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Or did he smile because now he was in charge and could
make life and death decisions over British, French, and
Americans whose governments had humiliated Asia for so
many centuries? Who knows why he smiled, but he smiled,
and I remember that smile, for our family was to be its target a
few weeks later on the day we parted forever.

It was like a comic-book cartoon: the stocky droopy-
mustached representative of the descendants of the Sun God
whose objective was to found a new East Asia Co-prosperity
Sphere through the might of the Japanese Imperial Army, and
the nervous trio of representatives of the Christian Church
whose objective was to found a new world order based on the
precepts of a Hebrew/Christian God.

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He spoke a little English and seemed very happy. He told us that a Major Takahashi would meet us at the Customs House office at 9:30 A.M. We found the Customs House perfumed with phenol. An army aide introduced us to the major, and the major, in halting English invited us back at 5:00 P.M. We were there again at 5:00 P.M., waited in vain until 6:00 P.M. when we were told by the aide to come back early the next day. At 8:00 A.M. the next morning we were told to return at 1:00 P.M. At 1:00 P.M. we approached the Major as he came in, requested a few minutes to talk, and were asked to wait until he had lunch. We waited until 3:30 P.M., when he left his office. We tried again.

"Go home and wait at your churches," he replied imperiously as he brushed past us. Foiled in the attempt at a personal

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interview we went back home to prepare for the meetings at
our churches. Up to this time the Japanese soldiers had not
molested our centers, but they were looting the Chinese shops
and homes of everything not previously looted by the Chinese.

April 28, 1941

I threw away my school schedule and built a little shack
beside the front gate so those of us who watched the gate could
keep dry from the spring rains. During the previous days we
had been reorganizing for hard times: planting vegetables, and
getting another rabbit breeder from one of my Chinese teacher
colleagues at the school. It was possible, but not easy, to buy
rice which we needed in great quantities for the center for
which we were responsible. Pastor Ching organized literacy

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classes for the people in the center. I started the last section of
my second year of language study, learning to write 400
Chinese characters and 100 radicals (basic elements which
divide all characters into 214 classifications).

May 7, 194.

My diary noted that this was a futile day attempting to
get permission to import food for the starving. We had
contacted the International Red Cross in Shanghai for a
shipload of rice and wheat. But the Japanese who had
admonished us to feed the hungry refused permission to import
grain. But Ellen brightened that dismal day with an evening
celebration of my thirty second birthday, complete with a
birthday cake lighted with red Chinese candles (a luxury which

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made me feel guilty). And I spent that night chasing robbers. Except for the birthday celebration, this was the pattern of our lives during the May days of 1941 in Ningbo.

We climbed under our mosquito nets into bed with a prayer that the next day would bring some new hope. Instead, we were awakened from a sound sleep by the frantic ringing of the Dzong Teh school bell, a prearranged advance warning system in case of an attempted break-in. I grabbed the club at the side of our bed and dashed barefoot in pajamas toward the gate house across the campus. By the time I got there the gatekeeper was already examining a hole in the brick wall. The light of his flickering candle cast shadows over the articles left behind in the robber's hurry to get away: an iron and a hammer used to breach the wall, and a big brass gong which

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we used to advantage later. We propped some boards and
school furniture against the hole in the wall and retired again,
but every creak in our old house, every tree branch that
squeaked against its mate in the night breeze, or any unknown
noise in the street robbed us of sleep more valuable than the
few items that had been stolen.

We were relieved to hear the early morning street sounds
of the peddler praising his fresh bean curd; the rattle of the
cart wheels on cobblestone streets as the collectors of night soil
gathered their contributions from every household, and the
chanteys of sailors hoisting their sails for a trip up the river.
That day's work schedule had been established by the robbery
the night before. We checked the school for missing items,
which turned out to be the clock from the chapel, a few small

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utensils, and a little rice. We hired a brick mason to patch the
hole in the wall and designed a more frightening warning
system with a long wire strung between the gatehouse at the
school and the gatehouse a few yards from our home. At both
ends we hung old woks and copper pots and pans close enough
together to make a frightful racket all along the way
when the wire was pulled at either end.

It worked well, for a few days later robbers had my
bicycle almost to the top of the wall, ready to be lowered by
ladder to the street, when the alarm reverberated all over the
neighborhood. They dropped the bike on our side of the wall
and ran away with the ladder. Evidently the word got around
that we were not easy targets for there were no more attempted
break-ins.

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Pastor Ching advised us that the robberies all over the city should be no cause to alarm us about our personal safety. He reminded us that the robbers were hungry people, many of them with hungry children at home, and I remembered Jean Valjean in *Les Miserables*. I was glad that I never had to use my club.

May 14, 1941

The day began helping Pastor Ching transport several large bags of rice to our refugee center ended in another paroxysm of fear over fleas. When I got back home at about 6:00 P.M., I said to Ellen, "I feel itchy, especially under my collar." She turned down the back of my collar and found several fleas, a sure sign that there must be more on my body.

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We devised a contamination protocol. She had secured a Flit gun (one of the original household insect killers popular on the American market at that time), and the procedure was to spread a large white sheet on the floor. I stood in the middle of the sheet while she stood at the edge, Flit gun ready and aimed. As I undressed inch by inch down to the nude she fired at every tiny brown spot she could see either on me or on my clothing. At the end we counted fifty-two fleas on the sheet, belly up, each one a possible death warrant, but still an insignificant collection compared to the 145 million produced in 4,500 flea incubators located in remote areas of Manchuria.⁸

My clothes were given the strong soap-kerosene treatment while the Flit preparation was gently washed from my tender skin. Even though I had been protected with plague serum, we

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counted the incubation days for the plague with trepidation,
reliving the life and death schedule of a victim. By the tenth
day we knew that we had been granted another stay of
execution.

May 19, 1941

The Japanese Special Service Bureau requested all
Christian leaders to attend meetings at their own churches. The
officials requested the religious organizations to help in the
establishment of the peace and prosperity of the new
government. They wanted the churches to continue to feed and
clothed the poor, to care for the homeless, and to educate the
children. No problem, that was what we were there for.

The problem for me was a more profound personal one.
On the way home from the meeting of pastors with

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the Special Services Bureau I found a beggar at our
gate. He was a scabby skeleton who lay with his head
on a filthy burlap sack from which he groaned and
begged from all who went by. The Chinese usually dropped
copper pieces (perhaps equal to one hundredth of an American
penny) into beggars' baskets, but at that time most Chinese had
no coppers not needed for their own existence. I gave the
beggar fifty cents (Chinese money) and asked him to move on.
He picked up his burlap head cushion and a bedroll and walked
away. No amount of satisfaction over the fact that we were
caring for several hundred refugees inside the gate could blot
out the feeling of remorse for not being able, or not willing, to
give more than 50 Chinese cents to that beggar at our gate, and
there were thousands like him in the city. He needed more

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than money. He needed enough food to make him strong,
enough medicine to make him healthy, and enough work to
give him self respect and independence. He needed more than I
could provide, and the money I gave him was nothing at all.

Contacts with Japanese officers and soldiers during these
weeks of care for the refugees in our center were generally
benign and sometimes pleasant, and we learned that the war
was harder on them than it was on us. An officer by the name
of Tanagouchi, who helped us get the Lengyel family back to
Yuyao, told us that he had been in China three years, and that
he would not get home until the war was over. When these
young men were sent to China they were destined to stay until
the war was over or until their ashes were sent
home in burial urns. A Major Kishinami told us that he had a

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three-year old son whom he had never seen. On June 4, 1941,
while biking into the city to see if I could find plague serum,
a Japanese sentry pointed his gun at me and made me get off
my bike.

"You American?" he said in broken English.

"Yes, American", I answered.

"You Christian?" he asked again.

"Yes, Christian," I said with more confidence.

"I Christian," he responded, crossing himself.

"Good," I said, as he waved me along with the point of
his bayonet. Again, I discovered that no plague serum was
available.

On June 20, 1941, when I bought tickets and secured
passes to leave Ningbo for Shanghai, the military ticket agent,

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who spoke good English, made this interesting statement,
"Japanese and American individuals can be intimate although
our two nations are not friendly." I agreed with him and
added that I hoped our two nations could soon be friendly.
(This was five months before Pearl Harbor.)

One encounter frightened me more than all the others.
Coming in the front door of our home from an errand in the
city I saw a Japanese officer's sword lying across the little
table in the front hall. Visions of all the atrocities and rapes I
had heard about in other parts of China raced through my
mind. My club! Upstairs on the floor beside my bed! Grab
the sword! Then I heard Ellen asking someone if he would
have sugar in his tea. She was passing him a cup of tea when
I stepped in. He had called, he explained, to see if we were

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okay. As he left I picked three blue Japanese Irises from my garden and gave them to him with a bow. He responded with a bow. I bowed again, and he bowed again as he backed sideways toward the gate, his sword clanking against his highly polished military boots. I bowed him out of the gate. He bowed. Then, taking advantage of the closing gate, he sneaked in an extra bow, a winner by one!

Back in the house, I congratulated Ellen on her remarkable composure. "What else could one do?" she replied. We hugged.

During this period I was reading H. G. Welles' *Experiment in Autobiography*. I copied a couple of sentences in my diary with a note indicating how irrelevant they were in our situation. "If life is not good enough for you," he wrote,

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"change it." And "If you want something sufficiently, take it
and damn the consequences." How could I cut down the looter
on our street whom the Japanese had hanged to the wall by his
thumbs and disregard the consequences of harm to my family?
How could I interfere with a firing squad executing a looter by
the side of the road as I biked out to school and damn the
consequences, not only to my family, but our whole program
of refugee centers?

May 26, 1941

On May 25th we discovered a dead rat in our parlor and
more fleas in the house. A few days earlier I had set out more
rat poison and I caught two in traps. When rats die, their fleas
abandon the carcasses for more

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93

pleasant temporary lodging until they can migrate to more
succulent hosts, and our home seemed to be their favorite
Holiday House. Multiply the consternation caused by three
dead rats in our house by the 3 million required to produce
plague pathogens in the laboratories in Manchuria and one gets
the significance and size of the Japanese biological warfare in
China.⁹ And on May 26th, while on an errand at the hospital I
heard that there was bubonic plague in the city again: That
news hit me like a rifle shot. I came home immediately and
told Ellen who screamed as if she had been stabbed. So we
both went to work on the old house again, scrubbing, carrying
all our clothing and bedding out to be shaken and aired in the
sun. Even though we had been protected by plague serum,

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we could never take a chance. By the end of the day we could
hardly stand.

The only chance I ever had to use my club was on an
intruder a few days later. About 1:00 A.M. I was awakened by
a thumping and rustling in the little room we used as a
bathroom, opening off our bedroom. The bathroom was
equipped with a porcelain wash basin and water pitcher on a
small washstand, a big ceramic basin, somewhat like a huge
decorated flower pot in which we could sit for a bath in water
carried up from the first floor, and there was a commode
which had to be carried out and cleaned every morning. In my
anxiety to get out from under the mosquito net under which we
slept I got my fingers and toes tangled in the mesh, but
managed to get free without waking Ellen.

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95

Clutching my club in my right hand, I sneaked barefoot
toward the bathroom door where I reached in and flicked on
the dim electric light, burning at about one third capacity as the
central power plant conserved energy for the city. Silently as a
moonbeam I inched into the bathroom and quickly closed the
door to prevent his escape. There he was, clinging to the
rough plaster wall above the bathtub. His eyes glowed orange
in the dimly reflected light, his ears and whiskers laid back, a
thin line of bubbles shimmered along his lips tightened over
dagger sharp teeth. The bubbles told me that he had been
feasting on our precious bath soap. An easy target! Doubly
angered, I raised my club with both hands and brought it down
squarely where the middle of his back should have been. But
he had jumped nimbly to a spot above the mirror and my
carefully aimed blow smashed a hole in the soft plaster wall.

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The amah (nanny) in the next room screamed that robbers had broken into the house. Ellen shouted, "Archie! Where are you?" The children woke up crying. I took a full sideswipe at the rat above the mirror and smashed the glass with a great clatter. He jumped across the room behind me. The whole household was now screaming. I went after him again, but he scuttled back of the wash-stand out of reach. I had him trapped this time. Putting down my club I rushed the wash stand like a linebacker hitting a halfback on his way to a touchdown. I pushed the wash-stand against the wall until a faint gurgling sound died to nothing. Gently pulling the stand away from the wall, I heard a thud as his body dropped to the floor. Sweating and triumphant, I picked the beast up by the tip of his tail, held him out at arm's length and opened the

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door to the bedroom. Ellen and the amah ran back to the other side of the bedroom screaming while I opened the bedroom window and dropped him. It seemed like a month until I heard him hit the ground below like an over-ripe tomato. Another half-hour of decontamination of the bathroom with our Flit gun, then we all tried to sleep, but the night belonged to the rat.

## Epilogue

### June 21, 1941

News arrived on June 11 that we could leave June 13, but that we must first get inoculated again with Japanese serum which was now suddenly available at the Zhejiang Provincial Bank, the bank to which I had gone to draw out the Riverbend

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School funds the day before the invasion. But our boat did not arrive until June 20, leaving us time to rebound from the debilitation of the plague shots and for me to take one last exam of the five year requirement on Chinese Language and Culture; this one to answer fifty questions on Chinese history and culture. We got our tickets and passes early on the 20th and were informed at 1:00 P.M. that the ship would not leave until the next day at 5:00 P.M. The next day, we and our baggage were sprayed from top to bottom with disinfectant as we walked over the phenol soaked padding at the foot of the gangplank of the little ship taking us to Shanghai. The same smiling officer with the long downward pointing mustache, who had met the representatives of the International Relief Committee at the Cathedral two months earlier, waved his arm

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in goodbye and said, "We hope you will be back soon!" I
wonder now how much he knew about the plans for Pearl
Harbor, and since then I have also wondered if his bones were
among the bones of other Japanese soldiers which I saw four
years later strewn along the Burma Road.

July 3, 1941

Aboard the Japanese passenger ship, "Tatuta Maru," we
were so deadened with fatigue and anxiety that we had no
feelings at all, except the comforting pulse of a big ship
picking up speed down the yellow, silt-laden Yangtze estuary.

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January, 1992, 51 years later.

We have learned that The Military Tribunal of the
Primorye Military Area of the Soviet Union, meeting in
Khaborovsk, December 23-30, 1949, and the International
Military Tribunal for the Far East meeting in Tokyo May 3,
1946, uncovered a scorpion's nest of international intrigue and
complicity which ended in the commuting of the sentences of
the Japanese who conducted biological warfare in China and
restored them to places of prestige in Japanese society. This
included a cover-up which began with General Douglas
MacArthur and continues to this day.¹⁰

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Some friends who read the first draft of this manuscript said that our experience with bubonic plague spread by plane was scientifically impossible. I discussed this with our son, Edward, and our daughter, Carolyn, who lived through the experience with us. They said, "Dad, you had better get indisputable evidence which will support your story."

In December, 1991, I called Dr. Alan Barnes, Chief, Plague Section Bacterial Zoonoses Branch of the Department of Health & Human Services in Fort Collins, Colorado. I explained in some detail the manuscript I was writing and asked for scientific data which would support our experience. His most considered scientific opinion was, "what you describe is highly unlikely, but remotely possible." But, wisely, Dr. Barnes referred me to the Asian Division of the Library of

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Congress where Ms. Andrea Qu put me in touch with the
research materials used in this manuscript. In additiom to
extensive corroboration of our personal experience I learned
that the American, Japanese, Soviet, and British governments
had been involved in an international cover-up of the gruesome
story of the Japanese experiments in bacteriological warfare in
China from the time of General Douglas MacArthur until the
present. The reasons for the international cover-up are military
and political, which is another story.

The Japanese use of bacteriological warfare in China and the
subsequent war crimes trials stimulated the Allies to beef up
their own experiments which did not cease at the end of World
War II. On January 5, 1992, CBS reported in "60 Minutes"
that one American stockpile of bacteriological and chemical

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weapons contained enough lethal material to wipe out the entire
population of the earth. We know that Europe and the
Russian Commonwealth have similar stockpiles, and no nation
knows how to destroy them safely. Add to that the
proliferating stockpiles of nuclear weapons which can destroy
the earth many times over, and one wonders.

Is it that human beings have some inbred moral disorder
that impels them to self-destruction without waiting for the
cosmic cataclysms which formed the earth in the first place?

oOo

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Epilogue

# Our daughter, Carolyn, who was born fifty-four years ago during the plague attack on Ningbo, China, has now completed the cycle of her experience with bubonic plague. She is administrator of the Ramah Navaho Health Center in Pine Hill, New Mexico. She wrote recently of her first experience with bubonic plague in the United States.

"Our Family Nurse Practitioner diagnosed her first plague case this season and sent him off pronto to the hospital by ambulance. He had come in complaining of headache, fever, general body aches, especially in the glands.

(The same symptoms we looked for in Ningbo 40 years ago when Carolyn was less than a week old.)

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He is about 30 years of age and has no known alcohol or diabetic problems. When the nurse found an enlarged gland and a darkened spot on one thigh, she suspected the problem. He had a high fever of 101...By the time they got to the Zuni hospital an hour later, his fever was 104. The bubonic plague was confirmed by initial testing that afternoon at Zuni and he was put on an I-V with strong antibiotics. Blood samples were also sent to the Center for Disease Control where the plague was re-confirmed. The patient has recovered and is back at home."

\# The People's Republic of China has made a tourist attraction of the site where the Japanese manufactured plague bacteria at Pingfen in north China.

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# A recently discovered manuscript of a speech that Emperor Hirohito's brother gave to the Japanese troops in 1944 denounced cruel acts of Japanese troops. Although biological warfare was not specifically mentioned, it can be assumed that he was also aware of those internationally banned atrocities.

ARC/Jan-95

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**Additional Data Continues to Appear:**

*The Denver Post* "Russia dragging feet on germ weapons",
Aug 31-92.

" "Moscow grants access to germ warfare
facilities", Sept 15-92.

*The New York Times*, "History's Unfinished Business-A
Message to Emperor Akihito and the Japanese People".
(Full page ad by the Ad Hoc Committee on Japan's Wartime
Responsibilities, The Chinese Alliance for Memorial and
Justice) Oct 18-92.

*The New York Times Book Review*, "Collective Amnesia in
Tokyo."

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BIO-WAR LOG

Aug 91--Began as an address to The Men's Club, First
Presbyterian Church of Englewood, NJ.

Sept 1-91--May 25-92 Circulated to amily and friends for
critical comment.

Ellen, Paul and Rachael, Betty Grossman, Carolyn, Ed, Gail
and Steve, William and Martha, Frank and Jean

Woo, Dolores, Peter Grossman, Fred Rein, Barbara Soyster
for editing, Bolton, Cowles, Karen Whiteney, Yen abd Lori
Whitney, Jeri-Lou Maus, George and Hanna Sgalitzer, Ernst
Lengyel, Debbi Soled, Fr. Malatesta, Doug Merwin, Anton
Ivanaovich, Andrea Qu, Ralph Covel, Lisa, Paige Kempner,
Alan Barnes, Curtis and Marion, Courtney and Blandine
Hafela, Norman Chang, Jean McGill.

Sept 30-91--THE NEW YORKER. Oct 28-91 Doubtful but will
read. Feb. 2-92 Re-submit. **Feb 12-92 rejected.**

Feb. 26-92--Georges Borchardt Agent). **Rejected.**

Sept. 2-92--HEALTH. **Apr 8-93--lost, suggest inquiry.**

Mar 3-93--NEW YORKER. (Revised version)
**Apr-20-93 Reject**

Aug 11-93--Ben Cowles

Mar 23-94--Dr. James Fish

July 8-94--Enquiry--THE LUTHERAN **Reject. July 16-94**

July 9-94--Enquiry--Janet Dight (Agent) **No new clients**
**July 18-94**

July 19-94--THE ATLANTIC ((Enquiry) **Reject. AUG 8-94**