Supreme Commander by Stephen E. Ambrose

Author:Stephen E. Ambrose
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307946638
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T10:00:00+00:00

ISHII KNEW HE was in deep trouble. No one, not even the emperor, could save him or even think of lifting a finger. He was on his own, the target of a massive manhunt. If he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a cave somewhere, he would have to do what every “big fish” criminal does when the jig is up: cut a plea deal. He could embarrass a lot of important politicians with what he knew. As the war drew to an end, he got his team together and issued his final command: his comrades in arms were to go into hiding, never again to seek government employment, and never again to contact one another. After they departed the Unit 731 facility at Pingfan, he ordered all the buildings blown up and razed to the ground.

By the time the Russians, who had invaded Manchuria, got to Pingfan, everything was gone. But some evidence still remained: Even though the prisoners’ bodies had been burned and then pulverized, skeletons from earlier days remained buried deep under the debris. The bullet holes, knife marks, and chemical residues indicated that this had been more than a lumber mill. Definitive proof came from the animals that the Japanese, in their haste to flee, had released into the countryside: thousands of plague-infested horses, monkeys, dogs, rats, even Mongolian camels.

What exactly had been going on at Pingfan? Allied investigators in Germany had it so much easier: the Germans have a well-known penchant for recording, documenting, and filming everything, so when it came time to prepare evidence for the Nuremberg trials, all the prosecutors had to do was collect and organize the available evidence. In Japan this was not the case. There were hardly any pictures or written records, and Ishii’s doctors and lab technicians were lying low. Considering that Ishii’s operation employed twenty thousand people in its various hospitals and factories of death in China, Japan, and the South Pacific, this was quite an accomplishment.

Ishii, who by now had escaped back to Japan, resorted to another stunt commonly used by most-wanted criminals. After burying many important documents in the garden of his Tokyo home, he arranged for the local mayor to issue a proclamation declaring that he was dead: He had been shot to death in Manchuria. His friends staged a massive funeral ceremony, complete with mourners, priests, burning incense, and prayers for his departed soul. By all eyewitness accounts it was an elaborate and moving event with many tears shed by mourners glancing at the sealed coffin.

Hearing that Ishii had beaten him to the grim reaper did not please MacArthur. Further news that he might have pulled a fast one made him even angrier. SCAP got an anonymous letter, written in Japanese, saying that the funeral had been a fake and that the writer, a former associate of Ishii, would reveal all if MacArthur’s office would place a specially worded advertisement in a certain Japanese newspaper within three days. However, by the time SCAP translated this bombshell letter and got it to MacArthur, the deadline had passed.

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