By Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman
Review by Brian L Evans
Canadian Journal of History
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| The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets From the Early Cold War and Korea, by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman. Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1998. xxi, 274 pp. $29.95 U.S. (cloth). |
This allegation, made in the early months of 1952, based on Endicott's observations in Northeast China and reports from the Chinese, was quickly dismissed by the Canadian government and efforts were made to discredit Endicott's charges and to undermine his credibility. Resorting to the method, later known as "plausible denial," the Canadian and American governments heaped scorn on the man who was seen as no more than a mouthpiece for the Red China regime.
Lester Pearson, then Secretary of State for External Affairs, who had earlier commented that Endicott had "sold his soul to Moscow," resisted calls to prosecute Endicott for treason, partly out of fear that it would create of him a martyr. Instead, the government concentrated on impugning his motives.
It was a fairly easy sell, given the faith that average Canadians, cosseted by years of wartime propaganda, had in their government telling the truth. Already banned from the United States for his earlier views on the Soviet Union and the new regime in China, Endicott had few platforms for his views. (Even the book Five Stars Over China, written by his wife Mary Austin, giving impressions of the new China immediately following the Communist victory was unavailable at Harvard University until over a decade later, and only then through the private gift of a Canadian China scholar).
Endicott, however, never gave up, drawing closer and closer to proving his allegations. Later revelations that the United States had taken over Japanese biological experiments, along with the Japanese scientists who conducted them provided more hard evidence. Only his death in his late nineties prevented Endicott from completing the picture.
The complete (or nearly complete) picture has now been drawn by two scholars from York University, utilizing recently declassified materials from American, Canadian, and British government archives, along with documents from the Chinese Central Archives.
Stephen Endicott (son of the aforementioned Reverend James G.) and Edward Hagerman have done a masterful job in marshalling the evidence and providing the arguments to make the case for the charge that the United States indulged in biological (bacteriological, germ) warfare under the umbrella of the Korean War.
Their book is one that deserves wide discussion, not only for what it tells us about how governments deliberately misinform and mislead their citizens, while sacrificing the rights of individuals, but for what it means in the history of Western (American) relations with Eastern Asia.
After using atomic weapons in Asia, in hindsight, it seems hardly a deviation for the United States to experiment with biological weapons less than a decade later, and to move on to agent orange, napalm and other devices (including — alleged — biological weapons) in Vietnam in the `60's. In preaching its "higher" standards of behavior to Asians, the West has always been blessed with a shortness of memory.
The United States and Biological Warfare is replete with photos and documents, such that it is difficult not to join with the authors in their summation that the covert planning of the Strategic Air Command for the delivery of bacteriological weapons, along with pressures to widen the Korean War combined with the "circumstantial evidence from the United States, Canada, Australia, Korea, and China," lead "to the conclusion that the United States took the final step and secretly experimented with biological weapons in the Korean War."
Perhaps, at long last, Jim Endicott has been vindicated.
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