David Peace - Occupied City

July 9, 1947

Dear Peggy ,

As you can see from the above address, & as you probably already know through other channels, I am still confined on doctor’s orders (& quite possibly on MacArthur’s orders, too) to this hospital. They say my illness has taken a turn for the worse, but I do not believe them. I now believe they may even be experimenting on me, for they seem incapable of curing my illness, only prolonging it .

So the days turn into weeks, the weeks into months, the months into years, & I cannot tell you how much I miss you, Peggy, & how much I miss the children (who doubtless do not even remember me). I also cannot tell you how much I want to leave this bed, this hospital, this city, & this country! But I know that even if I can leave this bed & this hospital, I will not be able to leave this city & this country until I have corrected all the mistakes I know I have made, until I have righted all those wrongs .

For as I lie here, hour after hour, day after day, with nothing but time on my hands, I cannot help but go over & over, again & again, all the events that have left me here, that have STRANDED me here so very far from you & all I hold dear. Particularly, I cannot help but go over & over all the choices & mistakes I have made. Peggy, I go back, again & again, over & over so many things .

Do you remember the balloons, Peggy? I see now that was where it all started for me, with those balloons, for that was when they first came for me, those men who never knock, who never introduce themselves, those men who came that day in November 1944, who told me of Jap germ warfare attacks on the Chinese in Manchuria. They’ve killed a lot of people, they said, they’ve poisoned wells, poisoned reservoirs. So we knew. Even then, back in 1944, we knew, I knew. Then they told me of the strange balloon that had been found in Butte, Montana, thirty feet in diameter, ninety-one feet round, & made of rice paper, told me of ten other strange balloons that had been found, & told me to come to Washington .

Do you remember how excited I was, Peggy? How I stood in that circle around those balloons, that circle of military & scientific experts, how I told them these strange balloons had obviously come from Japan, that prevailing winds could easily carry balloons from Japan to the US mainland? How I warned them that if any of these balloons contained Japanese B-encephalitis, then we were in real trouble because mosquitoes are the best vectors of Japanese B-encephalitis & we have plenty of mosquitoes here in the States? How I warned them that our population had no defenses against B-encephalitis, that we had no experience of the disease so we were totally vulnerable, that four out of every five people who contracted B-encephalitis would die? Of course, I didn’t stop there, did I? I told them it was equally possible that the Japs could have contaminated the balloons with anthrax, that anthrax is a tough bug, sturdy & cheap to produce, that we knew the Japs had already used it in China. I warned them back then that the Japs could splatter the west & southwest of Canada & the United States, that they could contaminate the pastures & the forests, kill all the cows & sheep, all the horses & pigs, plus a considerable number of human beings. I also told them there would be widespread panic & hysteria, so they placed rigid censorship on all radio & press reports of the finding of any balloons .

But the balloons kept coming, didn’t they, Peggy? By the end of March 1945, over two hundred balloons had been found from Hawaii to Alaska & down to Michigan & I pored over each one of them, inch by inch, but I found no hint of bacteria, no trace of disease. Nothing except incendiary devices, only two of which actually detonated — do you remember those, Peggy? The one in Helena, Montana, that exploded & killed a woman, the other in Oregon which killed six men out fishing, do you remember?

But I refused to believe that the Japs had not infected the balloons. I could not believe there were no bacteria, no disease, that these were the only balloons. So I spent hour after hour in the glass belly of a B19, tracking up & down the west coast of the United States, hour after hour looking for thirty feet of rice paper hanging in a tree or lying punctured in a field, & still I found nothing .

But I refused to give up, even then. I gathered up every field report I could find. I asked for meetings at the headquarters of the 7th Service Command in Omaha, Nebraska & the headquarters of the US Western Defense Command in San Francisco. I spoke for hours, I spoke for days, telling them what we knew, what I knew, even then, in March 1945. I told them about biological warfare & about strange balloons. I told them about the Jap germ attacks on the Chinese & about the Jap use of anthrax, the Jap use of plague —

PLAGUE, even then, PLAGUE .

I told them about the man who headed the Jap BW project, though I could not yet name him. I told them about the Jap BW headquarters (which I then believed to be in Nanking). I told them about the prisoner-of-war statements which mentioned a bacillus bomb (the Mark VII, Type 13, Experimental Bacillus Bomb). I warned them of possible targets, possible means of dispersal, possible biological agents & diseases. I told them about Jap attempts to get a strain of yellow fever virus from the Rockefeller Institute in New York & about a similar attempt in Rio de Janeiro. I told them it was quite possible that the Japs now had the virus through Germany. I warned them of the threat to our cattle & livestock from rinderpest, that rinderpest kills & spreads rapidly, that we were 100 percent vulnerable to rinderpest. I warned them that one single balloon could be crossing the Pacific that very minute, carrying enough cholera to start an epidemic, that we were 100 percent vulnerable to cholera .

I told them & I warned them because I KNEW, Peggy, I KNEW, even then, I KNEW .

But then, of course, the call came from MacArthur & that was the last time I saw you, the last time I saw the children, that last time before I ended up here in THIS PLAGUED CITY .

I know now for sure, Peggy, that they’d already been told about me before I even set foot in this place, that was why they were waiting for me, why they had my photograph!

That photograph of me in Camp Detrick is another thing I keep coming back to, over & over, again & again. How had the Japs got hold of that photograph? I know that our own guys, our own G-2, must have given it to the Japs, that G-2 must have already made contact with Naitō & the top men in the Jap BW program & that was why he was waiting for me, why he had my photograph in his paws, why he knew I wasn’t up to the job because THEY HAD TOLD HIM, because THEY HAD ALREADY MADE THEIR DEAL .

Of course, I knew even then that I could not & should not trust them but I see now that I personally was far too ready to believe all that I was told. So I believed that the Kwantung Army operated on the mainland with a high degree of independence from the military leadership back in Tokyo & I believed that, within the KA, Ishii was a law unto himself, that the Army Medical Department exercised no control over Ishii & his operations .

I realize that I became obsessed with Ishii, believing Ishii, & Ishii alone, to be the one who should bear sole burden for their BW program. I realize now that this was what I wanted to believe .

Now I believe more than ever that the deal (deals? Who knows how many deals were made?) was a mistake. But I swear to you, Peggy, that I did not know that human guinea pigs had been used when I suggested the arrangement to MacArthur, Willoughby & Compton. And now we know about the bacillus & anthrax bombs & their use on American prisoners of war & Chinese civilians, now we have the evidence, there is still time to prosecute Ishii & all the other guilty Japs at the Tokyo Trial. But no one here or in Washington takes my claims about the human experiments seriously or, should I say, no one wants to take them seriously because it does not suit them & what they (wrongly) believe to be ‘our best interests’ .