There was once an oral surgeon named Lytle S. Adams. He lived a long time ago, when America was fighting a war against Japan. Japan had attacked a military base in Hawaii, and—the day that happened—Adams was on vacation at Carlsbad Caverns. That’s a system of caves in New Mexico, where thousands and thousands of bats live. Adams was very impressed with the bats, and he came up with an idea: a swarm of weaponized bats, with miniature incendiary bombs strapped to their bodies—bats that would be dropped over Japanese cities to streak through the air, scatter far and wide, and then explode, sparking thousands of little fires all over the place, burning down buildings and frightening everyone.
Adams was friendly with Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, and he used his connections to send a brief to the president; the president gave it to a military commander with a note that said, ‘This man is not a nut.’ And so, by 1943, there was a top secret bat-bomb project up and running in several states, eventually called Project X-Ray.
Adams and his team drove thousands of miles, visiting caves to trap and assess the viability of various bat species. They painstakingly engineered tiny bombs, weighing 28 grams or less, and developed techniques for clipping them to loose skin that puckers off a bat’s chest. They devised ways to release armed battalions from a B-25—180 bats at a time—in a sealed container specially made at a factory reportedly owned by Bing Crosby. It was a kind of metabomb that would—once it reached a survivable altitude for bats—deploy a parachute and spring open, releasing the bats and somehow also pulling the pins on their time-delayed, exploding payloads. The military threw $2 million at the idea and ran 30 separate demonstrations. More than 6,000 bats were drafted.
But as an article in Air Force Magazine notes, ‘There were many complications.’ For one thing, the bats had to be squashed into ice cube trays and refrigerated to trigger hibernation so they could be more easily handled by the men and women clipping bombs to their chests. And many of the animals, once the giant metabomb popped open, simply never woke up. Or the clips ripped out of their skin. Or the bombs didn’t trigger. Great numbers of insubordinate bats simply ‘refused to cooperate and plummeted to earth.’ Once, a rogue flock of bat conscripts escaped through an open door wearing live explosives. They set fire to a brand-new military hangar, destroying it, and burned out a commanding officer’s car.