A Little History - the Doctor from Neuchâtel

The Doctor from Neuchâtel

The 41-year old doctor was the first foreign physician to arrive in the city. In his diary he wrote, 

The doctor’s original assignment for ICRC had been to interview prisoners of war (POWs) held in Japan, not to deal with bombing and civilian victims of the war. He arrived in Tokyo one day after the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. A day later the US carried out a similar attack on Nagasaki. A week later the war was over in Japan.

News of the attack was initially blacked out by both Japanese and American authorities. Hearing through others of the tragedy, he secretly sent a colleague to Hiroshima to report.  His colleague wrote that:

“...out of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 had died; out of 300 doctors, 270 had died or were too badly injured to work. Conditions appalling - city wiped out eighty percent - all hospitals destroyed or seriously damaged - inspected two emergency hospitals - conditions beyond description. Effects of bomb mysteriously serious - many victims apparently recovering suddenly suffer fatal relapse due to decomposition white blood cells… now dying in great numbers..."”

At the time there was no way to estimate the number killed, though later estimates placed the total in Hiroshima at 140,000 and another 40,000 in Nagasaki. How to care for the survivors? How to re-establish essential services.

With the report and photos in hand, he pressed the new American military officials to approve an initial assessment mission and delivery of emergency supplies.  Taking the American officers along for the assessment left no doubt in their minds of the extent of the tragedy and need for urgent relief.  He then worked tirelessly to find and deliver food, medical personnel, and supplies to the area. 

Hiroshima was not his first encounter with a disaster, but it was the worst - indeed the worst that the world had ever encountered.

Born in 1904 as the son of a pastor in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he first worked on relief efforts for Russia in the aftermath of World War I. He later studied medicine in Geneva and after graduating in 1929, he went to work as a surgeon in Casablanca.

A few years after his return to Geneva, Italy invaded Ethiopia. The young doctor received a call from a friend from his earlier days working on Russian relief efforts. Would he consider going to Ethiopia to help the ICRC delegation there? He agreed, thus becoming one of only two ICRC delegates in the country. When the head of mission was forced to resign in the face of heavy opposition from the Italians, the young doctor became the head of a one-person delegation in the country.

Dr. Marcel Junod

Along with many other atrocities the young doctor witnessed, was the use by Italian forces of mustard gas to decimate the Ethiopian troops (this despite the fact that both Italians and Ethiopians had signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning use of such weapons).

In 1937 he worked again for ICRC, this time to aid the injured on both sides of Spain’s civil war. World War II broke out two years later, and ICRC sent him to survey and report on conditions in POW and civilian concentration camps in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.  His life became one of constant travel, negotiating access with camp officials, and meetings with POWs and refugees.  

In late 1944 he was exhausted.  He resigned from ICRC and went home to his newly-wed wife. 

Not long later the phone rang again.  ICRC needed him in Japan.  The war in Asia was moving towards its climax, and there was deep concern that conditions for POWs in Japan and Manchuria were deteriorating quickly.  Moreover, western countries feared that many of the prisoners might be killed in the final days of the war. For Japan, itself, allied countries were preparing an invasion and a stepped-up bombing campaign.

He was very reluctant to leave Geneva, especially as his wife was now pregnant. After much thought and discussion with her, the doctor agreed to go for what he understood would be a short mission.  It turned out instead to take nearly a year.  

With the war still underway in Asia, getting to Japan was no easy task. The quickest way would have been via the US or Canada, but this was totally unacceptable to the Japanese.   So he and a colleague had first to travel to Cairo, then Tehran, Moscow and then via the trans-Siberian to Manchuria.  Only once they reached the Japanese Headquarters in Harbin could they negotiate permission to interview POWs held by the Japanese in Manchuria, and discuss their further mission to Japan.  

Obtaining permission to enter Japan mission was a major hurdle. Unlike European countries, Japan had never signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs and thus ICRC had no right under the treaty to enter, inspect and aid prisoners held there. Equally difficult was the fact that the USSR was about to declare war on Japan. The border would then become impossible to cross.

Permission to enter Japan finally arrived -  just a day before the USSR declared war and began their invasion of Manchuria.  In fact, the two ICRC delegates left Manchuria just hours before the Russian invasion began.  

Although they knew nothing of it at the time, their arrival in Japan came just two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Shortly after their arrival in Tokyo, the two ICRC delegates began to hear rumors of the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Once they were able to negotiate access, and convince the American and Japanese authorities of the extent of needs, Hiroshima became the focus of their work.  In Hiroshima itself the doctor worked partly as an organizer and partly as a physician, treating the thousands suffering from radiation and other effects of the atomic explosion.  His closest working partners were Masao Tsuzuki, a professor specializing on radiation illness, and a unit from the Imperial University of Tokyo.  

He tried to compare the effects of radiation to the victims of the poison gas attacks he had witnessed in Ethiopia.  In the end, he could only conclude that atomic weapons were far worse, and like the use of poison gas in warfare, nations must work quickly to ban their use.  He wrote later that:

"..for someone who was a witness...of the dramatic consequences of this new weapon, there is no doubt in his mind that the world today is faced with the choice of its continued existence or annihilation. Only a unified world policy can save the world from destruction."

In mid September 1945 the American authorities banned him and others from reporting the nature and extent of death and illness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Yet they allowed him to continue working, and 

later wanted to decorate the doctor for his outstanding efforts. ICRC rules, however, did not permit their staff to receive honors from any government.  

Eight months after arriving in Japan, ICRC finally gave him permission to return home to Switzerland. There in April 1946 he had his first chance to hold his son who had been born while he was in Japan. He swore that he would now settle down to a ‘normal life’ working as a doctor at home.

His resolution did not last long though. A year and a half later while studying as a surgeon in New York he made the mistake of calling on an acquaintance he had earlier met in Geneva - Maurice Pate. Pate had a way of convincing people to change directions in life.

In December 1947 Maurice Pate appointed Dr. Marcel Junod, as UNICEF’s first Representative to China.  He arrived in Shanghai on February 5th 1948 and immediately got down to work.

In some ways, this was only the beginning of the story of UNICEF's work in China - but for that story, you will have to wait for the next edition of ‘A Little History’.

 

Read previous articles on UNICEF's history