The "germ warfare" being waged by the United Nations Command during the Korean War was not against people. In fact, Lieutenant Gerald A. Martin saved the lives of many POWs and refugees by classifying and treating several forms of virulent dysentery and diarrhea.
Although their work was obscured by communist charges that the United States conducted germ warfare, the medical officers of the United Nations Command did, in fact, conduct a war on microbes, not people. One Navy doctor, Lieutenant Gerald A. Martin, MD, Medical Corps, U.S. Navy, played a key role in the battle against epidemic enteric fevers until his death in an aircraft accident on 27 September 1951. Martin and other Navy medical and medical service personnel created and manned one of the most unusual vessels in Naval Forces Far East, the USS LSI(L)-1091, a converted landing ship that became a floating laboratory. The crew and the vessel became Fleet Mobile Epidemic Disease Control Unit Number One, commanded by Commander Joseph M. Coppoletta, MD, Medical Corps, U.S. Navy.
Before Martin joined the unit in late March 1951, the laboratory ship had yet to make a significant contribution to the United Nations Command's war on disease. Used to process Korean refugees in Pusan harbor through the bleak, defeat-plagued winter of 1950-1951, Commander Coppoletta's ship finally received a dramatic mission in March 1951. Headquarters U.S. Naval Forces Far East assigned the disease control unit to an intelligence mission, organized by Brigadier General Crawford F. Sams, MD, Medical Corps, U.S. Army, the Asian theater preventive disease officer. In a high-risk commando mission, Sams went ashore with a Korean-U.S. special operations team to investigate agent reports of bubonic plague near Wonsan. Unable to penetrate the communist security system, Sams had to be satisfied with questioning an agent who had seen the disease victims. Had his team found a diseased Korean, the "specimen" would have gone to the disease control unit for examination. Sams concluded that the disease was real enough (probably a virulent form of smallpox), but not a threat to the immunized soldiers and civilians under U.N. control.
The research mission started with a plan drafted by the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, a group of civilian and military experts in the identification and control of epidemic diseases. Heartened by its success in developing preventive medicine programs and respiratory disease treatment during World War II, the board, chaired by Dr. Colin M. MacLeod, created a special commission to study epidemic enteric (gastrointestinal) diseases and to devise more effective preventive medicine programs and treatments for disabling diarrhea and dysentery. The board declared war on that traditional bane of all armies, "the runs." Dr. MacLeod and fellow board member Dr. Thomas Francis Jr. organized the Commission on Enteric Infections at the 1948 meeting of the American Public Health Association. They recruited three key people for the commission: Dr. James Watt, a noted epidemiologist at the Louisiana State University Medical School, New Orleans; Dr. Albert V. Hardy, laboratory director of the Florida State Board of Health; and Colonel (Dr.) Richard P. Mason, Medical Corps, U.S. Army. In its first studies the commission concluded that basic research on the shigella and salmonella bacteria, the principal culprits in diarrheal epidemics, did not exist.
The threat of epidemics of many kinds in Korea made it an ideal site for both good research and good preventive medicine. Assigned as the commanding officer, 406th Medical General Laboratory, Tokyo, Colonel Mason recruited the epidemic disease control unit as one of his two principal field investigative teams. After the Sams mission, Colonel Mason took over operational control of the unit. He widened its research mission to include the administration of experimental drugs in five different combinations that the commission believed might arrest and cure epidemic diarrhea. A veteran of the Sams mission, Lieutenant Martin joined the unit as Mason's action officer.
In addition to his impressive credentials as a doctor, Jerry Martin brought special qualifications to his assignment. Born and raised in Korea, he was the son of a Canadian medical missionary, Dr. Stanley H. Martin, who had been a staff physician at Severance Hospital, Seoul, until 1940. Jerry Martin had retained his affection for Asians during his long medical education in the United States at the Medical College of Virginia, Baltimore's University Hospital, and the National Naval Medical Center. He still spoke fluent Korean. His sister Ruth was a missionary nurse, and his family had close ties with the Protestant missionary community through the Kilbourne and Moore families. Designated co-director, Joint Dysentery Study Group, Martin accompanied the disease control unit to Koje-do in March 1951. He and his team immediately started a stool-collection and analysis program and provided the medical personnel of the 60th General Depot, the camp administrator, with a variety of drugs for their patients.
Over the next six months all the key leaders of the Commission on Enteric Infections visited Koje-do and reported that Martin and the disease control staff had done an exceptional job in their research assignment as well as serving as emergency treatment teams. Martin's own contribution had been exceptional and beyond his high medical competence. His fluency in Korean won the cooperation of the prisoners of war and the Korean camp personnel. And he enlisted the cooperation of the U.S. civilian staff at Koje-do, the psychological warfare agents of Far East Command's Civilian Information and Education Division, many of whom were Protestant missionaries and family friends such as the Reverend Harold Voelkel and the Reverend Edwin W. Kilbourne, Martin's brother-in-law. Martin also proved instrumental in the organization and staffing of a medical clinic to provide care for the Korean refugees on Koje-do, many of whom had become employees of the United National Civil Assistance Command. The Korean doctors and nurses themselves were refugees from Severance Hospital, Seoul, the missionary and teaching hospital of international renown where Jerry's father had been a staff physician.
The Korean refugee community on Koje-do also included North Korean intelligence agents who served as liaison officers between the political directorate of the North Korean Army and the political officers inside the wire who were leading a life-and-death struggle for the hearts and minds of the North Korean POWs. No doubt Pyongyang knew of Martin's successful medical work, for its agents tried to disrupt his work and condemned the efforts of the epidemic disease control unit as heinous research worthy of Unit 731, the Japanese germ warfare agency in World War II.
Although the unit found its research efforts limited by the POW violence that grew at Koje-do in late 1951 and became a war in 1952, its findings confirmed the parasitic nature of diarrhea bacteria that made them immune to normal field sanitation measures. Only inoculation and prompt medical treatment would curb an epidemic. The research provided valuable clues to the different varieties of diarrhea and amoebic dysentery. The Navy floating laboratory developed the capability of processing 300-400 stool samples a day, an unpleasant but essential part of its diagnostic work. The clinic to treat Korean camp personnel flourished and provided a more cooperative set of patients for drug experimentation, mostly with new antibiotics. Fleet Mobile Epidemic Disease Control Unit One became a principal agency for training medical personnel to deal with enteric diseases. Dr. Jerry Martin did not live to see his pioneering work come to fruition. Taking laboratory findings and sample cultures to Tokyo, he died when the Air Force C-46 in which he was traveling crashed into a mountain in bad weather. Awarded a posthumous Legion of Merit, Martin received additional recognition when his clinic for Koreans on Koje-do was named the Gerald A. Martin Memorial Health Center. Korean POWs carved the granite memorial that leads to the clinic's open door.
The unanticipated result of Dr. Martin's war on epidemic diarrhea and dysentery among Korean communist POWs in the crowded camps on Koje-do was a flurry of additional charges by the communists that United Nations Command was conducting germ warfare experiments on helpless Korean captives. The truth is that Martin and his colleagues kept the prisoners alive and well, thus encouraging many of them to refuse repatriation in 1953.
Dr. Millett is Mason Professor of Military History at The Ohio State University and is coauthor or editor of several books on military history. He thanks Mrs. Virginia Martin, Colonel Richard P. Mason, MD, U.S. Army (Retired), Colonel Robert J.T. Joy, MD, U.S. Army (Retired), and Dr. Edward J. Marolda, Naval Historical Center, for their assistance in the research for this article.