er U.S. Army Air Force Lieutenant
Robert L. Hite is led from a Japanese transport plane by men of the
Kempeitai. Although subjected to
waterboarding, Hite survived the war. In Japan, the
Kempeitai often assisted local civilian law authorities (though it was not a
gendarmerie), and targeted students, farmers, socialists, communists, pacifists, foreign workers, and any showing irreverence for the emperor. In occupied territories and war zones, the
Kempeitai was responsible for issuing
travel permits, recruiting labor, arresting members of resistances, requisitioning food and supplies, spreading propaganda, and suppressing anti-Japanese sentiment. The organization was notorious for its brutality in suppressing dissent, and was responsible for widespread abuses, including forced labor, torture, and executions. Torture methods were taught at
Kempeitai schools, and included
flogging,
waterboarding, burning and scalding, administration of electric shocks, knee joint separation, suspension from ropes, kneeling on sharp edges, fingernail and toenail removal, and digit fracturing. The
Kempeitai also ran Japan's network of
prisoner of war (POW) and civilian internment camps, which treated detainees in violation of the
Geneva Convention of 1929 (not ratified by Japan). A total of 350,000 prisoners were taken and housed in 176 camps in Japan and about 500 in occupied territories. The
Kempeitai pressed many POWs and civilians into slave labour gangs for war work, and subjected them to torture, including standing inside small cages set on top of red ant nests and lashing to trees with barbed wire. Prisoners were forced to sign non-escape oaths, and those who escaped and were recaptured were subjected to beatings and torture as examples in front of other prisoners. 27 percent of Allied POWs taken by Japan during the war died in captivity. Camp guards, often Korean and Formosan, were also abused by
Kempeitai superiors. After the
Doolittle Raid in April 1942, captured Allied airmen were accused of intentionally attacking civilians so were treated as war criminals rather than POWs, and were thus made subject to the death penalty. The U.S. airmen captured in China after the raid were subjected to harsh treatment and interrogation by the
Kempeitai; three were sentenced to death and executed in October 1942, while five others had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. They were subjected to mental torture in the form of
mock executions. Every airman captured in occupied territory after the raid was starved, interrogated, and tortured by the
Kempeitai; by May 1945, the
Kempeitai decided that formal trials were a waste of time, and executed airmen (often by beheading) soon after their
courts-martial had been approved. In December 1944, three U.S. airmen were arrested by the
Kempeitai at
Hangzhou; they were paraded through the streets, ridiculed, beaten, and tortured before being doused with petrol and burned alive. In February 1945, six British airmen were captured in southern Burma and interrogated by the
Kempeitai before being lined up on the edge of a trench, blindfolded, and beheaded by a
Kempeitai officer; their bodies were used for bayonet practice. In May 1945, a U.S. aviator shot down and injured near Saigon in French Indochina was left untreated for three days before being interrogated by
Kempeitai, then killed with
procaine. In July 1945, 15 U.S. airmen were captured and interrogated by the
Kempeitai near Hiroshima; 12 died in the U.S.
atomic bombing of the city on August 6, of which two were possibly clubbed to death at
Hiroshima Castle by the
Kempeitai, and two were possibly stoned to death by civilians. The
Kempeitai organized regular and violent reprisals against populations in Japan's occupied territories. After the Doolittle Raid, it carried out reprisals against thousands of Chinese civilians accused of helping U.S. airmen. In 1942, it carried out the
Sook Ching, a mass killing in Singapore after it fell to the Japanese, and in October 1943, in the
Double Tenth incident, arrested and tortured 57 people in response to an Allied raid on Singapore Harbour; 15 of them died in custody. In 1943–1944, the
Kempeitai arrested 1,918 persons on Java, of whom 743 died while in custody (439 of whom were executed). In March 1944, the
Kempeitai brutally suppressed a riot in
Tasikmalaya in western Java, killing several hundred Muslims; Muslim leader
Zainal Mustafa and 23 of his disciples were later executed. In September 1944, the
Kempeitai executed the Rajah of Loeang and 95 natives from the Loeang and Sermata Islands for failing to turn over guerrillas who had allegedly assassinated several officers. On 7 July 1945, the
Kempeitai killed 600 inhabitants of the village of
Kalagon in the
Moulmein region of southeast Burma in the
Kalagon massacre as reprisal for local guerrilla attacks after interrogation, beatings, and the rape of women and children did not elicit information. The Chinese
Kempeitai was responsible for providing human test subjects, codenamed
maruta ('logs'), for the Army's
biological warfare research program under
Unit 731 near
Harbin, Manchuria. Thousands of uncooperative prisoners and civilians were transported in windowless prison cars to the unit's facility under the
Kempeitai Human Materials Procurement Arm and were subjected to medical experimentation, including
vivisection, artificially-induced illness,
frostbite, and simulated combat wounds. More experiments, also facilitated by the
Kempeitai, were conducted on Allied POWs in the southeast Pacific. In February 1944, an outbreak of
tetanus among hundreds of laborers in Java, possibly tied to the biological warfare program, was traced to contaminated vaccines. The
Kempeitai accused Achmad Muchtar of the
Eykman Institute in Jakarta, who treated many of the victims, of deliberately contaminating the vaccines to sabotage labor for the Japanese, and imprisoned him for nine months before beheading him and running over his body with a
steamroller. The
Kempeitai also organized extensive criminal networks, which extorted vast amounts of money from businesses and civilians in areas where they operated; the forced prostitution system for the Imperial Army, whose victims were known as
comfort women; and the all-female
Tokyo Rose radio propaganda broadcasts. == Active units ==