A Japanese university has opened a museum acknowledging that its staff dissected downed American airmen while they were still alive during World War II. A gruesome display at the newly-opened museum at Kyushu University explains how eight U.S. POWs were taken to the center’s medical school in Fukuoka after their plane was shot down over the skies of Japan in May 1945.
The flyers were subjected to horrific medical experiments. Doctors dissected one soldier’s brain to see if epilepsy could be controlled by surgery, and removed parts of the livers of other prisoners as part of tests to see if they would survive. Another soldier was injected with seawater, in an experiment to see if it could be used instead of sterile saline solution to help dehydration.
Twelve airmen were aboard Captain Marvin Watkins’ B-29 when it took off from Guam on a bombing raid against an airfield in Fukuoka. They all bailed out when their aircraft was rammed by a Japanese fighter.
Local residents converged on the surviving airmen as they landed. One emptied his pistol at the crowd before shooting himself dead, another was stabbed to death by locals. Of the remaining airmen, Captain Watkins was taken for interrogation and survived the war. The rest died during the horrific vivisection experiments.
Todoshi Tono, one of the doctors involved in the experiments, later dedicated his life to exposing the atrocities after the war and wrote a book against the wishes of colleagues who wanted their crimes to be lost in the mists of time. In 1995, he told The Baltimore Sun that one of the U.S. flyers had been stabbed by locals after his plane had crashed, and presumed he was going to be treated for the wound when he was taken to the operating theatre for live dissection instead.
