Allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War were raised by the governments of People's Republic of China and North Korea against the United States. The US Government and its allies denounced this as a hoax.
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During 1951 the Communists made vague allegations of biological warfare, but these were not pursued.[1]
On 28 January 1952, the Chinese People's Volunteer Army headquarters received a report of a smallpox outbreak southeast of Incheon. From February to March 1952, more bulletins reported disease outbreaks in the area of Chorwon, Pyongyang, Kimhwa and even Manchuria.[2] The Chinese soon became concerned when 13 Korean and 16 Chinese soldiers contracted cholera and the plague, while another 44 recently deceased were tested positive for meningitis.[3] Although the Chinese and the North Koreans did not know exactly how the soldiers contracted the diseases, the suspicions soon shifted to the Americans.[3]
On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Ministry made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. This was immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett, and by the apparent confessions of captured US airmen.[4] The Communists also alleged that US Brigadier General Crawford Sams had carried out a secret mission behind their lines at Wonsan in 1951, testing biological weapons. He said, however, that he had actually been investigating an outbreak of bubonic plague.[5]
When the International Red Cross and the World Health Organization ruled out biological warfare, the Chinese government denounced this as Western bias and arranged an investigation by the World Peace Council.[6] The World Peace Council set up the International Scientific Commission for the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in China and Korea. This commission included several distinguished scientists, including renowned British biochemist and sinologist Joseph Needham. The commission's findings also included eyewitnesses, and testimony from doctors as well as four American Korean War prisoners who confirmed the US use of BW.[6] Its final report, which made on 15 September 1952, was that the allegation was true, that the US was indeed experimenting with biological weapons.[7]
Journalist John W. Powell was charged with sedition by the US government for repeating the allegation.
The US and its allies responded by describing the allegation as a hoax.[8] Upon release the prisoners of war repudiated their confessions which they said had been extracted by torture.[9]
An Australian colleague, Denis Warner, went so far as to suggest that the story had been concocted by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett as part of his alleged role as a KGB agent of influence. Warner pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London, a favorite author of Burchett's.[10] However, the notion that Burchett originated the "hoax" has been decisively refuted by one of his most trenchant critics, Tibor Méray.[11]
Méray worked as a correspondent for Communist Hungary during the war but fled the country after the abortive uprising of 1956. Now a staunch anti-Communist, he has confirmed that he saw clusters of flies crawling on ice.[12] Méray has argued the evidence was the result of an elaborate conspiracy: "Now somehow or other these flies must have been brought there... the work must have been carried out by a large network covering the whole of North Korea."[13]
Recent research has indicated that, regardless of the accuracy of the allegations, the Chinese and North Koreans acted as if they were true.[2] After learning the outbreaks, Mao Zedong immediately requested Soviet assistance on disease preventions, while the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Logistics Department was mobilized for anti-bacteriological warfare.[14] On the Korean battlefield, four anti-bacteriological warfare research centers were soon set up, while about 5.8 million doses of vaccine and 200,000 gas masks were delivered to the front.[15] Within China, 66 quarantine stations were also set up along the Chinese borders, while about 5 million Chinese in Manchuria were inoculated.[14] The Chinese government also initiated the "Patriotic Health and Epidemic Prevention Campaign" and directed every citizen to kill flies, mosquitoes and fleas.[14] These disease prevention measures soon resulted in an improvement of health for Communist soldiers on the Korean battlefield.[15]
Alongside the evidence of Chinese archives is the independent eyewitness account of this "unprecedented campaign of public health" by Tibor Méray.[16]
Subsequent historians have offered other explanations to the disease outbreaks during the spring of 1952. For example, it has been noted that spring time is usually a period of epidemics within China and North Korea,[14] and years of warfare had also caused a breakdown in the Korean health care system. Historians have argued that under these circumstances, diseases could easily spread throughout the entire military and civilian populations within Korea.[17]
Others have revived the biological warfare claims more recently.[18] In 1998, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagermann claimed that the accusations were true in their book, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea.[19] The book received mixed reviews, some called it "bad history"[20] and "appalling",[21] while other praised the case the authors made.[20] To counter these renewed allegations, Kathryn Weathersby and Milton Leitenberg of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center released a cache of Soviet and Chinese documents in 1998 purporting to show the North Korean claim was an elaborate disinformation campaign.[18][22]
The official Chinese government stance is that biological warfare was a real threat, and they reacted properly in order to prevent serious epidemics from spreading throughout North Korea and China.[23]
Australian historian Gavan McCormack has argued that the claim is "far from inherently implausible" and has pointed out that one of the POWs who confessed, Colonel Walker Mahurin, was in fact associated with Fort Detrick in Maryland, a biological weapons research facility.[24] Author Simon Winchester has concluded that the KGB was sceptical of the allegation but North Korea leader Kim Il Sung believed it.[25] Winchester believes the question "has still not been satisfactorily answered".[26]
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