Captured U.S. Pilots Revealed How Germ Warfare Was Organized During Korean War
One captured airman identified Tachigawa Air Base as a site where biological bombs were assembled. Meanwhile, evidence suggests active US pilots tried to warn the public about the use of germ warfare.
A preponderance of the evidence over the past couple of years has established that the U.S. used biological weapons in its war with North Korea and China in the early 1950s. This is based on CIA, Department of Defense and other government documents, contemporary scientist investigations, the statements of allied biological warfare personnel, as well as a close reading of the confessions of twenty-five U.S. airmen. It is time now to move on to an examination of how the U.S. pulled off the operation.
The story that follows documents what seems like an unsuccessful attempt by Air Force flyers to tip off the press and government officials to the secret U.S germ warfare campaign then underway in Korea and Northeast China. This attempt at military whistleblowing allows for a wider consideration today of the evidence surrounding the germ warfare charges, especially how the bioattacks were organized.
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On the morning of May 5, 1952, Americans awoke to two headlines concerning the ongoing war in Korea. One story, reported by the United Press wire service, said the U.S. Army had just ordered rationing of “the ‘most important’ kinds of amunition” [sic]. “World War II stocks are just about gone and ‘production still does not equal battle expenditures,’” the article stated.
Beyond the ammunition woes, it was also reported in the U.S. Senate that “half of the American fighting planes in Korea are ‘obsolete or at least obsolescent.’” As a result, there was a cost in human lives, intoned California’s Republican Senator, and future Senate Majority Leader, William Knowland, as Air Force crew have “unnecessarily died in obsolescent planes in Korea.”
As shocking as that news may have been, a much larger scandal, one that would reverberate for many months and years, was first reported that Monday spring morning.
The second story, also via United Press, announced that captured U.S. Air Force personnel had told their captors they had been involved in dropping U.S. biological weapons on North Korea and China. Two fliers, 1st Lt Kenneth Enoch and 1st Lt John Quinn, testified to the use of bacteriological or “germ” weapons in a radio broadcast overheard on “Peiping” (Beijing) radio.
The broadcast by Enoch and Quinn came some three weeks after a press conference by a delegation from the International Association of Democratic Jurists, who, having toured over a dozen purported sites of biological weapons (BW) attack in North Korea in March, claimed evidence of U.S. germ warfare.
There are a few videos online that, in part, include portions of Enoch and Quinn’s statements. See this video, with partial statements in English beginning at 10:29 and 11:50 time marks.
The May 5 UP story highlighted Enoch’s account, noting both he and Quinn said the germ war campaign began on January 1, 1952.
“Enoch said the Air Force in a ‘highly secret’ briefing, had informed him about the use of germ warfare. He said officers referred to bombs filled with infected insects as ‘duds,’” the article said. (During this period there also was a controversy underway in the Canadian press over whether Canada was sending “infected insects” to U.S. forces for use in biological warfare.)
Citing Enoch’s testimony, the UP article stated:
On Jan. 1, 1952, the briefing officer of Group Operations (Enoch was with the third bomb wing, a navigator on a B-26 light bomber) told us the order in the form of a casual reminder, to pay close attention to dud bombs, just giving us the term by which the lethal germ bombs would be known. [Parentheses in original]
The U.S. and allied forces declined to comment at the time, saying they could not confirm that the voices heard on the radio could be accurately identified.
Enoch indicated that on the night of January 6–7 he had dropped two germ bombs over Hwangju, North Korea. Four nights later, he and his crew dropped four similar bombs over Tunghwa (Chunghwa), North Korea. In each case, he reported to Group Intelligence back at base that he had dropped two and four “duds,” respectively.
“That was for secrecy,” Enoch said.
In his taped statement, Enoch, who was then 27 years old, also mentioned having “attended a lecture on germ warfare given by a civilian at the Air Forces ground school at Iwakuni, Japan” on August 25 the previous year. This “secret” lecture was attended by 10 pilots and 25 navigators, and meant to educate the fliers about use of biological weapons.
At the close of his May 5 statement, Enoch said he was determined to “struggle for peace in this war against capitalism… to clear my conscience for my past errors.” Much would be made later about his use of such anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Despite later claims that the flyers’ confessions — there would be 25 published in all — were replete with Communistic propagandistic rhetoric, this wasn’t the case, as anyone who has perused the documents can see. What the criticism over left-sounding rhetoric masked was the fact that the flyers were very upset over how the war in Korea was being conducted.
After Enoch was repatriated to the United States in September 1953, he and the rest of the flyers who testified to use of germ warfare retracted their statements to Chinese interrogators, claiming that their testimony was produced under torture or other duress. Yet, understandably never mentioned at the time, nor by most subsequent commentators and historians, the flyers’ retractions were made under threats of prosecution for treason by military authorities. As such, the germ warfare retractions were themselves produced under coercive circumstances, throwing their validity into grave doubt.
Much later, Lt. Enoch withdrew the claims of torture by the Chinese included in his retraction and denied to documentarian Tim Tate that he was ill treated while in captivity.
Only recently, after this author pursued testimony given during a post-Korean War military inquiry into the biological warfare “confession” of Marine Corps Colonel Frank Schwable, did the story take an even murkier turn, as the record showed that Air Force and Marine Corps flyers were told that, if captured, they could freely give up to their interrogators information about what they knew! (Regular infantrymen and Marines did not have this luxury.)
Returning Pilots Report an Excess of “Duds”
A little over a month after the germ war confession headlines, on June 14, Missouri Senator James Kem (GOP) told reporters that U.S. troops in Korea were being forced by the Truman administration to fight the Korean War with World War II weapons. Kem, an opponent of Truman and politically an isolationist, cited recent figures showing the U.S. had suffered 109,000 casualties to date.
“The air force is using antiquated bombs,” he said in a statement, “and reports say that about one out of five bombs are duds.” (Bold added for emphasis.) He called for an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Kem never mentioned the fact that captured U.S. flyers had been quoted only a few weeks earlier as saying that American bombers were dropping biological bombs in the Korean War and hiding their use by labelling the bombs in official reports as merely “duds.”
A few weeks after Kem’s accusations, the Mexico Evening Ledger, a Missouri newspaper, published an “exclusive statement” from C. Herschel Schooley, Chief of the Press Branch of the Department of Defense. Schoolely told the Ledger that the true “dud” rate was only 1 in 20, or four times smaller than what Kem claimed.
“The Air Force has advised me,” Schooley wrote, “that only about 5 per cent of the bombs dropped by the Far Eastern Force aircraft over Korea did not explode.”
A one-in-five, or 20 percent rate of unexploded “dud” ordinance would have been quite high. Five percent was probably too conservative a figure for most measures of “dud” non-performance. A review of historic “dud” rates in the wars of the last hundred years or so shows that a ten percent rate is about average. Still, nonexploding ordnance rates varied widely based on type of bomb, conditions of use, and taking into account larger “dud” rates for submunitions used in cluster bombs. For instance, cluster bomb use during the Iraq War revealed subcomponents had a 17 percent cluster bomblet “dud” rate.
Speaking for the Pentagon, Schooley claimed that “a considerable number of duds resulted from human error rather than faulty bombs or fuses.”
Schooley further explained how in “the excitement of combat, fighter-bomber pilots sometimes failed to turn on their arming switch prior to releasing their bombs. Also, in a number of instances involving light bombers, it was found that armament personnel had failed to pull the safety pin after loading the aircraft.”
But in a statement to investigators from the International Scientific Commission in August 1952, captured Air Force pilot John Quinn said the germ bombs had no pins to pull. (See pg. 8.)
According to the DoD press official, his statistics and explanatory information on duds came “from a recent ordnance survey in Korea conducted by one of the Air Force’s top men assigned to the Air Materiel Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio.”
What Schooley didn’t say, or didn’t know, was that Air Materiel Command and other personnel at Wright-Patterson were themselves heavily implicated in the U.S. biological warfare program, both in terms of research and operational use.
In any case, Kem returned the rhetorical fire five days later, telling the Ledger he obtained the figure of 1-in-5 duds from a June 13 article in U.S. News & World Report, titled “Where are the weapons?”
Managing editor of USN&WR, Carson Lyman, told Kem the June 13 article “was based on interviews with pilots who had returned from Korea. The pilots who have been in Korea, and actually dropped the bombs are the ones who have made the charge.”
This was news from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, though there was no indication as to why now, over a year and a half into the war, the returning pilots had chosen to speak out about a problem with “duds.”
Lyman thought the story would not go anywhere, but stood firmly by his magazine’s reporting.
He told Kem, “it will probably be impossible to get confirmation of these charges [of the high dud rate]. In fact, he said it was likely they would be denied.” Lyman was not wrong about that.
Kem’s statement to the Ledger continued: “The pilots who dropped the bombs and their observers know what happens when a bomb is dropped, and according to Mr. Lyman they talked to a U.S. News and World Report staff man in San Francisco immediately upon their return and later in Washington. It is their firm opinion that 1 out of 5 bombs are duds. Incidentally, the U.S. News and World Report has not had anyone in the defense department challenge its story of June 13.”
Lyman was also correct about the prospects for the “duds” controversy. The story quickly dropped out of sight, and it doesn’t appear there were ever any hearings on the question in Congress.
Counterclaim: “No duds”
Enoch’s charge that the U.S. Air Force was mislabeling as “duds” biological weapons ordnance in Korea and China did not escape the notice of major U.S. media. Oland D. Russell, Far Eastern correspondent of the large Scripps‐Howard newspaper chain, weighed in on the “duds”-BW controversy in a column on July 16 (“third of a series”), as linked here in The Pittsburg Press.
“The records show,” Russell wrote, that Enoch and Quinn “flew missions on the nights they claimed but that they reported no ‘duds’ afterwards.” This was directly contrary to what Enoch and Quinn had reported.
An interpolation in the text, marked by brackets and italic typeface further noted, “The Communists charged that Quinn and Enoch were instructed to report their ‘germ bombs’ as duds to preserve secrecy.”
Actually, the “Communists” had only reported what Enoch and Quinn had said. It was Quinn and Enoch’s superior officers who ordered the use of the term “duds.” (In later “confessions” by other airmen, the term “Special Missions” was also reportedly used.) So Russell was misrepresenting what the reports had actually indicated.
Russell didn’t say where he got access to the reports by Enoch or Quinn about their bombing missions. They would have been highly classified. That may have not been a problem for Russell because Russell was, unknown to everyone at the time, also an intelligence agent for the CIA.
Possibly his information came from his contacts in the Fifth Air Force, likely the same officers who allegedly gave Russell “names and dates on the Enoch and Quinn stories.” Even more, these Air Force officers were said to “believe the fliers deliberately injected discrepancies that only our side could detect hoping to start an investigation to discredit the whole story.”
Russell didn’t say what these discrepancies were, nor whether there was any investigation. But it does seem to me he was partly right. The “duds” whistleblowing possibly was meant to stimulate an investigation into what was going on, but with the hope of unearthing the top secret biological warfare campaign. Further on, this article will consider the evidence for such a theory.
After this article was first published at Medium.com, I found a video of Lt. Quinn’s retraction of his confession. In his retraction, which the video never notes was made under threat of court martial for treason, Quinn denies ever dropping a dud. He seems to emphasize the issue, though his questioner never asked him specifically about it.
It’s worth reproducing the entire quote for interested readers. (See video, times 8:37–9:30.) Asked if he had participated “in any type of bombing raids which could conceivably be classed as germ raids or bacteriological warfare raids,” Lt. Quinn replied:
Absolutely not. I flew most of my missions in areas where I could get low at night. Most of my bombs — all of my bombs on those missions, and most of my bombs altogether, I could actually feel the concussion of them and see the explosion. I don’t think anybody could, could imagine germs or insects, no matter how selectively bred they are in laboratories, and whatever else they want to say about them, could live through something like that. I always have seen my bombs explode. That was one thing I was, I was real happy about our country about. We didn’t drop — I, I’ve never dropped a dud.
It’s easy to read into Quinn’s testimony what one wishes to see there, on both sides of the question. But the purpose of pointing it out here is to demonstrate the sensitivity at the time of the entire “duds” question.
Quinn’s point about insects unable to survive a bomb’s explosion is a red herring. In every discussion of biological bombs ever made, it’s clear that the bombs in question do not explode like regular bombs, having at most a small charge to open a panel or door on the bomb itself in order to release the sensitive payload. Much work was put into preserving the payload of such germ bombs by developing heaters inside the bombs to keep bacterial and insect vector payloads viable until release.
For instance, the E77 germ bomb, which was developed to be released by a high-altitude balloon, part of the joint Army Chemical Corps and Air Force Flying Cloud program, was discussed in the July 1953 Seventh Annual Report of the Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories. Each bomb had a container which held “approximately 3-1/2 lbs. of feathers and anti-crop pathogens... grouped centrally around a chemical type heater which maintains the proper temperature control for preserving viability of the fill” (pp. 61-62).
According to a May 1953 “status report” by R.E. Stine for the Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories, the heating element was “of the exothermic-reaction chemical type,” utilizing water in contact with a mixture of sodium monoxide and granular aluminum (pg. 37).
Elsewhere in this article, Quinn tells international investigators that the biological bombs he saw on his flights had no fuses, i.e., no standard explosive device. Many of these bombs were based on the design of the propaganda bombs used to distribute hundreds of thousands of leaflets over the troops and countryside of Korea, but instead of leaflets, a portion of the bombs opened and insects or other animal, plant, or other infected vectors (e.g. feathers) were released.
In yet another example of how the military approached the technical demands of biological weapons ordnance, as early as December 1950, a top secret report from Camp Detrick described how traditional cluster munitions were modified to deliver a biological payload. The modified M16A1 cluster bomb adapter was developed to release a biological payload. Gainsaying Lt. Quinn’s assertions regarding exploding bombs in his confession retraction, there was no explosion in these bombs. Instead, “packages containing the feathers would open and the contents be discharged upon the functioning of the cluster,” that is, when the cluster bomblets were released from the mother bomb. As a result, dozens of cluster bombs would drop, opening at predetermined elevations to spread their germ-laden payload.
A CIA Journalist-Agent Covers-Up Extent of Japan’s Biological Warfare Program
A few days after his article on the “duds” controversy, Russell was back on the “germ war” beat. In a July 18 article, the Scripps-Howard reporter responded to charges in the “Communist” press that the former head of Japan’s biological warfare program, Lt. General Shiro Ishii, had reportedly “arrived in Korea on a freighter last December, ‘carrying all the necessary equipment for bacteriological warfare, including cholera germs, gas which induces blood poisoning, and pestilence germs.”
Russell, who was described by The Pittsburg Press editor as “a former Army Intelligence specialist [who] recently completed a thorough investigation of the Red germ war charges,” conceded that Ishii had previously “headed a big Japanese experimental laboratory for conducting germ warfare while he was in Japan’s Manchurian Army.”
“Moreover,” Russell continued, during World War II, Ishii “was in charge of germ warfare experiments including cholera, typhus and other epidemic diseases. But it’s also a fact that neither Japan nor any other country used germ warfare in World War II.”
Russell claimed his investigation showed that Ishii had never left Tokyo, and that he owned and operated a small inn. Moreover, he had never left Japan since the end of World War II.
Of course, we know today that Japan did use germ warfare in World War II, in addition to “barbarous experiments performed on living humans.” Moreover, a deliberate attempt to hide that fact was undertaken by U.S. military and intelligence authorities, who secretly had granted amnesty to Ishii and his researchers for war crimes.
Unknown to Russell’s readers, and not revealed for two decades, Oland Russell was at the time he wrote these articles in the employ of the CIA.
According to a New York Times investigation in 1977, Russell was a “journalist-agent,” one of dozens the CIA used. The article, “Varying Ties to CIA Confirmed in Inquiry,” said that of more than 200 journalists the Times investigated, “[m]ore than 50 individuals were found to have had some links to the C.I.A.”
The Times outed a number of these CIA-linked reporters, including “ the late Edward P. Kennedy, a one‐time reporter for The Indianapolis Star who, while with the C.I.A., worked for the English‐language Japan Times in Tokyo, the Okinawa Morning Star and The Bangkok Post; M. J. Gorman, the editor of The Caracas Daily Journal in the mid‐1950’s, and the late Oland D. Russell, a Far Eastern correspondent of the Scripps‐Howard chain.”
In fact, Russell was more than a “correspondent.” A news item a few years earlier, in 1975, in The St. Joseph Gazette identified Russell as “news editor of the Scripps-Howard bureau in Washington,” at least by late 1949.
Russell was dead by the time the story of his CIA employment was published. His contributions on the Korean War biological warfare controversy can only be considered dubious.
As for General Shiro Ishii, head of Japan’s Unit 731 biological warfare complex, we don’t have definitive documentation of his movements in post-war Japan, or of his travels abroad. But it’s worth noting that he did disappear from his home in late December 1949 and at least for the first few months of 1950, according to AP reports at the time. As late as July 1955, at least one AP report said that Ishii had been “reported missing since 1950.”
But Ishii may have never had to leave Japan to make an impact. In January 1951, the Soviet newspaper Pravda reported that the U.S. had “established a bacteriological warfare center in Japan under the direction of former Japanese Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii…. reports on Ishii’s work in Japan were going to an American bacteriological warfare research center at Camp Dietrich [sic], Md.”
While we can’t verify the presence of a U.S. biological laboratory under Ishii’s command, it is true that numerous reports were sent from Ishii and his associates to the U.S. biological warfare authorities in the Army’s Chemical Corps.
Readers can see these reports online. For instance, “The Report of ‘A’” on anthrax experiments was sent from former Japanese Unit 731 members, perhaps Ishii himself, to researchers in the U.S. government’s biological warfare program, most likely to the Army Chemical Corps’ Intelligence Branch. See also the reports on glanders and plague that were sent to Ft. Detrick.
In June 1952, the same month that Senator Kem was calling for a Senate investigation into the “duds” scandal, Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that Ishii, “who previously had refused to see reporters, denied he had any connection with United Nations forces in Korea.” The story does not say where Ishii was located, though the article is datelined “Tokyo.”
Captured U.S. Pilots Tell of How Germ Warfare Was Organized
There is no specific link connecting the Kem or U.S. News and World Report stories about an alleged high rate of duds in the Korean War and the accusation that germ warfare drops by the U.S. Air Force were hidden by reporting them as “duds.” While the two stories are only separated by some five or six weeks, it could simply be a coincidence that both concerned “duds.” It would be a hell of a coincidence, though.
But the temporal link isn’t the only possible connection. Both stories originated from reports from pilots who had flown bombing missions in Korea. The denials came from the Department of Defense, the very government agency that was being charged with germ warfare to begin with. The only known press investigation into the Enoch-Quinn revelations at the time, by Oland Russell’s Scripps-Howard news agency, is contaminated by Russell’s CIA connections (secret at the time).
Unreported by anyone until now, in interviews with members of the International Scientific Commission (ISC), two Air Force pilots captured by the Chinese, 1st Lt. Paul Kniss and 2nd Lt. Floyd O’Neal, pointed to Japan as a possible assembly site for the biological bombs.
Kniss, in particular, mentioned Tachigawa (aka Tachikawa) Air Base on the west side of Tokyo as a large facility that could have been involved in assembling the bombs. Kniss also told ISC members that Tachigawa was where U.S. war planes were outfitted for spray apparatus for bacteriological aerosols.
Tachigawa Air Force base during the Korean War was the headquarters for Far East Air Materiel Command (FEAMCOM). There’s no reason Kniss or O’Neal — who didn’t put in their written confessions the information about U.S. bases in Japan being involved in logistics of the germ war, but offered it up under ISC questioning — would make this material up. As for FEAMCOM, it certainly had the manpower and expertise to do the job.
According to a Spring 2002 article, “USAF Logistics in the Korean War,” in Air Power History, “Air Material Command, commanded by Lt. Gen. Benjamin W. Chidlaw, headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, served as the primary logistics support for the Air Force” (pg. 49). Its duties included “supply, maintenance, modification and repair,” as well as materiel acquisition.
The Tachigawa air depot, a “major supply and maintenance” site, was capable of performing “aircraft, equipment and component overhaul and modifications” (pg. 50–51).
When the ISC had the opportunity to interview POW flyers Kniss, O’Neal, Enoch and Quinn, in a site very near the Yalu River in early August 1952, 1st Lt. Kniss, who had only graduated pilots’ school eight months earlier, was asked about how the germ bombs were assembled. Kniss first mentioned that the ordanance depots in South Korea, such as Wonju, were too small for the job. He assumed the germ bombs were put together somewhere in the United States and then flown to Japan and South Korea.
In his written statement to Chinese interrogators, as reproduced in the ISC report, Lt. Kniss had stated the bombs had come to the airfield “from Wonju in a special truck.” The bombs themselves weren’t loaded until 15 minutes before taking off, compared with regular bombs, which were mounted in place two hours before a mission. There was a special loading crew from “the ordnance department,” men dressed in “white uniforms,” with “masks and gloves.” (ISC report, pg. 581)
Kniss told the Chinese that any germ bomb dropped would “be reported as a dud when the pilot returns from his mission.” (pg. 584) His statement to the Chinese interrogators was dated July 20, 1952.
Kniss’s questioning by ISC member, Dr. Andrea Andreen, a Swedish clinical laboratory director from Stockholm, took place maybe two weeks after he signed his “confession.” She pressed Kniss a bit more. Wasn’t it possible, she asked, given the amount of time it would take to transport materiel from the U.S. to Korea, that there might be a base in Japan “that could do the job”?
Kniss replied, “Well, yes, I mean, it is [a] known fact that the American forces have very large bases in Japan, like Tachigawa, one of the largest air bases I’ve ever seen…. I mean, it’s very huge and it’s very possible that they could even have it there right at Tachigawa because that is where our aircraft went to be fixed up with the germ spraying. I mean, they could, they could well be produced right there.”
Kniss continued, “That is a air material command base, too, I mean, that is a big supply base, the supplies come in from America to Korea, the base, I mean, you can tell * * * I think it’s about 15 miles long. I mean, that will give an estimate of how large it actually is” (pg. 11, asterisk-ellipses in original).
Dr. Andreen also quizzed the pilot Floyd O’Neal about where the germ warfare ordnance could have been assembled. O’Neal replied that prior to coming to Korea, he had been told that the preparation for the germ war “was being done at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland.” The bombs were being brought to the Far East “by air transport, every 2 weeks or so.” (pg. 2)
O’Neal did offer that Japan could have been a site for bomb assembly. He told Andreen, “I would say less than 72 hours, direct, if the germ bombs were brought all the way from Maryland. I do not know of any other center. There is a very good possibility, of course, of there being some of [sic] Japan, where they have extensive facilities left over from the last war.”
O’Neal told ISC investigators that the research done to develop more cold-resistant insects and bacteria was also done at Aberdeen. “The Chemical Corps and the Army Ordnance Department have quite extensive laboratories in Aberdeen,” he said (pg. 7).
Note: The ISC’s interrogation of the four flyers was transmitted in English morse code by New China News Agency between September 21 and 25. It was picked up and transcribed by the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and these are the copies referred to in this article. Many thanks to researcher Alice Atlas for initially tracking down these rare reports!
Germ War Caused Demoralization Among Flyers
One final hypothesis exists as to why the “duds” issue was brought up by pilots returning to the United States after their rotation was finished overseas. It seems possible that the pilots were trying to bring some attention to the “duds” issue because they were upset over the biological warfare program.
Because of the secrecy of the program they could not speak out, but it’s possible they hoped that raising a ruckus over “duds” would mean authorities back in Washington, D.C., or in the press, would look more into it. Because of secrecy protocols, they could not tell anyone about the actual germ warfare.
It seems further unlikely that these pilots were unaware of the headlines generated by Enoch and Quinn’s broadcasts about the germ war, with its emphasis on how the bombs dropped were referred to officially as “duds” for secrecy sake. Enoch’s talk of “duds” may have opened an avenue to get the news out.
How do we know that the pilots might be upset about the germ warfare? Because that’s what they told their interrogators over and over again.
Most of the flyers interviewed by the Chinese, and also by the ISC investigators, spoke about shock, horror, and demoralization by Air Force and Marine Corps personnel involved in or hearing about the germ warfare program.
A few examples will have to suffice for brevity’s sake, though there are many more instances of such claims than could be reproduced here. I ask the readers’ forbearance, but these quotes are given as evidence of how the biological warfare campaign was received by those meant to fight it.
In his statement to the ISC investigators, referenced above, Paul Kniss described the morose mood of Air Force flyers after having undertaken germ war missions. Air crew didn’t talk about it much after a mission was completed. Kniss said there was “vast discontent,” and he believed that men had begun drinking excessively at the officers’ club as a result. “Fights were frequent.”
As to his own role in the germ war program, Kniss said, “I can never be able to express in words just how much it actually sickened me, and I know the other men reacted the same way.”
The whole war bothered Kniss, and he singled out for criticism the use of saturation bombing, the massive use of napalm, the bombing of non-military targets, and the strafing of civilians. The lack of progress in the peace talks “was another thing that had the men very bitter…. Why continue the war, why continue having people killed on both sides, why this unnecessary slaughter that was going on?”
Consider similar comments from other “confessions” or “depositions,” such as that of Marine Corps Colonel Frank Schwable to his Chinese interrogators: “I do not say the following in defense of anyone, myself included, I merely report as an absolutely direct observation that every officer when first informed that the United States is using bacteriological warfare in Korea is both shocked and ashamed.”
Schwable continued, “I remember specifically asking Colonel Wendt what were Colonel Gaylor’s reactions, when he was first informed and he reported to me that Colonel Gaylor was both horrified and stupefied and said he’d like to ‘turn in his suit.’ Everyone felt like that when they first heard of it, and their reactions are what might well be expected from a fair minded, self respecting nation of people.”
U.S. Marine Corps Major Roy H. Bley was Frank Schwable’s co-pilot on their doomed flight returning to base. He was an ordnance officer. In his written deposition to his captors, Bley said he was asked by Colonel Clark, the logistics officer of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, what he (Bley) thought of the use of germ bombs.
Bley replied, “Sir, it’s not only against my own principles but it would also certainly leave a black mark against the Marine Corps’ reputation”.
Bley continued, “The colonel said he didn’t approve of its use either, nor did anyone else in the Wing but we were ordered to do so by higher authority and there was nothing to do but obey our commands.”
First Lt. Howard Hitchens was a navigator on B-26 bombing runs in Korea. According to his statement to Chinese interrogators, he took part in seven germ warfare missions. He was shot down on October 29, 1952 on his 35th overall mission. He had bailed out alone.
Hitchens wrote, “The main feeling that seems to pervade the air around Bacteriological Warfare is one of shame and fear. None of the men who participates in it is proud of his job. But no one that I can remember ever refused to fly one of the missions.”
John Quinn met with the ISC on August 2, 1952, having been brought to the meeting from his POW camp. Someone had told him his wife was giving birth to a baby that very day, so he admitted he was feeling “emotional.”
Quinn told the ISC group, “As a soldier I took part in germ warfare. But as a normal human being I hate it and I hate those responsible for it. If they are not stopped — if germ warfare isn’t outlawed — though today it’s just being used in Korea, tomorrow it may be used in other parts of the world — perhaps my own family will be the target.”
In his talk with the ISC members, Kenneth Enoch expressed the wish that the American people be informed about the war crimes being committed, including germ warfare. Could this have been the kind of sentiment that possibly motivated the complaints from pilots about “duds”, which surfaced briefly in the U.S. press in Spring 1952? It certainly seems a possibility.
Enoch asked the ISC delegates questioning him to “make their voices heard among the American people…. You can reveal all your damning evidence and testimony you’ve seen and heard here in North Korea during your inspection, and in Northeast China, and so when the American people come to realize the terrible truth, the horrible significance of this challenge to humanity, they will rise as one to throw down the people who’ve launched this thing” (pg. 10).
Enoch’s feelings were echoed by Lt. Floyd O’Neal in his testimony. O’Neal castigated the U.S. press and government.
“I know the manner in which the newspapers and radio commentators deal with news. They distort the facts. They leave out the facts. They tell the people only what they want to the people to hear,” the Air Force pilot said.
“The general public does not know the truth about germ warfare being waged in Korea and Northeast China…. They must be brought out of this ignorance of the fact that germ warfare is being used over here….
“I hope I’ve inspired you a little bit. Perhaps that’s a vain hope. But you must understand the urgency — the need, the crying need of the whole world to know these things. Thank you” (pgs. 7 and 9).
This article was first published on March 24, 2023 at Medium.com under the title, “‘Duds’ or Germ Bombs? A Forgotten Korean War Controversy.” The current article reflects some minor editorial corrections, and the addition of a few paragraphs describing the development of both the E77 balloon bomb and the modified M16A1 cluster bomb adapter.
Thanks for this read
Superb research...imagine if it was the Russians doing this how much attention would have been made..as usual the MSM slept..