Once when I was passing time in a drug study in Delaware, one of my fellow volunteers spoke of his military service during the Vietnam War and in various government actions in the years following. He had been in Special Services, which means that he would often be assigned to missions the government could never admit to, being utterly ruthless and immoral. He might be handed a list of names or villages and sent into a "neutral" zone such as Laos or Cambodia, where he would assassinate politically meaningful people and slaughter their families in the bargain. In other words, he was a problem solver. I asked him the old familiar question, "Why did you join that particular corps -- didn't it bother you?" He explained that the only way he felt that he could have even the smallest influence in the events taking place around him was either to stay entirely out of the war and desert, or to be as well-informed and personally dangerous as possible. The regular enlisted men were being sent to their deaths for no reason at all, every day, with no idea in their heads as to what was going on in the minds of the commanders, much less in other parts of the conflict zone. He chose to be a conscious, deadly agent as an alternative to being a plate of dog food. He didn't think of it as choosing to be a homicidal maniac.

This fellow-traveler's choices were none I would be proud of, and his reasoning does not excuse the atrocities he committed, but if we confine ourselves to the choice between regular military duty and the status of an operative from the inner command circles has an obvious logic. Looking into certain chapters of military history, I can agree that in hindsight, any war will be an absurd orgy of mass murder and only a few partisans really understand what is happening. The pointlessness of death becomes more vivid whenever one hears the word experiment in relation to a military action. Here we'll examine war experiments both real and pretended, and a medical blunder that was excused under the guise of research. In the process the reader may see that a high level of suspicion is appropriate while listening to apologies in either area.

Theaters or war have been used as laboratories throughout history in order for governments to figure out new ways of handling their personnel, how to employ strategies under particular circumstances, and especially to test new technology. Naturally soldiers and civilians serve as the guinea pigs while generals strive to reach the next threshold in state-of-the-art mass homicide. However for this to be the case on a given battlefield, all of the planners of a given war machine must be in on the experiment, and they must have a clear idea of what it is they wish to learn, what theory they are putting to the test. First, for an example of an actual military experiment we'll take a look at the aerial bombardment of the Basque town Guernica by the Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) on April 26, 1937. In that instance the town's population and architecture served as experimental matter for the Nazi war machine, and during it the Germans learned many useful things. The motive for the raid was quickly surmised by observers throughout the world, but Hitler and his Spanish client did not admit that it was an experiment.

Then, the raid on Dieppe by the Allied Forces on August 19, 1942 was an unauthorized mission that turned into one of the worst blunders of W.W.II, but which has been presented to history as an experiment by which key insights were learned and which made the successful invasion of Normandy possible two years later. In reality nothing was proven save for the stupidity and of the mission's commander, Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979). The raid was not an experiment.

Finally we'll show why the Dieppe raid is strikingly similar to the tragic death of Nicole Wan in 1996. Her overdose had nothing to do with experimentation, but this "quest for the unknown" was invoked as bureaucrats fumbled for a plausible reason why disaster had struck the young woman down. Guernica, the experiment that really was.

On April 26, 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, a town in the Basque region named Guernica was used as a military research zone by Hitler's Air Force, and its wartime population of 9,000 civilians served as human guinea pigs. Guernica was the first town in history not only to be completely destroyed, but also completely terrorized by means of aerial bombardment and strafing.

Guernica, located about 13 miles East of Bilbao, is a place of deep mystical importance for the Basque people. It is the spiritual capital of their race and the home of the sacred oak tree of Guernica, a symbol of Basque independence. On the day in question Guernica still lay just 6 miles within the Republican zone, parts of which were held by anarchist militias or by the government of Spain, and it was attacked by the insurgent ultra-right wing (generally called Fascist) forces led by General Francisco Franco. The Condor Legion in the command of Lt. Colonel Wolfram Von Richthofen (a cousin of the famous flying ace "Red Baron" Von Richthofen) had been sent to assist Franco by Hitler the previous summer, just after the conflict started. It was the Condor Legion that bombed Guernica.

Unlike earlier air raids, which generally targeted military facilities, Guernica's two gun factories and its bridge were among the few structures left standing by the bombs.

The Raid began at about 4:30 PM and ended around 7:30. The first bombs fell in the main square, filled with refugees from Bilbao which had been bombed the previous day. They were waiting by the train station, trying to get farther away from the front lines. It was a Monday, which was the weekly market day. The planes divided their tasks into three parts.

First, twenty-three larger planes, Junkers-52, made high passes, during which they dropped 1,000 pound explosive bombs that blasted out the concrete structures of the buildings. Second, another squadron of experimental Heinkel-111s, led by First Lieutenant Rudolf Von Moreau returned with smaller experimental incendiary bombs, some weighing 9 pounds, others in 2-pound aluminum tubes containing thermite and white phosphorous, that set fire to the wreckage of the buildings. Third, much smaller Heinkel-51 and Messerschmitt BF-109 fighter planes flew low over the town and the roads leading from it. These dropped very small anti-personnel bombs, filling the air with razor-sharp metal splinters, and they also shot down any pedestrians they spotted with the machine guns mounted on their wings. The orders were to shoot "anything that moves." Panicked men, women, and children were moving along the roads and through the fields around the town, and all were attacked, including the nuns from the hospital and their livestock.

1,654 people died, and 889 were wounded in the attack. The Republican forces had only 8 planes, these offering a spirited but futile resistance. There were no anti-aircraft flack-guns at all, and still worse was the problem of enemy spies, including the most influential man in the town, Rufino Unceta, who owned one of the gun factories. Unceta kept his sympathies well-hidden and delayed the removal of his machinery to safer ground. The fully fitted plant was captured a few days after the bombardment. There were no more than a few score soldiers there at the time, mainly demoralized troops retreating from the front.

The Renteria Bridge was presented by the German pilots in later decades as the principal military target in Guernica. Supposedly it survived because the wind had blown their bombs off target. It's a small stone structure, held up by two small pillars. The question as to why anti-personnel and incendiary bombs would be used to destroy such a target remains outstanding. In fact, the mission's commander knew that the town was just 300 yards from the bridge. The small incendiaries were certain to scatter like leaves and land all over the area when dropped from the height of 6,000 feet. All this clearly establishes that the bridge was never the real target, and that the town was marked for total annihilation. There were four Stuka dive-bombers available to Von Richthofen that day, capable of carrying single 1,000-pound bombs. These could have been deployed to very precisely and easily destroy the bridge. Furthermore the Junkets came in flying abreast, and not single-file, as they would if they'd been targeting a single, small target.

News reports quickly appeared in London and New York stating whose airplanes had attacked Guernica, and precisely how they did it, in consistent eyewitness reports. The Fascists denied the attack altogether, saying that the craters had been caused by land mines and the fires by "Red incendiaries." These denials always conflicted with one another miserably. The news caused a major stir in Catholic circles throughout the world because the Basque region is one of legendary devotion to that faith. The credibility of many clergymen who were fiercely loyal to Franco was brought into question.

It must be stressed that the Spanish Nationalists and the Nazis never wanted the world to understand the actual motives for the raid on Guernica any more than they would advertise their death camp at Dachau. The absolute amorality of the experiment is obvious.

While assisting the takeover then being waged by his Spanish client Franco (who later became a US ally), the Luftwaffe used Guernica to try out the "strategic bombing" system that was to prove extremely useful a few years later during World War II. Important lessons regarding aircraft design were also learned. In addition, new ways of spreading despair and panic through urban populations were perfected in this Nazi experiment in aerial terrorism.

Thus, the experiment at Guernica was quite successful. The techniques devised there have since become basic to modern warfare, having been used ever since by all military powers.

Dieppe, 1942: The Experiment That Never Was

The French port of Dieppe (dee-EPP) lies on the English Channel, about 75 miles across the water from Newhaven, England. During peacetime, the ferry between these two has traditionally been the most convenient passage between the two countries. In the summer of 1942, the German army had been occupying Dieppe already for almost two years, and they had placed a sizable unit of soldiers and ordinance there to defend it against attack. This was not a major investment on their part, but merely a garden-variety defensive installation in one of the mid-sized ports along that coastline. They had not yet fortified all of the beaches in between the towns with larger and more complex forces , as they would later on when actually preparing for an allied invasion.

At this point, Hitler was still winning the war. The British public was getting more and more impatient with its leadership, and clamoring for a "second front" to be launched against the Nazis in addition to the battles being waged by the Russians. The British Government was divided as to what to do next, however. Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister who wanted to take the offensive and take territories back from the Germans, and around him were all sorts of advisors both political and military. One of the ideas that had been kicked around in the war room was that of a "super raid," meaning the invasion of a port by a large force. The purpose was to divide the German resources and help the Soviets, and also bring on a massive air battle, and abandon the port again after holding it for no more than a day.

One of these plans, called Operation Jubilee, was for raiding Dieppe. The young Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the royal family had been placed in charge of Combined Operations, an allied planning unit. This new job was quite important, but some of the older, more experienced commanders considered him a light-weight, and they understood his position to be a public relations move on Churchill's part, rather than a sensible way to tighten the war machine. Mountbatten never received approval from the chiefs of staff for his raid on Dieppe, although he spent the rest of his life assuring the world that he had done so. Other, similar plans had been rejected by the chiefs, and he didn't want to waste an opportunity for personal glory just so that more skilled persons than he could consider whether these 7,000 men had any chance of living through the mission, much less succeeding. When Churchill learned of Jubilee's total defeat he was in Russia on a diplomatic mission. The news came to him as a shock, because he had not known that it was to be attempted. He did not say that Mountbatten had not gotten approval however, because to do so would have been to expose to the world the incompetence of his team, and this would cause major trouble even if admitted long after the war was over. The Chiefs had never given approval, and yet they didn't seem to care that all sorts of planes, ships, and loaded landing craft were being led away by Mountbatten, who did not have direct authority over that much of the military forces.

The raiding party assaulted the beach "despite the fact that he did not have either the capital ships or the heavy bombers that alone could have counter-balanced the defenders' firepower and give the attacking force any chance at all," in the words of historian Brian Villa. Another strange question is why the party landed in daylight, and without a smoke-screen of any kind to hide the men from the cross-hairs of the German guns. Another again is why they advanced straight into a fortified harbor, rather than landing some distance down the undefended beach and coming in from the sides or from behind. It all seems like a classroom exercise on how to carry out a doomed mission, explainable only by Mountbatten's blind ambition and the absolute commitment on the part of Churchill and the royal family to protect him from paying the normal price for his reckless abuse of trust and power.

Dieppe was not the last time Churchill's moral choices were, shall we say, strange? Before the war's end he had chosen not to relieve the famine-stricken population in Bengal and watched 3-5 million people die from starvation and disease there. More famously still, he had not instructed his bombing crews to destroy the railway lines leading into the German death camps, after the allies had achieved total command of the air space over Europe. In these two affairs, he could have prevented millions of deaths by making a few phone calls, but he just didn't. Mountbatten, in the present instance, was promoted further and became the supreme commander of the allied forces in Southeast Asia, eventually gaining the title "Earl of Burma" from the final victory in that region.

At any rate, Operation Jubilee was the most costly and most embarrassing blunders of the whole war, on either side. No nation understands this better than the Canadians, since out of the 6,000 troops that assaulted the beach that day --most being from the South Saskatchewan regiment, Canadian second division --1,700 were killed or wounded and another 1,900 were captured and spent the rest of the war in internment camps. Only a handful made it into the town at all, which is no surprise because not one of the Canadians had any previous battle experience.

Every tank that landed had to be sacrificed, mainly because their treads were not suited for the gravel at Dieppe and fell right off the tanks. Mind you, every person planning the attack can be presumed familiar with, and to have personally visited, the Normandy coast. 33 landing craft never made it past the beach. Aside from the gravel, there were anti-tank ditches and concrete barriers blocking all entrances to the town, all in plain sight.

Down the beach a piece at a village called Puys (pwee), one of the two flanking maneuvers by a Canadian infantry battalion ran into what allied historians have termed "bad luck." The German commander had ordered a "practice alert" for his battalion, and the beach defenses fully manned. The men were met by machine-gun fire the moment they stepped from the landing craft. Hand grenades rained down on from the cliffs upon those who lasted more than a few seconds. If Allied Intelligence had been involved, they might have easily created a diversion or at least made sure that this German unit was elsewhere on the day of the raid. As it happened, Mountbatten's team was completely clueless.

Canadians are bitter about the massacre to this day, even though a good share of the blame goes to the Canadian General McNaughton, who could easily have refused to involve his troops because he was given no evidence that the War Cabinet had approved the mission. He simply took Mountbatten's word that everything was a go.

The German casualties were about 600 men and 200 planes. Since the Allies lost only 100 planes, this attrition rate got some favorable mention. The relative advantage in the air has not been presented as a justification for the massive losses. For their part the Nazi commanders were somewhat bewildered by the ease by which they had defended the port.

How and why did the British Government cover up the fact that one of its pet idiots, the incompetent but picturesque Louis Mountbatten, had jumped the chain of command and led thousands of soldiers --mostly from another country --into a virtual meat-grinder in order to put a few laurels on his own head? Their reasons were very clear. If they had admitted that this had happened, it would have caused a grave breach between Britain and not only Canada, but possibly all of the British Commonwealth nations. During the war such a scandal would badly undermine confidence in Britain's military leadership: a grave concern to say the least. Beyond that, the scandal could have undermined public confidence in the government itself, particularly since Mountbatten was able to pull it off because of his royal connections. The method ultimately used to cover up this atrocity was a bit more innovative: they called it an experiment.

The disastrous Operation Jubilee was called the "rehearsal for invasion" even before the Invasion of Normandy (Operation Overlord) took place in June 1944. The two operations have been aligned into a direct relationship by command apologists incessantly for half a century, as though it had been possible to win the war only because valuable "lessons" were learned at Dieppe. On the eve of the Normandy invasion, the 3rd Canadian Division was told that "the plan, the preparations, the method and technique" of their new mission was "based on knowledge and experience bought and paid for by the 2nd Canadian division at Dieppe." Mountbatten swore by this formula for the rest of his life. "I do hope," he wrote in 1973, "the Dieppe boys will have at last understood that without their valiant efforts we could never have had Overlord."

Diversion was one of the ways by which the aristocrat claims to have schooled the invasion forces. He called Jubilee "one of the great deception operations of the war," meaning that it misled the Germans into thinking that the invasion was to take place at a major port such as Cherbourg or Le Havre --ports capable of handling large-scale troop landings. This is not true because it would have been foolish to directly attack those ports anyway, but no one needed a suicide mission at Dieppe to learn this --it's a matter of strategic first principles.

Another alleged "lesson" learned at Dieppe was supposedly ways to jam or falsely trigger the defensive radar systems that the Nazis had in place along the European coastline. Historian John Campbell has very carefully examined all of the developments in radar technology during the course of the war, as well as the strategic proposals and counter-proposals for invasion that followed operation Jubilee. He discovered that there was little or no value placed on the Dieppe events regarding radar, and he points out that no new jamming devices were tried during the mission, that no German devices were captured, nor were the Germans tricked into using any devices they had not used before so as to expose a defense system the allies hadn't figured out.

Historians have been mentioning too that while Jubilee involved a small force, a tiny clique of generals and a few miles of coastline, Overlord involved hundreds of thousands of troops, the total involvement of all the allied resources in the region, and an unbelievably complex coordination of intelligence, communications, and supply transport. To say that one determined the plan of action for the other is like saying that one can plan for surgery on a whale by dissecting a sardine. Another problem is the time lapse: the Germans had developed new radar technology and installed massive additional defense systems throughout France during the two years passing between Dieppe and D-Day.

Also obvious is the time lapse: two years passed between the two operations. During the hiatus several large-scale amphibious landings occurred, all over Europe. Everything worthy of consideration for the Normandy invasion was tested after Dieppe. Thick encyclopedias on The Battle of Normandy exist, without making even a single mention of Dieppe. As one historian quipped, if it "was a rehearsal, ...it certainly wasn't a dress rehearsal."

Mountbatten lived a long and luxurious life, but he was never to really forget Dieppe. A year before his death he said to a Canadian TV producer, "[I don not understand] Why they wish to go on revelling in the massacres with their martyrism. They [just] want to revel in their misery." Throughout the postwar life he said many times, "It is a curious thing, but a fact, that I have been right in everything I have done and said in my life." In 1979, while relaxing on his yacht, Louis Mountbatten was blown to pieces by a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army.

Hoi Yan (Nicole) Wan was a 19-year old University of Rochester freshman who died as a result of an air pollution and second-hand smoke study on March 31, 1996. The research in which she participated began in 1981, and involved the harvesting of lung cells during a procedure called a bronchoscopy. In this procedure, a flexible bronchoscope measuring 7mm x 40cm is inserted down the subject's windpipe, and the local anesthetic lidocaine is sprayed down the throat to control gagging. Her family sued for wrongful death, demanding $100 million, and the university floundered for answers. The family and the University jointly announced on October 3, 1996 that an out-of-court settlement had been reached.

The settlement came a few days after the New York State Department of Health found that attending physician Mark Frampton, of the university's Strong Memorial Hospital had allowed his intern, Dr. Edgar Geigel, to give Wan four times the maximum dose of lidocaine, had failed to state clear maximum dosages in the study's protocol, had violated the stated guidelines, and had failed to properly monitor the young woman's condition after the procedure. Ms. Wan was complaining of chest pains and weakness and was coughing blood when she was discharged from the hospital. She returned two hours later to the emergency room suffering a heart attack, passed into a coma, and died two days later. There are questions remaining as to whether the attending physician was even in attendance. He may have let his intern do the procedures unsupervised. The finding by state health department officials did not carry any penalties, but was passed along to the federal Office for Protection from Research Risks, which is conducting its own probe and can sanction institutions.

The settlement stipulated that the university will erect a memorial to Ms. Wan, it will offer scholarships to Chinese-American students, and it will sponsor an annual lecture on the ethical and safety issues involved in research on humans. An undisclosed amount of money was agreed upon, described only as "reasonable compensation satisfactory to the Wan family." It has been reported that the family plans to push for a requirement that research volunteers under age 20 have parental consent. The Wans did not know that their daughter was participating in research until they learned of her hospitalization.

After the news emerged of Wan's death, the bronchoscopy was reported as an "experiment" in newspaper reports. New York State Health Commissioner Barbara De Buono connected the research protocol to the mishap of Nicole Wan's death. Both of these misinterpretations go a long way in blurring the seriousness of the Dr. Frampton's and Dr. Geigel's mistake and serve to whitewash the social implications of the tragedy.

Lidocaine is hardly an experimental drug, being in common use since 1946. As for bronchoscopies, Dorland's Medical Dictionary cites these from 1898. This tissue sampling was part of a long-term gathering of data from the US population in order to figure out how all of us are affected by air pollution. The tissue biopsy is itself a virtually ancient procedure, dating back to the invention of the microscope in the 1850s. This means that Nicole Wan's fatal experience at Strong Memorial Hospital had no experimental features: she underwent an entirely routine procedure. The recording of data was to begin when the lung cells reached the laboratory, and even at that point the word experiment would be a bit of a stretch. Frampton ∓ company know all about lidocaine, bronchoscopies and biopsies because they're physicians and a lung specialists, and not because they read a particular protocol that described the harvesting of lung tissues from study volunteers.

A spokesperson for the University of Rochester said in April '96 that Dr. Geigel had performed "more than 100 bronchoscopies without incident" before the case of Nicole Wan. Why then did he forget such basics as the maximum safe dosage of lidocaine and the need to carefully observe the patient after using the drug? Why did he disregard Nicole's complaints of chest pain and weakness? Why didn't her coughed-up blood mean much to him? Let's consider some of the possibilities.

Since Ms. Wan's death, the author has interviewed two people who volunteered for the very same study, one a man and the other a young woman in her early twenties. One did the study in Philadelphia, the other in Boston. Both said that the procedure went smoothly and that it seemed like easy cash. I myself have been intubated for a stomach research study, using lidocaine. The anesthetic was no big deal. The doctor doing the procedure would stop and ask if I was OK whenever I gagged on the tube, and I would say "I am a good soldier." As he removed the tube later on I cautioned him: "Remember, Doc, I'm not a lawn mower."

Doctors in the US usually are not the elite, wealthy, professionally independent operators they are commonly believed to be. Today most of them are simply the employees of hospitals. Large chains of hospitals in the US are now owned by investment groups, and are managed not by physicians but by people holding business degrees. Foreigners who seek treatment here often express disgust with the rushed, impersonal demeanor of American doctors. The typical physician is badly overworked. His decisions are heavily influenced by the salesmanship of pharmaceutical firms and the constraints of "managed care." Thus the medical professions have been badly bastardized by big business. But a few doctors still are the wise, well rested, and deeply caring super-people who we all want at our bedside in times of crisis, and those are the ones whose services the average person cannot afford.

If a young woman had been brought into that same hospital with a foreign object lodged in her esophagus and a few wealthy relatives at her side, bearing the full compliment of insurance ID cards and summoning their professional friends on cellular phones, she might well have been seen by the same doctor, and she may have needed a bronchoscopy. However, in such a case, the doc would have the certain knowledge in his bones that if he made even the smallest mistake, or if his conduct was in any way imperfect, the payback would be swift and sure. He would have devoted extra time to her, and would have been more demanding of his support staff.

Nicole, however, was not in the same social class as such a patient. She was just a guinea pig, someone who was strapped for cash, and who was essentially renting her own body in an honorable but distinctly undesirable manner in exchange for a few bucks. This was not someone with a lawyer at her beck and call. Harvesting her lung cells was a monotonous schlep-job for the doctor. In Wan's case, they knew instinctively that imperfect conduct would not be carefully watched for, and might even be expected. Whatever carelessness or other shoddy possibilities waited in these or any doctors' behavior necessarily surfaces first in the case of one of his weaker patients. This time, the shoddiness backfired, but Drs. Frampton and Geigel have not suffered any serious setbacks. One might argue that he should have been prosecuted as criminals (and a few doctors have said so off the record), but the worst they could ever expect are long, easy practices in prison infirmaries, or some other duty out of the fast lane. As it happens, Frampton is still practicing and experimenting at Rochester, and Geigel was last spotted, also practicing, in the Miami area. This out-of court settlement not only side-steps the factors I have named, but it also has been announced in terms that smell of sympathy and deep concern. This is what galls me more than the rest. First, the University of Rochester took advantage of Nicole Wan's vulnerable position, and then got itself off the hook easy because of her family's very understandable wish to put the whole tragedy behind them. Any doctors who perform bronchoscopies without knowing everything about lidocaine and its dangers and acting accordingly are butchers and slobs who should be run out of the profession on a rail. These two have been publicly excused.

In wartime and in peacetime, in medicine and in battle, mistakes are sometimes sugar-coated with the argument that the failed action was tried in the best interests of humanity. We have offered here one real battle experiment, Guernica, and how its true motives were denied afterwards. This was to be compared with a pure blunder, Dieppe, which was excused on the shabby argument that it had provided valuable lessons. Finally the accidental death of a healthy young woman at Rochester in 1996 was played in the media as the unforeseen result of an experiment, so that the public would not see that it actually had been caused by malpractice in a totally routine medical procedure.

For further reading:

• Beevor, Anthony. The Spanish Civil War. London: Orbis, 1982.
  
• Campbell, John P. Dieppe Revisited: A Documentary Investigation. Toronto and London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1993
  
• Legarreta, Dorothy. The Guernica Generation: Basque Refugee Children of the Spanish Civil War. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984.
  
• Personal Library Publishers. Echoes of Disaster: Dieppe 1942. Toronto: Personal Library, 1979
  
• Southworth, Herbert R. "Guernica." In James W. Cortada, ed., Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Westport and London: Greenwood, 1982.
  
• Thomas, Gordon and Max Morgan Witts. Guernica: the Crucible of WW2. New York: Stein ∓ Day, 1975.
  
• Villa, Brian L. Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989.