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The military tested mustard gas and other chemical agents with about 60,000 enlisted men serving as proxies for enemy troops, reported NPR.
Those troops were broken into racial groups, with white soldiers used as scientific control groups to establish what a "normal" reaction would be, and those results were compared to the reactions of other ethnicities.
"They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins," said Rollins Edwards, a 93-year-old black veteran who took part in the experiments.
Edwards said he and about a dozen other soldiers were taken to a wooden gas chamber and locked inside, where a mixture of mustard gas and lewisite were piped in.
The veteran said the chemical agents made him feel like he was on fire, and he said some troops fought to escape.
"Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out, and then some of the guys fainted," Edwards said. "Finally they opened the door and let us out, and the guys were just — they were in bad shape."
Mustard gas damages DNA within seconds of contact and causes painful blisters and burns, and exposure can cause leukemia, skin cancer, emphysema, and asthma.
All of the experiments were conducted secretly and were not recorded on the subjects' official military records, NPR found.
Most of the soldiers have no proof they were subjected to the experiments and received no follow-up care or health monitoring at all.
Some men were unable to receive proper medical care for their injuries because they were sworn to secrecy and could not tell their doctors what had happened.
Edwards still breaks out in a rash and his skin still falls off in flakes more than 70 years after taking part in the tests, and he carried around a jar of those flakes for years to prove what had happened.
Federal officials admitted in 1991 to military testing on enlisted men during World War II, but current defense officials said those types of experiments were abandoned long ago.
"The first thing to be very clear about is that the Department of Defense does not conduct chemical weapons testing any longer," said Army Col. Steve Warren, director of press operations at the Pentagon. "I think we have probably come as far as any institution in America on race."
Comment: Which is not very far -- just look at how the police conduct themselves.
A Canadian researcher first exposed the race-based experiments in 2008 in a report that suggested black and Puerto Rican troops were tested as part of a search for the "ideal chemical soldier" who was more resistant to mustard gas.
Those troops would then be used on the front lines while white soldiers stayed back, protected from the poisonous gas, University of Alberta researcher Susan Smith reported in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.
The article received little attention, but NPR examined additional records as part of a two-part investigative report that showed troops were segregated by race and exposed directly to mustard gas in a variety of tests.
Many tests were conducted on Japanese-American soldiers to determine how mustard gas might affect enemy Japanese troops.
The widow of one Japanese-American veteran said her husband accepted his role in the experiments.
"(He wanted to) prove he was a good United States citizen," said Susan Susan Matsumoto, whose husband Tom died of pneumonia in 2004.
Listen here.
chemical weapons testing?
hmmm..
what are depleted uranium shells?
oh, maybe that's not "testing" they don't need to test it, they KNOW what it does!