Hiroshi Osedo
TOKYO: Students in Japan are about to be told for the first time that the Imperial Japanese Army tested poison gas on an Australian prisoner of war during World War II.
The disclosure will be made in a book by historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, of Chuo University in Tokyo.
His research in the Australian National Archives in Canberra revealed that Japanese troops tested cyanide gas (prussic acid) on A.D. Nelson, a Royal Australian Air Force lieutenant, and F. Englesman, a Dutch East Indies Air Force sergeant, in November 1944. Nelson had been flying a P40 Kitty Hawk attacking Japanese forces when he was shot down on October 13, 1944, in the Kai islands in what is now Indonesia.
Professor Yoshimi said a Japanese lieutenant had thrown bottles of prussic acid on the two PoWs.
The men collapsed and were then stabbed to death with bayonets by Japanese military police.
A Japanese lieutenant-colonel who gave the order and the lieutenant who threw the gas were executed as war criminals in Hong Kong on July 15, 1948.
Professor Yoshimi said it was widely known that more than 3000 Chinese, Korean, Russian and Mongolian civilians were killed in biological warfare experiments during the war. But the story of chemical warfare was not well known.
"I believe it was only the Japanese military who had used chemical weapons in warfare during World War II," Professor Yoshimi said.
His book Dokugasu-sen to Nihongun: Gas Warfare and the Japanese Military Forces will be published today.