Something else also happened in the course of the second World War.
Again anticipated by the first World War, but now taken to a scale in the, an
intensity that, we had not really seen before.
I've said something earlier in an earlier lecture about the relationship between
scientific discovery and warfare. Technological innovation and warfare.
Within the second world war, in particular, a scientific revolution was
brewing. Because the nature of the
industrialization of warfare meant that the edge would go, not just to societies
able to mobilize resources, but the societies that would enjoy a scientific
edge in the rivalry between the Belligerents.
For the war impelled more scientific research, in engineering the creation of
jets, and of course in the use of atomic energy.
This was, we can call, deep total war. Deep because it involved now, not just a
war of combatants against combatants, but all non-combatants against all
non-combatants. In World War II, 55 million people died
fighting. Half of them were civilians.
In one extreme a course of this scientific revolution within war was the Manhattan
project. It was the result of a collaboration of
the allied powers to create a new master weapon out of scientific research.
It began in 1942. The leading physicist in this
experimentation was a man called Robert J Oppenheimer, shown here is this
photograph. It was a massive project to convert
nuclear fission into a mass weapon. This was something new then, and it begins
relatively early on in, in the war itself. But there were many other weapons of mass
destruction, what we would call now weapons of mass destruction.
Biological and chemical wars, chemical weapons also being experimented with.
Some of which took on some macabre proportions.
Perhaps some of the most awful was the case of what is known as the case of unit
731 of the Japanese. Unit 731 was a secret military medical
unit working out of Mantsoeria. Euphemistically known as the "Epidemic
Prevention Research Laboratory of the Japanese Imperial Armies".
Here you see a, a bit of a grainy image of what 731 was doing in Mantsoeria.
Employing some of Japan's leading scientists and doctors in the field.
They took their experimentation in new directions and in a new scale.
Using human subjects for their experimentation, live human subjects for
their experimentation. Particularly, and this is where empire
comes back in, 10,000 captives from the territories that they had conquered.
The vast majority of the human subjects being used were Chinese.
But there were also some prisoners of war. Vivisection, intentional infections of
living human beings to see how they would survive certain infections.
Testing grenades inside bodies to see which could deliver the highest mortality
rates. Impregnation, abortion, germ releasing
bombs. And of course, injections of various
viruses and diseases to see how they might work if biological warfare were going to
be added on to the mechanical warfare that they were already practicing.
In one entire case, an entire province of China, was infected with a plague to see
what would happen. Fleas were released on a population and
some 400,000 Chinese civilians died as a result of the plague.
China in a sense was treated like a scientific laboratory for the Japanese
fighting machine. People utterly de-humanised in the
struggle. 25,000 people we now know were killed in
experimental deaths. At the end of the war, of course, the US
Army had ta deal with this toll of this example of what had happened.
It was clearly an atrocity. The occupying US armies of Japan were
finding evidence of what had happened wrestled with of course the conundrum of
what to do. On the other hand General Douglas McCarthy
did see that in some cases some useful scientific discoveries had been drawn from
this experimentation. In part because of the nature, of the way
the Japanese atrocity, atrocities had committed, been committed against the
Chinese. A lot of these atrocities were then
subsequently swept under the rug and its only been the subsequent effort by
historians that really escavated the real story.
There were some important scientific legacies of the war.
These were, perhaps, the ones that were kept most, secret.
But the one that was most public was of course, the use of the atomic war.
So while the scientific effects of war are important, we also have to consider how
science contributed to the totalization of total war.
Blurring the lines between combatants and civilians.
Civilians, in fact, becoming the targets for war-making states, the subjects of
their experiments of the science that would be deployed in making war.
On that gruesome note I'm going to end this, lecture and continue with the war,
its toll and its aftermath in the next lecture.