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Japanese General Yoshijiro Umezo, Chief of the Imperial Staff, signs Japan's surrender documents on September 1 1945 aboard the USS Missouri (REUTERS)
Nine of the crew were taken into custody, with Capt. Marvin Watkins separated from his men and sent to Tokyo for interrogation. The remainder were handed over to a military physician and transported to Kyushu Imperial University's College of Medicine, the predecessor of the modern-day institution.
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In testimony against 30 doctors and university personnel presented to a hearing of the Allied War Crimes tribunal in Yokohama in 1948, it was claimed that doctors gave the POWs intravenous injections of seawater to test if it could serve as a substitute for sterile saline solution.
Others had parts of their livers removed to determine if they could survive. Another experiment was to determine whether epilepsy could be controlled through the removal of part of the brain.
Army General Douglas MacArthur (AP)
None of the crew of the aircraft survived and their remains were preserved in formaldehyde until the end of the war, when the doctors attempted to cover their tracks by destroying the evidence.
One doctor committed suicide in prison before the trial and charges of cannibalism were dropped due to a lack of evidence, but 23 people were found guilty of carrying out vivisection or the wrongful removal of body parts.
Five were sentenced to death, four received life prison terms and the rest received shorter sentences.
Two years later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, commuted all the death sentences and reduced most of the prison terms. By 1958, every one of the people involved in the case had been released.
The university has for seven decades been keen to avoid discussing the incident, but it came up at a meeting of professors in March and it was agreed to include the details of the case in the display.