Terrible fate: Captain Marvin Watkins, top left, and his crew were downed over Japan. Six of them and two others not pictured were dissected alive or subjected to other terrible medical experiments at Kyushu University. Pictured in the back row (l to r) are: Marvin S. Watkins (interrogated and released at the end of war) William R. Fredericks (died in medical experiment), Howard T. Shingledecker, (fate unknown), Charles M. Kearns (died at crash site), Dale E. Plambeck (died in medical experiment) Front row: Robert C. Johnson (died at crash site), Teddy J. Ponczka (died in medical experiment), Robert B. Williams (died in medical experiment), Leon E. Czarnecki (died in medical experiment), Leo C. Oeinck (died at crash site), John C. Colehower (died in medical experiment)
Some of the POWs had parts of their brains and livers removed in macabre experiments, while others were injected with seawater. Details of the experiments have been hushed for the past 70 years by the university. A visitor is pictured looking at the exhibit at Kyushu University
The soldiers were flying a B-29 bomber, pictured, when it was shot down over the skies of Japan. Eight of the men on board were taken to the Kyushu Medical School and experimented on. None survived the vivisections
Captain Marvin Watkins and an unknown number of hastily assembled crew boarded their B-29 Superfortress bomber on the evening of the 5 May 1945.
They took off on a bombing mission against an airfield in Fukuoka in the south of Japan.
It was just a few months before Japan would surrender, but the final few months of the war were bitterly fought.
Mainland Japan had been within range of US bombers since November 1944 and the Japanese showed little mercy to downed pilots.
Captain Watkins' aircraft was rammed and destroyed by a Japanese fighter flown by 19-year-old Kinzou Kasuya.
Local residents on the ground reported seeing about a dozen parachutes.
One US airman was killed when another Japanese fighter flew through his parachute, cut the cords and sent him plummeting to the ground.
Another crew member drew his pistol when he touched the ground and opened fire on the Japanese approaching him. When he reached his last bullet, he shot himself dead.
The local residents stabbed another crewman to death and left others with knife wounds.
Local Army officers then sent Watkins to Tokyo for interrogation. He survived the war in a PoW camp.
The rest of the crew were handed over to the medical staff at Kyushu University where they were subjected to the terrible experiments.
WAR CRIMES IN THE NAME OF THE EMPERORThe Japanese armed forces committed a wide range of war crimes during brutal combat in the Pacific and China.
Images of Japanese soldiers using captured enemies for bayonet practice have become the symbol of Japanese barbarity, and the ordeals endured by Allied prisoners on the Bataan Death March and construction of the Burma-Siam railroad are well known in popular culture.
Allied airmen who were shot down over Japanese held territory could usually expect to be killed if they were able to bail out, often after terrible torture or a short arbitrary 'trial'.
But aside from the atrocities at Kyushu University, a group of medics known as Unit 731 carried out thousands of experiments on Chinese and Russian prisoners of war.
In a camp in northern China, thousands of prisoners were infected with various diseases and subjected to invasive surgery without anesthesia to study the effects. Limbs were also amputated and re-attached in unnatural positions, and some victims' esophegeal tracts were attached directly to their intestines.
Others were used to test grenades and flame throwers.
The architects of Unit 731 were given immunity after the war so Soviet and US forces could study their data on biological warfare.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3028694/U-S-POWs-shot-Japan-70-years-ago-dissected-ALIVE-macabre-experiments-controversial-new-exhibition-shows.html
