Bat Bombs Away!

Now I know why they call ‘em the Greatest Generation. What other group would have the moxie to turn bats into trained bomb-​​droppers?
The idea behind World War II’s Project X-​​Ray “was that a bomb-​​like can­is­ter filled with bats would be dropped from high alti­tude over the tar­get area,” says Murdoc Online. “The bats would be in a sort of hiber­na­tion, but as the bomb fell (slowed by a para­chute) they would warm up and awaken.”

At the appro­pri­ate alti­tude, the bomb would open and over one thou­sand bats, each car­ry­ing a tiny time-​​delay napalm incen­di­ary device, would flut­ter away and roost in var­i­ous nooks and cran­nies, many of them in extremely flam­ma­ble wooden Japanese build­ings.
The napalm devices would go off more or less simul­ta­ne­ously, and thou­sands of lit­tle fires would start at the same time. Many of them would grow into large fires, and the abil­ity of the Japanese fire­fight­ers to con­tain them would quickly be over­whelmed…
Seems to me, as out­ra­geous as it sounds, that it could have worked… In fact, one after­noon while demon­strat­ing the napalm devices, sev­eral bats woke too early in the lab, flew off, and ended up burn­ing down the brand-​​new but unin­hab­ited Carlsbad Auxiliary Army Air Base in New Mexico. Really.

Of course, this is the era of warrior-​​thinkers that came up will all sorts of so-​​crazy-​​it-​​might –just-​​work schemes — items like paper bombs, plague-​​filled subs, and air­craft car­ri­ers made of ice.
The October 1990 edi­tion of Air Force mag­a­zine has a hilar­i­ously detailed run­down of the whole bat bomb episode. And Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman cov­ers all sorts of WWII-​​era mil­i­tary research fol­lies in his book Laboratory Warriors: How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II.
THERE’S MORE: “Our intel­li­gent designer has never cre­ated an ani­mal that we couldn’t improve by strap­ping a bomb to it,” snarks Joel.

June 1st, 2005 | Bizarro, Retro-Futuro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.