Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War
Encyclopedia
Allegations of biological warfare
in the Korean War
were raised by the governments of People's Republic of China
and North Korea
against the United States. The US Government and its allies denounced this as a hoax.
On 28 January 1952, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army
headquarters received a report of a smallpox
outbreak southeast of Incheon
. From February to March 1952, more bulletins reported disease outbreaks in the area of Chorwon
, Pyongyang
, Kimhwa
and even Manchuria
. The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera
and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis
. Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon shifted to the Americans.
On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Ministry made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. This was immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett
, and by the apparent confessions of captured US airmen. The Communists also alleged that US Brigadier General Crawford Sams had carried out a secret mission behind their lines at Wonsan in 1951, testing biological weapons. He said, however, that he had actually been investigating an outbreak of bubonic plague.
When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization
ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced this as Western bias and arranged an investigation by the World Peace Council
. The World Peace Council set up the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea. This commission included several distinguished scientists, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham
. The commission's findings also included eyewitnesses, and testimony from doctors as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of BW. Its final report, which made on 15 September 1952, was that the allegation was true, that the US was indeed experimenting with biological weapons.
Journalist John W. Powell
was charged with sedition
by the US government for repeating the allegation.
An Australian colleague, Denis Warner, went so far as to suggest that the story had been concocted by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett
as part of his alleged role as a KGB
agent of influence
. Warner pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London
, a favorite author of Burchett's. However, the notion that Burchett originated the "hoax" has been decisively refuted by one of his most trenchant critics, Tibor Méray.
Méray worked as a correspondent for Communist Hungary during the war but fled the country after the abortive uprising of 1956. Now a staunch anti-Communist, he has confirmed that he saw clusters of flies crawling on ice. Méray has argued the evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy: "Now somehow or other these flies must have been brought there... the work must have been carried out by a large network covering the whole of North Korea."
immediately requested Soviet assistance on disease preventions, while the Chinese People's Liberation Army
General Logistics Department was mobilized for anti-bacteriological warfare. On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front. Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated. The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas. These disease prevention measures soon resulted in an improvement of health for Communist soldiers on the Korean battlefield.
Alongside the evidence of Chinese archives is the independent eyewitness account of this "unprecedented campaign of public health" by Tibor Méray.
Others have revived the biological warfare claims more recently. In 1998, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagermann claimed that the accusations were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. The book received mixed reviews, some called it "bad history" and "appalling", while other praised the case the authors made. To counter these renewed allegations, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History Project
at the Woodrow Wilson Center released a cache of Soviet and Chinese documents in 1998 purporting to show the North Korean claim was an elaborate disinformation
campaign.
The official Chinese government stance is that biological warfare was a real threat, and they reacted properly in order to prevent serious epidemics from spreading throughout North Korea and China. The Chinese historiography
on the Korean War, however, has been divided over the allegation, with some Chinese historians choosing to ignore the subject completely due to the lack of evidence.
Australian historian Gavan McCormack
has argued that the claim is "far from inherently implausible" and has pointed out that one of the POWs who confessed, Colonel Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick
in Maryland, a biological weapons research facility. Author Simon Winchester
has concluded that the KGB
was sceptical of the allegation but North Korea leader Kim Il Sung believed it. Winchester believes the question "has still not been satisfactorily answered".
Biological warfare
Biological warfare is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi with intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war...
in the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
were raised by the governments of People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
and North Korea
North Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
against the United States. The US Government and its allies denounced this as a hoax.
Allegations
During 1951 the Communists made vague allegations of biological warfare, but these were not pursued.On 28 January 1952, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army
People's Volunteer Army
The Chinese People's Volunteer Army was the armed forces deployed by the People's Republic of China during the Korean War. Although all units in the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army belonged to the People's Liberation Army , the People's Volunteer Army was separately constituted in order to...
headquarters received a report of a smallpox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
outbreak southeast of Incheon
Incheon
The Incheon Metropolitan City is located in northwestern South Korea. The city was home to just 4,700 people when Jemulpo port was built in 1883. Today 2.76 million people live in the city, making it Korea’s third most populous city after Seoul and Busan Metropolitan City...
. From February to March 1952, more bulletins reported disease outbreaks in the area of Chorwon
Chorwon
Chorwon is a kun, or county, in Kangwon province, North Korea. Portions of it were once a single county together with the county of the same name in South Korea; other portions were added from neighboring counties in the 1956 reorganization of local governments...
, Pyongyang
Pyongyang
Pyongyang is the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea, and the largest city in the country. Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River and, according to preliminary results from the 2008 population census, has a population of 3,255,388. The city was...
, Kimhwa
Kimhwa
Kimhwa is a kun, or county, in Kangwon province, North Korea. It is primarily mountainous, but the county's southeastern region is low-lying....
and even Manchuria
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
. The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis
Meningitis
Meningitis is inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, known collectively as the meninges. The inflammation may be caused by infection with viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms, and less commonly by certain drugs...
. Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon shifted to the Americans.
On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Ministry made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. This was immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett
Wilfred Burchett
Wilfred Graham Burchett was an Australian journalist known for his reporting of conflicts in Asia and his Communist sympathies...
, and by the apparent confessions of captured US airmen. The Communists also alleged that US Brigadier General Crawford Sams had carried out a secret mission behind their lines at Wonsan in 1951, testing biological weapons. He said, however, that he had actually been investigating an outbreak of bubonic plague.
When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...
ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced this as Western bias and arranged an investigation by the World Peace Council
World Peace Council
The World Peace Council is an international organization that advocates universal disarmament, sovereignty and independence and peaceful co-existence, and campaigns against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction and all forms of discrimination...
. The World Peace Council set up the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea. This commission included several distinguished scientists, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham
Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA , also known as Li Yuese , was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British...
. The commission's findings also included eyewitnesses, and testimony from doctors as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of BW. Its final report, which made on 15 September 1952, was that the allegation was true, that the US was indeed experimenting with biological weapons.
Journalist John W. Powell
John W. Powell
John William Powell was a journalist and small business proprietor who was most well known for being tried for sedition after publishing an article in 1952 that reported on allegations made by Mainland Chinese officials that the United States and Japan were carrying out germ warfare in the Korean...
was charged with sedition
Sedition
In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent to lawful authority. Sedition may include any...
by the US government for repeating the allegation.
Counterclaims
The US and its allies responded by describing the allegation as a hoax. Upon release the prisoners of war repudiated their confessions which they said had been extracted by torture.An Australian colleague, Denis Warner, went so far as to suggest that the story had been concocted by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett
Wilfred Burchett
Wilfred Graham Burchett was an Australian journalist known for his reporting of conflicts in Asia and his Communist sympathies...
as part of his alleged role as a KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
agent of influence
Agent of influence
An agent of influence is a person whose political actions and arguments are alleged to serve the interests of a foreign power, and to be directed or manipulated by the intelligence agency of that power...
. Warner pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
, a favorite author of Burchett's. However, the notion that Burchett originated the "hoax" has been decisively refuted by one of his most trenchant critics, Tibor Méray.
Méray worked as a correspondent for Communist Hungary during the war but fled the country after the abortive uprising of 1956. Now a staunch anti-Communist, he has confirmed that he saw clusters of flies crawling on ice. Méray has argued the evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy: "Now somehow or other these flies must have been brought there... the work must have been carried out by a large network covering the whole of North Korea."
Disease prevention measures
Recent research has indicated that, regardless of the accuracy of the allegations, the Chinese and North Koreans acted as if they were true. After learning the outbreaks, Mao ZedongMao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
immediately requested Soviet assistance on disease preventions, while the Chinese People's Liberation Army
People's Liberation Army
The People's Liberation Army is the unified military organization of all land, sea, strategic missile and air forces of the People's Republic of China. The PLA was established on August 1, 1927 — celebrated annually as "PLA Day" — as the military arm of the Communist Party of China...
General Logistics Department was mobilized for anti-bacteriological warfare. On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front. Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated. The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas. These disease prevention measures soon resulted in an improvement of health for Communist soldiers on the Korean battlefield.
Alongside the evidence of Chinese archives is the independent eyewitness account of this "unprecedented campaign of public health" by Tibor Méray.
Subsequent evaluation
Subsequent historians have offered other explanations to the disease outbreaks during the spring of 1952. For example, it has been noted that spring time is usually a period of epidemics within China and North Korea, and years of warfare had also caused a breakdown in the Korean health care system. Historians have argued that under these circumstances, diseases could easily spread throughout the entire military and civilian populations within Korea.Others have revived the biological warfare claims more recently. In 1998, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagermann claimed that the accusations were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. The book received mixed reviews, some called it "bad history" and "appalling", while other praised the case the authors made. To counter these renewed allegations, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History Project
Cold War International History Project
The Cold War International History Project is part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Project was founded in 1991 with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is located in Washington D.C....
at the Woodrow Wilson Center released a cache of Soviet and Chinese documents in 1998 purporting to show the North Korean claim was an elaborate disinformation
Disinformation
Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. For this reason, it is synonymous with and sometimes called black propaganda. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth...
campaign.
The official Chinese government stance is that biological warfare was a real threat, and they reacted properly in order to prevent serious epidemics from spreading throughout North Korea and China. The Chinese historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
on the Korean War, however, has been divided over the allegation, with some Chinese historians choosing to ignore the subject completely due to the lack of evidence.
Australian historian Gavan McCormack
Gavan McCormack
Gavan McCormack is a researcher specialising in East Asia who is currently Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History of the Australian National University...
has argued that the claim is "far from inherently implausible" and has pointed out that one of the POWs who confessed, Colonel Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick
Fort Detrick
Fort Detrick is a U.S. Army Medical Command installation located in Frederick, Maryland, USA. Historically, Fort Detrick was the center for the United States' biological weapons program ....
in Maryland, a biological weapons research facility. Author Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester, OBE , is a British-American author and journalist who resides mostly in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal...
has concluded that the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
was sceptical of the allegation but North Korea leader Kim Il Sung believed it. Winchester believes the question "has still not been satisfactorily answered".
Further reading
- Shiwei Chen, "History of Three Mobilizations: A Reexamination of the Chinese Biological Warfare Allegations against the United States in the Korean War," Journal of American-East Asian Relations 16.3 (2009): 213-247.
- John Clews, The Communists. New Weapon: Germ Warfare (London, 1952)
- Stephen L. Endicott, "Germ Warfare and "Plausible Denial": The Korean War, 1952–1953," Modern China 5.1 (Jan. 1979): 79-104.
- Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare (Bloomington, Ind., 1998)
- Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (Peking and Prague, 1952);
- Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York, 1982)
- Albert E. Cowdrey, “Germ Warfare. and Public Health in the Korean Conflict,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 39 (1984)
- John Ellis van Courtland Moon, “Biological Warfare Allegations: The Korean War Case,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 666 (1992)
- Tom Buchanan, “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the .Germ Warfare. Allegations in the Korean War,” History 86 (October 2001)
- Julian Ryall, "Did the US wage germ warfare in Korea?", Telegraph, (June 10, 2010).
- Ruth Rogaski, “Nature, Annihilation, and Modernity: China’s Korean War Germ-Warfare Experience Reconsidered,” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (May 2002)
- Nianqun Yang, "Disease Prevention, Social Mobilization and Spatial Politics: The Anti Germ-Warfare Incident of 1952 and the Patriotic Health Campaign,” Chinese Historical Review 11 (Fall 2004).