Invisible Weapon

Under its biggest, blackest headlines, the New York Post last week published the story that readers of Sunday supplements have waited for since World War II began. Military Expert Fletcher Pratt told how the Japanese had tried to spread bubonic plague from planes over the Chinese city of Changteh.

For months unconfirmed and unconfirmable rumors have persisted that the Japanese were experimenting with bacterial warfare in China. But the first reliable report reached the U.S. only last month, in a letter to the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China. Pratt double-checked his story with Chinese officials. Two days later the New York Times printed virtually the same story from its Chungking correspondent, Harrison Forman. In both accounts the essential facts were the same, were vouched for by Dr. Robert Lim, head of the Chinese Red Cross.

On Nov. 4 the 50,000 people in Changteh in Hunan Province ran for cover as a Japanese plane skimmed over their roof tops. The plane circled for an hour. It dropped no bombs. But on the ground near the two main gates to the city, scattered grains of rice and shreds of cotton cloth were later found. The police destroyed them, but saved some samples for testing. The samples were full of Pasteurella pestis, the short oval bacillus of bubonic plague.

There had been no bubonic plague in Changteh for ten generations, but within a week there were six cases. All died. Dr. Lim flew from Chungking to superintend the autopsies. They showed the marks of the "black death"--the black tongue and dark spots on the skin from which the plague got its name, the hugely swollen lymph glands of the groin and armpits. Careful laboratory tests confirmed the autopsy findings.

Once before, the Chinese said, Japanese flyers had tried to infect a Chinese city with plague. In 1940 they had dropped infected fleas on Chekiang Province. The fleas were wrapped in little cotton bags with rice or grain, to attract the rats which catch and spread the disease. But cold killed the rats first.

If the Japanese had really begun the nightmare of bacterial warfare, their choice of bubonic plague was not smart. Changteh is little more than a hundred miles from Japanese lines, and the disease travels as fast today as when it ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages. If warm weather brought an epidemic to Changteh, the disease might sweep to the Japanese.

To all those content to believe that the plague story was mere propaganda, Dr. Lim had a sharp word to say:

"I realize that the idea of a widespread scattering of the plague appears at first somewhat in the realm of fantasy.

"It is my belief that the Japs thus far have been experimenting in China, and it is my firm conviction that Japan is planning large-scale bacteriological warfare, not only here, but elsewhere, especially when things start going wrong for her."

Dr. Lim's tactful "elsewhere" might well have meant the U.S., where there are no Japanese troops to be infected. But it was pointed out that the U.S. had little cause for alarm. Modern inoculations against bubonic plague cut down its mortality rate; scientific rat hunts and sanitary measures can prevent its spread.

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