I can suggest "Year Zero: A History of 1945" by Ian Buruma

It doesn't really go into deep detail about this particular issue, but it really helps put your question into context There was no guidebook for the post-war period. No one had ever seen anything like this before. The issue doesn't make sense today, but it didn't happen today either. Check it out.

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Thanks again!

There's a famous book I read some years ago entitled something like Race and War in the Pacific. One of the authors main points was that because of how the Americans viewed the Japanese as a racial "Other", the Japanese leadership and population was implicitly and explicitly held to a different moral and behavioral standard than were the Germans.

In essence, the Allies were more genuinely shocked and outraged by German atrocities because the Germans were fellow white Christians, and were therefore expected to know better. Whereas in the case of the Japanese, they were a bunch of Asiatic savages who were merely reveling there pretenses to civilization.

Obviously, there are a fricking boatload of deeply racist assumptions behind this line of reasoning that far better scholars than I have spent the last 70 years trying to unpack and understand.

I suppose I'm wondering whether there was some specific information from Unit 731 that the US was after that made them so much more valuable, and if so how was it used?

Hey there, I recently finished reading "The Devil's doctors" which covers the major medical atrocities committed by the Japanese, including ones in Papua New Guinea, Mukden and committed by Shiro Ishii.

Japanese doctors involved in such activities were explicitly told to leave, and burn documents as they left, along with trying to kill as many survivors as they could. In the end, only 30 or so were 'officially' tried, and the ones sentenced to hang didn't, and all of them were eventually released in 1958(?) due to American troubles in the Korean peninsula.

The Japanese doctors were not so much given immunity, as that they were not charged, and the people involved were able to be useful to the US. There are some dubious issues regarding classified documents that the US gave back to Japan that contained evidence of these medical experiments, but it is hearsay.

The actual experiments being done, apart from the ones with Shiro Ishii were mainly regarding infection rates, symptoms and treatments for malaria, dysentery and wounds (at least for allied soldiers anyway. Apparently small pox and other nasties were used on Chinese nationals). These infections were done in stages with different virulent or bacterial forms of the diseases, and information was taken from the sample sizes.

Now, in cases such as biological warfare and microbiology, we didn't already have this information, unlike with the Nazi experiments in which we did mostly. The Japanese were able to play around with diseases that were so foreign to Americans and Europeans that it was quite useful that these tests had been done. Some of the weirder forms like injecting infected bile into someone who is already sick may be considered torture, but we now know definitely that it's not a good idea.

The whole thing isn't pleasant, and a lot of people got away with a lot of stuff they should not have. If you want another relevant book about the preceeding years of the Nuremberg trials of doctors, check out "Doctors from Hell" (they're really unique with the titles, I know).