How a WWII Japanese sub commander helped exonerate a U.S. Navy…Turkey’s president vows to ‘save’ the country from the largest outbreak of ‘sea…
This week’s entry: Bat bomb
What it’s about: Holy ordinance, Batman! During World War II, American scientists raced to develop crucial technology that would win the war: The B-29 bomber. Radar. The atomic bomb. And, a somewhat less crucial technology, the bat bomb: a bomb canister that contained live bats, each of which would carry an incendiary device and (in theory) start devastating fires across Japanese cities.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
Biggest controversy: The part where we tried to defeat Imperial Japan with an army of bats. The idea came from a dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams. An acquaintance of Eleanor Roosevelt, he wrote to the White House a month after Pearl Harbor suggesting the idea, which came to him during a trip to Carlsbad Caverns. Adams was “intrigued by the strength of bats” and believed they could carry an incendiary device, which could do serious damage to Japan’s largely wooden architecture.
With FDR’s approval, Adams led up an Air Force project to develop a bat bomb. His team for some wonderful reason consisted of a movie star (more on that later), an unnamed former gangster, an also unnamed former hotel manager, and chemist Louis Fieser, who developed the first synthetic vitamin K and cortisone, and more relevant to the war effort, napalm.
Their eventual prototype was a bomb-shaped metal canister with separate compartments for 1,040 Mexican free-tailed bats. The bomb would be dropped and then at 4,000 feet deploy a parachute, then open to release the bats. The bats would naturally roost in the eaves of buildings, but each one had a 15- to 18-gram payload of napalm (slightly heavier than the weight of the bat itself) on a timer. After several unsuccessful attempts at strapping the bombs to the bats, Adams’ team ended up gluing the devices directly to the bats.
Strangest fact: The only target destroyed by bat bombs was an American air base. Adams’ team made several tests of their bat bomb, but at Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base in New Mexico, napalm-armed bats were accidentally released, roosted under a fuel tank, and set the base on fire. The project was then passed to the Navy and then the Marines and was renamed Project X-Ray.
Thing we were happiest to learn: America didn’t end up incinerating thousands of bats for the war effort. The Marines were surprisingly enthused about the bat bomb, believing the countless small fires the bats would start would be harder to fight and would spread more quickly than a smaller number of large fires caused by conventional bombing. But by mid-1944, with $2 million already spent on the project and at least another year until the bats would be combat-ready, the project was canceled. As for Fieser’s invention, the U.S. dropped napalm on Berlin and Tokyo without any animal intermediaries.
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting Blog.