8. As part of a range of environmental conditional testing, prisoners of war had limbs deliberately exposed to frostbite and were sealed in high-pressure chambers to observe the limitations of the human body
Among the countless horrific experiments performed on Allied prisoners, Dr. Yoshimura Hisato of Unit 731 became fascinated in exploring the effects of frostbite upon the human body. Freezing certain body parts, these appendages “when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck”. Thereafter, ice was chipped away to determine the scale of the tissue damage and lasting physiological consequences of severe freezing.
In one particularly gruesome recollection, a former guard recounted how, in the course of raping female Chinese prisoners, his group had encountered a woman who “had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea”. Not isolated to only the extremes of cold, Japanese researchers sought to understand the effects of a wide range of environmental conditions including pressure – placing individuals in high-pressure chambers until their eyeballs popped out – and radiation – caused by exposing prisoners to lethal x-rays.