03/06/2026
The Fredericks family from Belleville, New Jersey sent three sons to war, two didn’t return….
2Lt William Fredericks was killed by the Japanese during medical experimentation on June 2, 1945 in Fukuoka Japan, he was 27 years old…
Born on December 15, 1917 in Belleville, New Jersey to Harry & Ruth Fredricks, William Ralph Fredericks had two brothers. He was previously a member of the New Jersey National Guard and then enlisted in the Air Corps on September 24, 1941.
Passing flight school and commissioned as a pilot, by 1945 William was serving with the 6th Bomber Squadron, 29th Bomber Group, based on Guam.
On May 5, 1945 he was the Co-Pilot of B-29 42-65305 which took off with a crew of eleven to bomb Tachiarai Airfield in Kyushu, Japan.
After dropping their bombs they were hit by AA fire, then attacked by Japanese fighters. After an engine fire spread to the wing, the pilot; 1Lt Watkins ordered the crew to bail out.
Eleven parachutes were seen by accompanying B-29s, one crewmember’s parachute was cut by a Japanese fighter, another killed himself with his last bullet before he was captured, two others died from unknown causes.
Seven crew-members including 2Lt Fredericks were captured by the Japanese. The pilot; 1Lt Watkins, was sent for interrogation in Tokyo, but the remaining six were sent to the Department of Anatomy, Kyushu Imperial University in Fukuoka, Japan.
The B-29 crewmen sent there were subjected to horrific medical experimentation, 2Lt Fredericks was tortured then killed on June 2, 1945 by vivisection without anesthesia. This was the fate of an estimated eight US POWs, their bodies were cremated afterwards to conceal what happened.
Postwar, the only member of the crew from B-29 42-65305 to survive Japanese captivity was 1Lt Marvin Watkins.
2Lt William Fredericks is Memorialized at the Honolulu Memorial in Hawaii and by a memorial marker at Arlington National Cemetery.
Older Brother Harry Fredericks Jr served in the Navy and went Missing in the Caribbean when the merchant ship SS Ogontz he was serving as a gunner on was sunk by U-103 on May 19, 1942.
Younger Brother Clifford Fredericks served in the Army during WW2, he passed away at the age of 80 on February 9, 2000.
At war crimes trials postwar; Toshio Tono, who was a 19 year old medical student at the time and had witnessed the medical experiments & murders of US POWs. He had secretly accumulated incriminating documents and testified for the prosecution.
Of the 30 Japanese military and civilian doctors at the Imperial Kyushu University who were involved in these deaths, 23 were found guilty. Several were sentenced to death, others long prison sentences.
Toshio Tono became an obstetrician & gynecologist postwar and spent decades trying to spread the truth about the horrors committed against US POWs in Japan during WW2. He wrote a book about the war crimes in 1979 and passed away in 2021.
In April 2015, the Kyushu University opened a medical history museum on a campus in Fukuoka, displaying a single panel and one page from a book on the history of the university about the POW medical experimentation.
