23. Attacking America With Biological Weapons
By 1945, Japan was on her last legs, but still had one last horrific card to play: weaponized deadly pathogens. Shiro 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. He proposed to subject American civilians to the same fate. On March 26th, 1945, Ishii finalized plans for Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, to attack America with biological weapons.
Five I-400 long-range submarines, each carrying three Aichi M6A1 Seiran float planes, were to cross the Pacific Ocean. Upon reaching America’s West Coast, the float plans, loaded with plague-inflected fleas, were to launch and attack San Diego. As one of the 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.“
