Start date October 1940 | ||
The Kaimingjie germ weapon attack was a Japanese biological warfare bacterial germ strike against Kaimingjie, an area of the port of Ningbo in the Chinese province of Zhejiang in October 1940, during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
These attacks were a joint Unit 731 and Unit 1644 endeavour. Bubonic plague was the area of greatest interest to the doctors of the units mentioned above. Six different plague attacks were conducted in China during the war, between the start of aggression and the end of the war.
Using airdropped wheat, corn, scraps of cotton cloth and sand infested with plague infected fleas, an outbreak was started that resulted in a hundred deaths. The area was evacuated and a 14-foot wall was built around it to enforce a quarantine. The area was eventually burnt to the ground to eradicate the disease.
A later attack in 1942 on the same area by the two units led to the development of their final delivery system: airdropped ceramic bombs. Some work was conducted during the war with the use of liquid forms of the pathogen agents but the results were unsatisfactory for the researchers.