Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science (review)

Walter Grunden has produced a superb study of how Japan mobilized science and technology to develop advanced weapons during World War II. In four well-crafted empirical chapters, he reviews the origins and accomplishments of Japan's covert nuclear-weapons program, its work on radar and the "death ray," its rockets, guided missiles, and jet-aircraft programs, and its efforts to develop both chemical and biological weapons. This book is easily the most comprehensive such study in English.

Grunden's central finding is that sectional rivalries handicapped the ability of the Japanese military to put science to effective use. Organizational failures—based upon mistrust amid stovepiped hierarchies—were compounded by the lack of raw materials (especially in the case of uranium for the atomic bomb) and by an inadequate scientific and industrial infrastructure. Remarkably, for a nation so often credited with an ability to establish consensus and coordinate policy, Japan's wartime science infrastructure was little more than a series of failed administrative reforms without strategic guidance from above. The result was ever deeper and ever more debilitating organizational entropy.

Grunden sheds new light even on familiar material. For example, Japanese science has long been derided for being derivative. The author documents case after case in which Japanese military scientists who studied abroad came home to champion research and development in their field. While much of Japan's wartime military science was as derivative as its industrial technology, the country's research in some areas did not always lag far behind that done elsewhere. Indeed, Japan's aeronautical research was as advanced as any in the world. Likewise, the abject lack of coordination across administrative jurisdictions that plagued big science projects for the military is well-known. But Grunden's choice of cases makes his the authoritative account. Neither the hapless scientist who found himself chairing both a navy and an army atomic-weapons project without being able to coordinate the efforts nor the rival army and navy radar systems that could not distinguish friend from foe are easily forgotten. His conclusion that the historiography of Japanese science is best modeled as a transwar phenomenon, rather than as separate pre- and postwar periods, is equally familiar. But his list of the postwar elites who started out in bioweapons labs—including one president of the Japan Medical Association—is comprehensive and striking.

Other material is entirely new and even more striking. His account of Japanese weapons labs abroad—what Morris Low has labeled "colonial science"—is remarkably comprehensive and fresh. The most disturbing case is that of General Ishii Shiro¯'s Unit 731, the infamous bioweapons laboratory. This, we learn, is not the isolated, small-scale operation that many claim. Ishii established a network of some twenty laboratories in northeast China that used live human subjects rounded up by the Japanese army to test active strains of viruses and bacteria without having to worry about contaminating Japanese citizens. Grunden estimates that Ishii supervised the activities of some 5,000 scientists and support staff and operated "the largest death camp in East Asia" (p. 187). To his credit, the author pulls no punches—the activities of Unit 731 were, he insists, "no less gruesome or evil" than Nazi atrocities (p. 189).

Grunden also accomplishes something that few Japan specialists ever attempt. He offers a detailed comparative prologue to his account of each weapons system. By reviewing the failures and successes of each of the belligerents in each weapon system, he provides a very helpful context for each of his Japanese case studies. One insight is that Japanese universities and their scientists were far less engaged in the war effort than their counterparts in the United States or Western Europe.

The subtitle of this fine study is a bit misleading, both for the author and the reader. The author is misled by relying on the "big science" model. Grunden...