"H-057-2: I-400 and Operation Cherry Blossoms at..." Topic

… Night: Japanese Plan for Biological Warfare – September 1945

"Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night was a Japanese plan to wage biological warfare against cities in Southern California, in retaliation for the U.S. firebombing of Japanese cities, which killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. The Japanese plan called for using aircraft launched from I-400-class submarines to drop "bombs" containing millions of plague-infested fleas. The planned date for execution was 22 September 1945, however Japan announced intent to surrender on 15 August, which was formalized on 2 September 1945, forestalling the operation.

The plan was the inspiration of Surgeon General Shiro Ishii, the Director of Unit 731, the biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, located in Harbin, Manchukuo (Japanese occupied Manchuria). Unit 731 conducted research on chemical and biological warfare agents, using live humans (including some Allied prisoners of war, including unconfirmed reports of U.S. POW survivors of the Bataan Death March) as test subjects. These included tests with bubonic plaque, anthrax, cholera, small pox, and botulism. The Japanese dropped bombs filled with biological agents on Chinese military and civilian targets. Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, more recent studies suggest the number of Chinese killed by Japanese biological warfare may have been in excess of 500,000. Unit 731's experiments constituted some of the most horrific atrocities of the war, yet Ishii was granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes in exchange for his cooperation in sharing knowledge with U.S. biological warfare defense programs…"

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Armand

Very sad.

I never knew until recently that US was shipping mustard gas to Italy. When the Germans made a raid on Bari that a ship blew up and spread mustard gas that cause many casualties.

Also Russia had a ship full of mustard gas that was sunk.

The Bari Harbour raid (Pearl Harbour of the Mediterranean) was a Luftwaffe victory – 1 Ju-88 lost, 29 Allied transport ships sank, extensive harbour damage – the Allies had their theatre reserve of mustard gas in the Liberty ship the John Harvey – a secret cargo that was released into the harbour when the ship sank; some of the sailors had mustard gas poisoning, others had neutropenia (low white blood cell counts) due to exposure, which post war was one of the observations that led to the discovery of chemotherapy for cancer

Thanks

Armand