Bat Bombs!
Mike Smith
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The plan involved bats. Millions of bats. Exploding.
In particular, the plan involved the Mexican free-tailed bat—a medium-sized species chosen for its ability to fly while carrying more than twice its weight—and chosen for its vast, millions-sized colonies, which even today form the largest gatherings of mammals on the planet.
In the plan, members of a top-secret World War II-era unit of the U.S. Air Force would net literally millions of Mexican free-tailed bats, from Texas or New Mexico caves, before gluing a tiny, specially-made napalm time-bomb onto every individual one. More than a thousand such armed bats would then be hung beneath stacked trays, inside a hollow, five-foot-tall bombshell perforated with air holes and equipped with a parachute. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these bombs would then be loaded into planes. The bombs’ temperatures would be lowered enough to send the bats into temporary hibernation—to eliminate the need to feed and calm them—and the “bat bombs” would then be flown, via the Micronesian island of Tinian, into the early-morning darkness over Japan.
The bombs would then fall through the air until, triggered by an altimeter about 4,000 feet up, their parachutes would bloom, their sheet-metal sides would fall away, the pins of the time bombs would pull out, and the bats themselves would awaken and emerge. The moonlit sky would fill with leathery wings, and the bats would fly down to roost before dawn, down to the eaves and overhangs of the city of Osaka. Fanning out for an estimated twenty miles in every direction, the bomb-bearing bats would roost all over the overcrowded city, before settling into the nooks of the city’s picturesque but notoriously combustible wooden buildings—shifting into sleep, and then exploding—bursting into flame, and burning down the city, a city that at the time boasted a population of approximately seven million people.
The idea for these bizarre “bat bombs” came to be known as Project X-Ray, but was initially known as the Adams Plan. Dr. Lytle S. Adams, a Pennsylvania inventor and dental surgeon, thought of the idea in December of 1941, shortly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
In the April 1948 Bulletin of the National Speleological Society, Adams recollected, “I had just been to Carlsbad Caverns, [in southeastern New Mexico], and had been tremendously impressed by the bat flight…. Couldn't those millions of bats be fitted with incendiary bombs and dropped from planes? What could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack?"
By January of 1942, Adams had gotten a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had responded with a brief note to a top military official, writing in part, “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”
Thus encouraged to make the idea a reality, teams of bat experts and chemists were assembled, to determine such things as how much a bat could carry and what kind of explosives should be used. Bats were netted from Carlsbad Caverns—caves wrongly believed at the time to contain the largest population of bats in the country, an estimated 8.7 million—and successful tests using unarmed bombs were conducted just outside of the caverns’ namesake, the town of Carlsbad.
During one particular test in early July of 1943, six bats were armed with bombs and released for a photo-op. The bats proved livelier than expected, however, and quickly flew to the buildings of a brand-new auxiliary air field of the Carlsbad Air Force Base. They roosted on a barracks building, on a control tower, on an office, on an airplane hangar—and, according to some accounts, on a general’s car and a fuel tank. Then, they blew up. The fires they caused sparked other fires, black smoke rose into the sky, and the entire complex burnt to the ground.
“After that test, [the project] did go in a different direction,” said Jack Couffer, Project X-Ray’s youngest member, in a recent personal interview. “That test was carried out by the Air Force. We were all in the Air Force. When that mishap happened, they took it more seriously than they probably should have. That was kind of the final straw.”
Infighting among the project members followed, as did the ouster of the project’s founder, a takeover of the project by the Marines, additional tests in Utah and California and Texas, the construction and bat-induced immolation of a fake Japanese village in Utah, the ordering of a million bomb-equipped bats for an actual planned attack, and finally, the sudden and insufficiently explained shutdown of the project—which coincided, interestingly enough, with various successes in New Mexico’s other top-secret project—a little something being worked on a bit farther north, in Los Alamos.
The year before, 1942, word of that project had drifted down to the men of Project X-Ray. The wonderfully eccentric 1992 book Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon, by Jack Couffer, recounts a conversation about the two projects, and is well worth quoting from at length.
“I heard the damnedest thing while I was in D.C.,” Doc [Adams] said when he got back from Washington. “Some general I met regarding appropriations confused our secret project with another secret project that’s apparently going on somewhere. It’s the silliest nonsense you ever heard of. And evidently this project has got the backing of the president and they’re blowing millions of dollars on it.”
[Jack] Von Bloeker [a bat authority and the project’s physiologist] looked up through his smoke and frowned.
“This general practically threw me out of his office, he was so enraged at the waste of time and money. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the one promoting that crazy notion of making bombs out of atoms?’”
“I had a hell of a time convincing him I had nothing to do with that kind of fraud,” Doc continued.
“What are atoms?” [project member] Frank Benish asked.
“The smallest particles of matter. You know, everything’s made out of cells. You break down cells and you’ve got something even smaller—atoms—something like that.”
“And they think they can make bombs out of them?” Benish shook his head. “Man, they don’t know sic ‘em from come here.”
“Can you imagine such an idea?” Doc said. “They’re throwing away millions, and I can’t get a staff car and driver!”
“Where’s all this happening?” [Von Bloeker] asked.
Doc shrugged. “As soon as he found out I had nothing to do with it he clammed up. But he first got the idea I was involved when I said we had some work to do in New Mexico.”
“Unbelievable!” [Von Bloeker] said.
“Yeah! We got a sure thing like the bat bomb going, something that could really win the war, and they’re jerking off with tiny little atoms. It makes me want to cry.”
New Mexico’s other top secret project—the atomic bomb, for you slower kids—ended World War II in August of 1945, with the dropping of two such bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ended the war, and in mere minutes it also ended more than 220,000 human lives, with thousands more to come due to the bombs’ radiation.
Had bat bombs been used instead, with the bats burning down nearly everything within forty square miles, such an attack would have incinerated almost ten times the area that was burned when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Radiation poisoning would not have been an issue, and though the effects on the American Southwest’s bat populations would have been inestimable, it’s fairly certain that fewer people would have died, as theoretically they could have dived into any of the numerous canals that criss-crossed the city of Osaka, and avoided burning to death.
“I can say that I think it would have worked,” said Jack Couffer. “We were really on the verge of making it happen.”
***
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Reader Comments (10)
He told me that a project like the bat bombings, if carried out, could very likely have dramatically affected bat populations for years to come.
Regarding the "other applications" you mentioned, according to Jack Couffer's book, bats were also once considered as agents for dispersing biological weapons.
Scary stuff. Thanks for reading, and take it easy.
That was so simple, so diabolical, and SO nature-oriented
that it makes me wonder WHY the Japanese didn't think of it first?
Isn't this the perfect plot for "Family Guy"?
I can imagine Peter Griffin loading hollow, perforated, five-foot-tall shells while singing to himself:
Ta da, da da, da da, da da.
Ta da, da da, da da, da da.
Bat bombs! - Bat bombs! - Bat bombs!
Great work, as always, Mike!
Some actually made it, but so few did and those that made it really didn't have any impact, so they abandoned the project.
I think there would be some interesting money in a book about all the war weapon ideas that failed.
I'd read about those balloons floating to the Pacific Northwest--it's pretty wild, and so simple. Those coming in from the West, and German submarines prowling along the East. (See the excellent recent book SHADOW DIVERS for more on that.)
There were also efforts undertaken by the U.S. to attach explosives to cats, pigeons, and dolphins.
And then there was that recent press release about the Air Force having considered dropping "gay bombs" to make enemy soldiers want to stop fighting and just make crazy homosexual love instead.
A book on such weapons could have a section for every major war--Revolutionary, Civil, Mexican, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, etc.--with a chapter apiece for every major idea. You could tell all of American history through a really weird lens, and even have an interesting introductory section about pre-American ideas in pre-American wars. Also: an epilogue about bizarre weapons and ideas currently being considered for the future.
That book would be awesome.
If any publishers are reading this, I would totally drop everything to write it, so long as I was provided with a decent advance.
Or if anyone else wants to take the idea and run with it, consider sending me a copy when you're done--and let me know if you'd like a copy of my bat bomb file.
The Japanese were successful in getting their bombs to the U.S., but didn't learn of it until years after the war. There were five fatalities connected to the balloon bombs, all members of the same family who were on a family outing in Oregon when one discovered a balloon bomb. The thing blew up practically in their faces. As far as I know these were the only casualties. There were balloon bombs found as far east as Wyoming, and perhaps further, according to some articles I have read.