Japan Dissected My Granddad Alive in World War II
Bob Bruner was a teen when he learned the word “vivisection.” Now a Japanese museum is shedding light on the monstrous wartime experiments on his grandfather and other U.S. POWs.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
From Japan comes word of a university medical museum with a new exhibit detailing vivisections conducted at the school on eight American airmen captured in the final days of World War II.
The so-called experiments performed on the living prisoners at the Kyushu University medical school included the removal of a whole lung, a stomach, and a liver, as well as pieces of brain.
The first of the unlucky eight was Staff Sergeant Teddy Ponczka of Pennsylvania, who had been stabbed with a bamboo spear during his capture. He must have assumed he would be receiving treatment for his wound when he was brought into an operating theater.