Less well known than bacteriological warfare, with which it is intimately linked—nothing delivers epidemic disease like an insect host—war by bug has left its mark on the historical record. Roman engineers liked to toss entire beehives into besieged cities, and defenders too deployed insects, along with boiling oil and large rocks. On their south-facing sides, some medieval castles had bee boles, warm recesses attractive to hive builders, which ensured there would always be a ready source of six-legged defenders.
Before the 20th century, however, insect conscripts never caused a fraction of the mortality that freelance bugs did. In the American Civil War, in which some 620,000 soldiers died, two-thirds were felled by disease, most of it spread by insects. After scientists established the insect-disease role in epidemics, everything changed. The Japanese were the first to grasp the military implications. In the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 the Imperial army became the first in history to lose fewer men to sickness than to weapons.
But the possibilities of knowledge always cut both ways with humans. It was the very strength of Japanese medical science—galvanized by a ruthless microbiologist named Shiro Ishii—that later unleashed the most horrific insect-fought war ever. Ishii set up shop in the puppet state of Manchuria to test his biowarfare theories on human guinea pigs. His Unit 731 grew to have a budget rivalling that of the Manhattan Project, and a staff of 10,000. At first, despite barbarous procedures—infected prisoners were vivisected so precise records of the disease's effects could be kept—Unit 731 was unable to kill people in sufficient numbers to impress the high command. Fragile pathogens tended to die off before initiating epidemics.
Then Ishii had his conceptual breakthrough: insects, he realized, not only delivered diseases, they protected them en route. So Ishii devised a Dante-esque perpetual plague machine.
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