audiobook This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since by Dave Chaddock in History

Review

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful. Courageous book takes on task of proving U.S. use of BW in Korean WarBy Jeffrey S. KayeThere is no historical controversy as contentious or long-lasting as the North Korean and Chinese charges of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War. For those who believe the charges to be false -- and that includes most of American academia; but not all -- there's no reason; really; to assume the North Koreans or Chinese made up any bogus claims to attack the credibility of U.S. forces. They had no reason to do that. It is a historical fact that the United States carpet-bombed and napalmed North Korea; killing over 2 million civilians thereby. In other words; massive war crimes are already self-evident; and if there is any mystery; it is how historical amnesia and/or callous disregard for crimes such as those committed by the U.S. and its allies in Korea; or the millions killed by the U.S. in Southeast Asia; can go ignored today.One man with evident integrity and unwilling to let the truth be buried is Dave Chaddock. His book is a superb exercise in historical rebuttal. The falsifications and lies and secrets propounded by the U.S. on the issue of its crimes has been going on for decades now. For instance; the U.S. populace did not learn of its government's post-war deal with Nazis; or its amnesty of the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731; until nearly 40 years had passed from the time of these events. If the book seems partisan at times; it is understandably the passion of someone outraged at what he has discovered -- just as many who have served in America's imperial wars returned home outraged; and too often broken; by what they had seen and endured.Chaddock builds on the seminal work of Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman; whose 1998 book; "The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea;" laid out the best case we have thus far for proving the U.S. BW campaign really did take place. Chaddock takes on Endicott and Hagerman's critics; and has a particularly trenchant critique of the discovery of Soviet documents that indicate the BW evidence was "faked." The documents were oddly serendipitously discovered at the time Endicott and Hagerman were publishing their book. (The actual documents have not been publicly released; if they in fact exist.) Chaddock shows that the Soviet "fake"; as presented; could not possibly have covered all the sites and evidence of biological weapons used in as short a time as given to create such a fantastic fraud.Chaddock also takes on the controversy that surrounded the testimonies ("confessions") of downed flyers interrogated by North Korean and Chinese captors. The flyers' testimony was considered very convincing at the time; and the U.S. scrambled to find a way to discredit it. (The U.S. separated the flyers' upon repatriation; with one group claiming they were tortured; and the other insisting they told the truth. All were threatened with court-martial if they did not recant.)The CIA and military created a cover-story that the men had been "brainwashed." This so-called brainwashing was then used as an excuse to increase funding in their own mind-control programs; the most famous of which was MKULTRA. Their efforts included recruiting the leading members of a generation (or two) of social science and psychological/psychiatric academics and practitioners; whose experiments on use of drugs like LSD; and on sensory deprivation; and mock torture at government "survival" camps; led ultimately to an institutional use of torture by the U.S. government itself after 9/11. Chaddock details much of this history; and as with other topics he covers; refers readers to ample numbers of sources and references. His bibliography is an important assemblage of modern literature on the entire controversy.Given the scare campaigns that are still used by the West about use of chemical or biological weapons by any country dubbed "evil" by the U.S.; Chaddock's book takes on added relevance; if not urgency.Chaddock's book is a treasure. It presents in an entertaining and convincing fashion what Chaddock himself calls the "overwhelming evidence" of BW use by the Americans during the Korean War.I hope the reader that stumbles upon these reviews and/or comments will not be turned off by the dubious "facts" presented in other reviews and decide to read for themselves. This is a time when independent thinking is in short supply. Curiosity and a zest for fact and truth are not traits highly valued today; particularly not when it comes to politics or historical controversies. But if you are someone who really wants to know the truth; who wants to see what someone who has spent a good deal of time researching the subject has to say; then this is the book for you.18 of 21 people found the following review helpful. U.S. Drops Fleas With Bubonic Plague on North KoreaBy David SwansonThis happened some 63 years ago; but as the U.S. government has never stopped lying about it; and it's generally known only outside the United States; I'm going to treat it as news.Here in our little U.S. bubble we've heard of a couple versions of a film called The Manchurian Candidate. We've heard of the general concept of "brainwashing" and may even associate it with something evil that the Chinese supposedly did to U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. And I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people who've heard of these things have at least a vague sense that they're bulls***.If you didn't know; I'll break it to you right now: people cannot actually be programed like the Manchurian candidate; which was a work of fiction. There was never the slightest evidence that China or North Korea had done any such thing. And the CIA spent decades trying to do such a thing; and finally gave up.I'd also be willing to bet that very few people know what it was that the U.S. government promoted the myth of "brainwashing" to cover up. During the Korean War; the United States bombed virtually all of North Korea and a good bit of the South; killing millions of people. It dropped massive quantities of Napalm. It bombed dams; bridges; villages; houses. This was all-out mass-slaughter. But there was something the U.S. government didn't want known; something deemed unethical in this genocidal madness.It is well documented that the United States dropped on China and North Korea insects and feathers carrying anthrax; cholera; encephalitis; and bubonic plague. This was supposed to be a secret at the time; and the Chinese response of mass vaccinations and insect eradication probably contributed to the project's general failure (hundreds were killed; but not millions). But members of the U.S. military taken prisoner by the Chinese confessed to what they had been a part of; and confessed publicly when they got back to the United States.Some of them had felt guilty to begin with. Some had been shocked at China's decent treatment of prisoners after U.S. depictions of the Chinese as savages. For whatever reasons; they confessed; and their confessions were highly credible; were borne out by independent scientific reviews; and have stood the test of time.How to counter reports of the confessions? The answer for the CIA and the U.S. military and their allies in the corporate media was "brainwashing;" which conveniently explained away whatever former prisoners said as false narratives implanted in their brains by brainwashers.And 300 million of so Americans more or less sort of believe that craziest-ever dog-ate-my-homework concoction to this day!The propaganda struggle was intense. The support of the Guatemalan government for the reports of U.S. germ warfare in China were part of the U.S. motivation for overthrowing the Guatemalan government; and the same cover-up was likely part of the motivation for the CIA's murder of Frank Olson.There isn't any debate that the United States had been working on bio-weapons for years; at Fort Detrick -- then Camp Detrick -- and numerous other locations. Nor is there any question that the United States employed the top bio-weapons killers from among both the Japanese and the Nazis from the end of World War II onward. Nor is there any question that the U.S. tested such weapons on the city of San Francisco and numerous other locations around the United States; and on U.S. soldiers. There's a museum in Havana featuring evidence of years of U.S. bio-warfare against Cuba. We know that Plum Island; off the tip of Long Island; was used to test the weaponization of insects; including the ticks that created the ongoing outbreak of Lyme Disease.Dave Chaddock's book This Must Be the Place; which I found via Jeff Kaye's review; collects the evidence that the United States indeed tried to wipe out millions of Chinese and North Koreans with deadly diseases."What does it matter now?" I can imagine people from only one corner of the earth asking.I reply that it matters that we know the evils of war and try to stop the new ones. U.S. cluster bombs in Yemen; U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan; U.S. guns in Syria; U.S. white phosphorus and Napalm and depleted uranium used in recent years; U.S. torture in prison camps; U.S. nuclear arsenals being expanded; U.S. coups empowering monsters in Ukraine and Honduras; U.S. lies about Iranian nukes; and indeed U.S. antagonization of North Korea as part of that never-yet-ended war -- all of these things can be best confronted by people aware of a centuries-long pattern of lying.And I reply; also; that it is not yet too late to apologize.14 of 29 people found the following review helpful. The 1952 germ war was a fabrication.By C. HwangThis book is just another conspiracy theory. Like several other books of this type; it is an accumulation of one sided evidence; contextomy; and evasive arguments. It is just a repeat of The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman plus the author's political view.Like Endicott and Hagerman; the author tributes the lack of concrete documentary evidence to the cover up by the U. S. government. They all fail to see that there is another possibility: what if there was really not a germ war in 1952?In January 1998; a journalist from Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun published 12 documents acquired from Russian Presidential Archives that showed the alleged use of U. S. biological weapons in the Korean war was fabricated and fraudulent. Endicott and Hagerman replied that there was no proof of the authenticity of the documents since they were copied manually without any reference or index number; although several researchers considered them real after close examinations.Fine. Those Russian documents were not perfect. Let's table them. But; how about Chinese documents?In The Summary of Experiences about Logistics in the War of Resisting America and Assisting Korea: Health Service published by PLA in 1986; pp. 319 - 405; several telegrams; if looked closely; hinted that the Chinese medical experts and military authorities in the Korea front line could not even confirm the alleged cases and the political pressure forced them to keep quiet.In late January 1952; some CPVA (Chinese People's Volunteer Army) front line units reported the discovery of flies and fleas in the snow. It was duly reported to CPVA headquarter; then all the way to Mao; Zedong in Beijing. Mao quickly judged that it's a germ war initiated by the U.S. while the investigation team sent by CPVA Surgeon General were still struggling to confirm the reports and found the medical evidence. A telegram from Central Military Committee dated February 27; 1952 talked about CPVA Surgeon General's failure of finding any hostile germs and his disbelief of the germ war. At the end; it asked CPVA HQ to "criticize" the Surgeon General and they (the committee) will send a representative to Korea to "check up" and "help" with the progress.More interestingly; that Surgeon General finally spoke out recently. In a posthumous manuscript published in late 2013 (Yan-Huang Historical Review; 2013; Vol. 11); Wu Zhii-Li; the former CPVA Surgeon General; admitted "the 1952 germ war was a false alarm."He talked about the failure to turn up any plausible medical evidence by his investigators and the investigators sent by Beijing. He talked about the harsh "criticism" by Peng; De-Huai; C-in-C of CPVA. He talked about the lack of patients and deaths from the germ war -- not even a single one! He talked about the fabrication of the evidences in order to convince "The International Scientific Committee": a professor Chen provided the content for the North Korean cases basing on his own experiences of examining Japanese germ warfare in WW2; they asked two CPVA lieutenants to change the location of discovery in their witness report; his receiving and uses of Yeresinia pestis samples from inside China (which they had never found in N. Korea) as evidence. About the confession of POW pilots; his comment is: "I highly admire our POW interrogators. They are very good persuaders." After one year of fanatical propaganda; the allegation suddenly came to a abrupt stop. Soviet leaders found that they were "mislead" by the fabrication of the germ war and told China and North Korea to stop.Several points in Wu's article can be verified by the telegrams previously mentioned. It even support the 12 Russian documents.So; the 1952 germ war started a false alarm but ended a fabrication.Case closed.