Kaimingye germ weapon attack

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The Kaimingye germ weapon attack was a Japanese biological warfare bacterial germ strike against Kaimingye (開明), a village near the port of Ningbo in the Chinese province of Zhejiang during 1938 or 1939, during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

These attacks were a joint Unit 731 and Unit 1644 endeavor. 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, a huge outbreak was started that resulted in over a hundred thousand deaths. The area had to be evacuated and contained with a quarantine that kept the area off limits until the 1960s.

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.