Amazon-Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey Lockwood; Oxford Univ. Press, 378 pages, softcover, © 2009.
Lockwood lays out his limits to objectivity and interpretation in the preface.
The Introduction is disquieting, as a possible scenario for spreading bubonic plague in a large city is described. This is followed by the question of whether Saddam Hussein’s agents could have been responsible for the introduction of West Nile virus to the U.S., followed by the serious threat of Rift Valley fever. Lockwood gives a brief preview of the other stories to be unraveled in detail in the book.
Section One: Stinging Defeats and Venomous Victories
Chapter 1 “Bee Bombs and Wasp Warheads”
Lockwood’s brief description of haplo-diploidy and the relationship of sterile workers to the queen and her offspring will be beyond the non-biologist’s full understanding. But the references to insects in the Bible will be familiar to readers. The weaponization of bees and wasps in warfare was a part of early warfare. Collecting scorpions in advance of a siege and pouring them down on enemy Romans trying to scale the walls of Hatra was effective. The origin of “bombard” is traced to “bee”: the siege engines could toss materials, producing “…the threatening hum associated with both an angry swarm and an incoming projectile.”
Chapter 2 “Toxic Tactics and Terrors” begins with the case of a bee sting causing a battle and describes the mechanism of the sting. The San bushmen of Africa use the juice from a leaf beetle larvae for its toxicity. The case of a powerful toxin from an orange-colored Roman “dikairon,” supposedly a small bird, is traced to a rove beetle. Botanical toxin strategies were transferable to insect toxins.
In Chapter 3, “Insects as Tools of Torture,” the torture by Native Americans is discussed before leading into the case of Stoddart and Conolly who were thrown into a “Black Well” in Uzbekistan, a Bug Pit infested with assassin bugs that secrete extremely painful saliva.
Section Two: Vectors of Death
Chapter 4 on “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades” describes the slow rate at which humans came to suspect insects vectored disease and instead blamed “bad air”…malaria. Commanders maneuvered the enemy into environments prone to insect-borne illness without actually knowing the cause. The Ark of the Covenant may have been protected by fleas infected with the agent for bubonic plague. During seiges, dead bodies, victims of bubonic plague, were hurled by catapult into walled cities, the infection then spreading by fleas.
Chapter 5 “The Victories of the Vectors” explains the rise of insect-vectored diseases as armies became larger and less hygienic. Napoleon Bonaparte loses four soldiers to disease for each one lost to battle, and orders his sick soldiers overdosed with opium to prevent them from dragging back the troops. The same mosquito as the yellow fever vector drives back Napoleon’s General LeClerc in the Caribbean and kills over 100,000 Americans pre-1901. When LeClerc fails, General Rochambeau is sent to Haiti and also sees massive yellow fever death. These failures contributed to France selling Louisiana to the United States. Napoleon’s Grande Armee then heads to Russia and is decimated by typhus, vectored by body lice in Poland, repeating prior disasters in French military history.
The American Civil War is the subject of Chapter 6, “A Most Uncivil War.” More men died of disease than warfare, with insect-vectored diseases prevailing. Still there was no recognition that lice and their eggs (nits) were factors, delousing being mainly for comfort. Typhoid and malaria had similar symptoms and were confused in war records. There were 1,287 malaria cases out of 1,000 men—possible because of recurrence, and causing half to two-thirds to be unfit for battle at any time. Generals such as Winfield Scott deduced the importance of timing the seasons of battle to avoid disease. A Confederate General Johnston knows to pin down Union troops in a swamp and let disease do the rest. Finally, the work of Pasteur and Koch make germ theory the new paradigm and Theobald Smith shows the relationship between a tick and Texas cattle fever and then Ross associates malaria and mosquitoes and Walter Reed nails Aedes aegypti as the carrier of yellow fever.
Soldiers in the Civil War times wore long hair. Today the military style short crew cut is the norm. This change came about due to lice. Chapter 7 “All’s Lousy on the Eastern Front” describes how more people died of louse-born typhus during World War I than died of direct warfare; in Russia, six times more. The French doctor Nicolle associates typhus with lice in 1909. As warfare grinds to a halt in trenches, the British add entomologists to their Sanitary Units; there is now a rationale for delousing stations and cutting off the hair that harbored the lice. Once disease prevention became known, it is a short step to using insects to cause disease in wartime.
Section Three: Bringing Fever and Famine to a World at War
It has been said that with development of the atomic bomb, physics now knew evil. I am a trained entomologist and Chapter 8, “A Monstrous Metamorphosis” is where the discipline of entomology comes to know evil. I have waited until I am in Harbin, China at the Unit 731 Museum to write this section of this book review. I visited this site in 2016. It is from the distance provided by Lockwood’s more abstract words that I can now continue this review for the emotions in my voice, in my hand recorder, overwhelm the message.
Chapter 8 starts with the good behavior of Japanese troops toward POWs in the Russo-Japanese War, and the Japanese Kitasato Shibasaburo who studied under Robert Koch, father of microbiology. But Lockwood describes how in just 20 years, “Japan’s military would be transformed from a model of morality into a template of depravity.” Lockwood describes the rise of Ishii Shiro as a medical pathogenic microbiologist and the coupling of preventive medicine with warfare; simply, to defend yourself against biological warfare, you have to develop the agents of biological warfare. And once developed for whatever good reason, it is a small jump to rationalize their use in war as you demonize the enemy. Shiro actually makes some positive contributions by defining a form of encephalitis outbreak and developing a ceramic filter for making water safe to drink without boiling it. But Shiro’s aspirations grow, and the Japanese military soon saw the potential of bacteriological warfare.
Shiro got his first opportunity to establish an experimental camp for experimenting with humans and growing cholera and plague bacteria, the Zhong Ma Prison Camp 60 miles south of Harbin. Because victims of infections would die and other bacteria would begin decomposing the tissues, the research into the mode of action and body damage was by vivisection, done while the victim was still alive in the end stage of dying.
Chapter 9 on “Entomological Evil” begins at the new biomedical death camp at Pingfan, about 15 miles south of Harbin. Today, Harbin has grown to encompass this area and I have not really left the city of Harbin to visit this museum. The facility covered 2 square miles, had 150 buildings, and was surrounded by a 15-foot wall with electric wire at the top. Called the “Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau,” it was “Unit 731.” When its identity was questioned, the Japanese said it was a lumber mill. The researchers began discussing their subjects (human victims) as “logs,” an effective way to dehumanize their experimental subjects. Similar to German experiments, readers will recognize some of Unit 731’s projects: “…frostbite, high-altitude decompression, and poisonous gases.” But the focus was on developing virulent forms of human disease agents and the means to deliver them.
Shiro makes some attempts to deliver disease to the enemy in bulk, infecting water supplies and general spraying of the battlefield---both are utter failures. The problems: 1)the agents live well inside a host but do not survive outside, and 2)the bacteria are lost in the big outdoor environment and cannot locate the victim. A reliable delivery system was needed. Insects were the solution. Shiro’s team developed ceramic “bombs” containing 3,000—6,000 fleas each. The “Uji” bomb would explode in the air and shower fleas on an area; the fleas would then hunt out human hosts. They scaled up production of fleas, first using white mice, then humans. “…the Japanese could produce more than half a billion plague-infected fleas per year.” In addition, Ishii Shiro trained his researchers to think of humans as laboratory animals. The Japanese Army had been desensitized by bayonet practice on Chinese prisoners. Human victims, were housed in two buildings and “were the key to the rapid development of biological weapons at Pingfan.” Insects that sought out victims were found far superior to “injection, inhalation, contact wounds, contaminated shrapnel….” Movie pictures of Shiro's work were shown to members of the extended royal family and had to be known by the Emperor. 70 miles north of Pingfan was an airstrip where tests were conducted. Prisoners were tied to crucifix-like stakes in a grid and the planes dropped ceramic flea bombs overhead. The fleas dispersed, the prisoners got sick and died.
Chapter 10 on “Japan’s Fleas and Flies.” The summer of 1940 probably was the first use of plague distributed by aerial-dropped fleas on the city of Xinjing. The plague in Chuhsien was definitely a result of aerial attack, and the raid on Quzhou that fall caused an outbreak that continued for six years, with over 50,000 deaths. In the next two years, over a dozen villages were attacked with over 100,000 casualties. Because cholera is a diarrheal disease, Ishii came up with a combination strategy to get a cholera epidemic going and by continually disrupting the battlefield, generate widespread infectious feces. The house fly that tramples on the feces and then tramples across food. Unit 731 took ceramic shells and mixed adult flies (called “maggot” bombs although the flies were not larval) with cholera along with the normal ammunition dropped in an attack in Yunnan Province. A continuous series of bombings prevented sanitation measures; the result decimated the Allied and Chinese troops. The maggot-bomb campaigns cost 410,000 lives, far in excess of the civilian losses due to Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Chapter 11 “Japan’s Pleas and Lies” begins with the turn-around of the War in a 1943 counteroffensive, and the subsequent change in attitude of the Japanese who were previously optimistic. Unit 731 was now operating in “desperate defense.” Ishii was called back from Nanjing to stop the Soviets. To produce 5 billion fleas required huge amounts of blood from their “human livestock.” Plague fleas were prepared for assaults on American forces at Bataan (not needed) and Saipan (we sank the ship). A plan was formulated to send one of Japan’s unique fold-up-plane-carrying submarines to the shores of America to distribute plague on our mainland. A Japanese general canceled the order at the last moment, indicating that America would probably retaliate in kind and that Japan would earn worldwide derision for such a tactic. However, the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the end of Shiro’s operations. He shipped critical files to his friends in Japan for hiding and then ordered a crew of Chinese laborers to tear down the Unit 731 facility—and then killed all laborers and prisoners. He left for Japan, but he also ordered the release of the infected rodents, causing a wave of plague in China that killed another 20,000 civilians.
Now the United States becomes a partner in this evil, when American interrogators decide that Ishii’s knowledge would be of value to the U.S. military biological warfare effort. As Lockwood puts it: “…General MacArthur’s desire for military intelligence came to loggerheads with the chief prosecutor’s concern for justice.” The Soviets captured officers and enlisted men from Unit 731 and held war crimes trial in Khabarovsk; after international bluster over American’s having not prosecuted Ishii Shiro, the Soviets also gave clemency in return for information. Ishii died in 1959 of throat cancer. Many of his staff who had conducted human experimentation at Unit 731 rose to become officials in the Japanese medical associations and National Institute of Health after the war. Japan’s official stance is to deny the Unit 731 atrocities. China and concluded that the total death toll from Japanese biological warfare was approximately 580,000 killed, which Lockwood calculates were three-fourths vectored by insects. William Patrick, retired chief of Production Development at our bioweapons facility at Ft. Detrick is reported as having gone through the extensive files provided by Shiro and found that: “many of the experiments were fatally flawed in their designs.” Lockwood concludes that the U.S. traded its moral authority and got little in return.
Chapter 12 moves on to “Beetle Bombs.” Adolf Hitler forbade research on biological weapons. Nevertheless, there was a German program under the Waffen-SS of Himmler that did dabble in weaponizing lice and fleas and used prisoners at concentration camps as victims. No less than J.B.S. Haldane spoke of the potato beetle’s possible use in future warfare. The French made plans to produce and disperse the potato beetle but not before the Nazi invasion in 1940. The German’s captured the plans and assumed the other Allies were following suite. The Germans had developed insecticides and along with the very effective nerve gases that they did not use due to inaccurate intelligence that the Allies were prepared to use nerve gases in return. In response to reports that the British had received ticks and beetles for biowarfare, the Germans decided to respond in kind. They concluded that it would take 20-40 million Colorado beetles to decimate those crops. Dr. Bayer calculated the crop destruction would drop food calories in Britain by 6 percent.
Louse-born typhus took more lives in WW I than munitions and this is the thesis for Chapter 13 “ Waking the Slumbering Giants.” In WWII, partisans infested German quarters with typhus-infected lice. Lockwood traces the beginning of the U.S. biological warfare program to the beginning of WWII. [The PBS NOVA documentary on “Bioterror” shows footage.] Anthrax, normally a non-lethal cutaneous disease, could be converted into a lethal inhaled disease. Lockwood describes Wild Bill Donavan and the formation of the CIA. We dust both soldiers and civilians with DDT to prevent louse-born typhus—an amazing success in WW II.
Section Four: Cold-blooded Fighters of the Cold War
Chapter 14. Korea’s Hailstorm of Hexapods
Unit 406 is an American secret project based in Japan after WW II to pursue defensive and then offensive research on warfare with insects. In the U.S., Camp Detrick is our base for biological warfare and “arthropod dissemination” is taken seriously. U.S. communications reveal that we discuss falling back on the fact that the U.S. had not ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Lacking an acceptable referee to investigate, there was no final decision.
Chapter 15. A Swarm of Accusations
Joseph Needham, a Cambridge scholar ended up being an investigator along with scientists from Brazil, France, Italy, Sweden and the Soviet Union. They came to the verdict that the U.S. had waged entomological warfare, using 14 different critters and eight disease agents. Lockwood notes that springtails were supposedly involved, but have never shown any ability to carry disease. While the committee could not conduct on-site inspections their accusations were plausible. The U.S. responded with counter-arguments. The fact that the U.S. had given a pass to Ishii Shiro in return for information on how to conduct such warfare was an argument against us.
Chapter 16. An Imaginary Menagerie?
The U.S. fights back at the “testimony” of captured American pilots that confessed to dropping biological weapons...but in wording not characteristic of Western rhetoric and therefore considered coerced. Lockwood details U.S. records of germ warfare briefings being given to our pilots, of bombs supposedly carrying leaflets being dropped after a bombing run when leaflets warning would not be useful, and testimony by the head of the Entomological Division of the Army Lab that the U.S. had never investigated using insects for biological warfare when clearly we had.
Chapter 17. The Big Itch
Now into paranoid anti-communism, Fort Detrick ramps up research and drops fleas over caged guinea pigs and mass-produces mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. By 1956, the Soviets announced they will also be using biological weapons. Now there are more situations where the documentation is still classified. By 1960, Fort Detrick can produce half a million mosquitoes a month.
Chapter 18. Yankee (and Vietnamese) Ingenuity. Vietnam is a tropical paradise for unconventional warfare, including the well-known Agent Orange herbicide, chemical warfare that not only erased forests but also destroyed 420 square miles of crops and caused the rise of scrub typhus. The Viet Cong in turn utilize native bees. President Nixon proposed a Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention to ban biological warfare and all major parties signed or ratified it in 1975. Yet the entomological loophole remains.
Chapter 19. Cuban Missiles vs. American Arthropods
The Army Chemical Corps likely worked with the USDA to weaponize planthoppers to transmit a virus to destroy Cuba’s sugar cane.
Chapter 20. A Tiny Terrorist in Castro’s Crops
In 1996, Cuba again complains of an entomological attack, this time with a microscopic thrip that can reproduce rapidly and damage a wide range of crops.
Section Five: The Future of Entomological Warfare
Chapter 21. Medflies, Fruits and Nuts
The Mediterranean fruit fly has the potential to destroy a $600 million/year market; the newly-introduced Asian longhorned beetle to destroy $669 billion.
Chapter 22. Fear on the Farm
The fire ant is small but very dangerous in numbers. The glossy-winged sharpshooter could inflict $20 billion in losses by vectoring Pierce’s disease infections of vineyards. The screwworm fly, eradicated several generations ago by rearing massive numbers of sterile flies, could be smuggled back to cause devastation to our cattle industry.
Chapter 23. Wimpy Warmups and Real Deals
West Nile virus & Rift Valley virus are described, along with the CDC process for detecting new infection agents. What could happen if foreign agents used new genetic engineering technologies to produce microbes carried by whiteflies?
Chapter 24. Six-legged Guardian Angels
Insects can serve as “canaries in a mine” to detect nerve gas. Lockwood describes collecting fireflies (actually beetles) in order to harvest their luciferin in order to make a chemical test for ATP, a signature of life, in tests for life on Mars. Insects can be chemical samplers for explosives. Bees to detect chemical plumes from mine fields.
Chapter 25. Insect Cyborgs and Roboflies
Cockroaches and beetles are enlisted to fuse machinery with living tissues. A jewel beetle “feels” a distant forest fire and navigates there to lay eggs, and is also a possible super-sensor for heat.
Chapter 26. “Vigilant and Ready”?
Law is not a good defense. Customs inspections have their limitations with 83 ports of entry and a huge and growing variety of items to identify.
The Epilogue provides a scenario of starting a yellow fever plague–and a warning.
Suggested Readings are provided chapter-by-chapter.
Notes likewise substantiate the claims and descriptions chapter-by-chapter.
Index is thorough.
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