror story that the Japanese Unit 731 based in the occupied Manchuria experimented on the local people. The Japanese authorities in Manchuria also experimented on the foreign POWs held there and even on the Japanese soldiers as well. The victimised POWs included the Americans, British, Chinese, Russians, etc. Civilian or military, the experimented human body parts were sometimes kept in large glass jars of over 6ft at the Unit 731 base. Many documented testimonies of the American and British veterans about these Japanese crimes are available in the Internet. Many of these evidences of Japanese crime were taken to the mainland of Japan and related human bones are being discovered in Japan even these days.
We saw a similar stuff in a recent movie about viral weapons, Ultraviolet, in the dark room of the doctor evil virus, though most of the part is deleted, right?
In The X Files series, Chris Carter also had such episodes of Nisei and 731 in the Season 3 series back in the end of 1995. The kidnapping of Dana Scully and the inhuman experiment on Scully while her pregnant body reminds us of the crime of the Unit 731 indeed, right?
These two episodes of The X Files are based on a fiction of human experiments on the American patients of Hansen’s Disease at an isolated colony. It was well known that similar inhuman experimental treatments were still going on in Japan for the same Japanese patients back then as well.
In these episodes, the phoney medical doctor Ishii of the Japanese Unit 731 appeared as the Japanese guy Dr Ishiguro, the human experiment expert. The Japanese war criminal, Ishii, himself was already dead by then actually. In the end of these episodes, Mulder finds a patient locked inside a train who looks like a little green man but Scully tells Mulder over the telephone that it is not it. It is a deformed victim of human experiments from the colony. The victim is being smuggled out of the experiment colony by Dr Ishiguro to be sent back to Japan as a sample of Walking Biological Weapon.
In fact, in around 1945, the Japanese military high command and the Unit 731 had such a plan to attack the San Francisco area in 1945 by shipping some infected humans as the walking biological weapon into the American soil. They were planning to ship such infected victims of human experiments to spread some pathogen among the San Francisco area. The large Japanese submarines were to be deployed for such a secret attack plan but this plan of biological or chemical attack against the US was cancelled anyway, just like the British plan against Tokyo was cancelled.
Apparently a Japanese TV network refused to air these episodes of The X Files back in 1996 or 1997. I guess the same Japanese network had been eager to buy and air The X Files show in their own country. But they refused to air the two episodes and, later, they completely shut it down back then, apparently.
The Japanese side waged the hideous and illegal chemical and biological warfare first. So they made it pretty legal for the US, UK and other Allied Forces to use the same weapons against the Japanese side including its civilian population, unfortunately.
The Allied Forces decided to use the first nuclear weapon for Hiroshima later, as we all know it, and the Japanese military accepted their defeat finally.
It is true that the war is over many decades ago but the Japanese side still deny their responsibility for such hideous war crimes as the chemical and biological warfare. Thay also deny any compensation to the thousands of surviving Comfort Women in the Asian countries and the Netherlands. By the way, there are female British victims of the same Japanese war crime because they lived in the occupied lands then.
These women happened to be in the war zones in the Asian countries back then. They were kidnapped by the Japanese military, raped and locked in the army brothels. Many of them were later murdered by the Japanese side to conceal their clean and hideous war crime against the civilians. The murdered Comfort Women are still left as just the missing persons even today.
The British plan of chemical warfare against Tokyo appeared during such an unfortunate time in 1945. Some crimes were compensated and healed but many of the wounds are still left unhealed even in this new century because of the Japanese refusal to compensate since about 15 years ago.
Hypocrisy will never heal these wounds, I guess. And I guess, today’s Japan needs to accept their own responsibility before it is too late for the surviving victims of the war crimes of their own old Empire. Thanks.