32. Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night: The Plan to Infect America With the Plague
Thanks to the thousands of test subjects killed in the camps of Unit 731, plus the hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians outside who were exposed to the plague, Shiro Ishii brought biological warfare to new heights – or depths. By 1945, even as Japan was reeling on her last legs, she still had a horrific last card to play: weaponized deadly pathogens. Ishii and Unit 731 had encased the bubonic plague, botulism, anthrax, smallpox, cholera, and other diseases into bombs that were routinely dropped on Chinese combatants and civilians alike. If Ishii had had his way, American civilians would have shared the same fate: on March 26th, 1945, he finalized plans for Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, to attack America with biological weapons.
The operation called for five I-400 long-range submarines, each carrying three Aichi M6A1 Seiran float planes, to cross the Pacific Ocean. Upon reaching the US West Coast, the submarines were to launch the float planes, loaded with plague-infected fleas, to attack San Diego. As one of pilots put it in 1998: “I was told directly by Shiro Ishii of the kamikaze mission “Cherry Blossoms at Night”, which was named by Ishii himself. I was a leader of a squad of seventeen. I understood that the mission was to spread contaminated fleas in the enemy’s base and contaminate them with plague.” The operation was scheduled for September 22nd, 1945, but the atomic bombing of Japan in August ended the war. Japan formally surrendered on September 2nd, less than three weeks before the launch date of Cherry Blossoms at Night.
