Page 69 - Unit 731 Testimony

recollections: "If this is true, it sends a shiver down the spine. This makes
the sacrifices in the Okinawa battle even more pitiful."

In the end, the attack never came together in time for execution. A
merciful coincidence of timing thus spared the people of Japan's
southernmost prefecture from further suffering at the hands of their Imperial
Japanese Army "protectors."

Even this was not the most shocking idea conceived by Japan's
military planners, however. Recent evidence points to a plan to carry
Japan's biological warfare program to the United States itself.

The top navy leaders who looked to biological warfare as a last-ditch
effort to turn the tide of the war set their sights no lower than the American
mainland itself. They targeted it for an attack that would combine elements
of previous attacks on Chinese cities and villages with a kamikaze delivery
system. A former officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy who had been
involved with the plan let the world hear about it for the first time in an
interview carried by the Sankei newspaper on August 14, 1977. Former

captain Eno Yoshio, seventy-three years old and living in Hiroshima at the
time he talked to the paper, was closely involved in the operation from the
beginning. The Sankei article quoted Eno as admitting that "this is the first
time I have said anything about Operation PX, because it involved the rules
of war and international law. The plan was not put into actual operation, but
I felt that just the fact that it was formulated would cause international

misunderstanding. I never even leaked anything to the staff of the war
history archives at the Japan Defense Agency, and I don't feel comfortable
talking about it even now. But, at the time, Japan was losing badly, and any
means to win would have been all right."

The Japanese navy had submarines nicknamed "underwater aircraft
carriers," which could generally hold from one to three seaplanes inside
watertight compartments at deck height under their conning towers. When
the subs surfaced, the hangar compartments opened into launch catapults.
When the planes landed, they came alongside their mother ships, and they
were hoisted back aboard with winches. The 1-400 submarine, the only ship

of its class, was a large sub capable of carrying three planes. This boat was
earmarked for the attack on America's west coast.
The sub had a displacement of 3,530 tons, an underwater speed of six
and a half knots, and a surface speed of eighteen knots. It was diesel-