The dentist who convinced FDR to bomb Japan with bats
by Gail Sherman · Boing BoingAn eccentric dentist with the ear of the President had a plan to win the war against Japan. In a letter to FDR, Lytle "Doc" Adams suggested that bats, the "lowest form of animal life …" could "return the call of Pearl Harbor," by being dropped by the millions on Japanese cities with tiny incendiary devices attached. The bats would roost in the nation's mostly wood and paper buildings, setting them ablaze. Although the bats would perish, most civilians, though terrorized, would likely survive.
The Army began work on the project and assembled a motley crew of chemists, bat enthusiasts, and explosives experts for the top secret program. Initial tests were performed with white phosphorus, but a new chemist joined the team. He suggested using a new incendiary he had invented, jellied gasoline, also known as napalm.
The bats, when accidentally released by the napalm guy during a photo shoot, did exactly as expected and burned the airfield to the ground. Ultimately, the program, renamed Project X-ray when the Navy took it over, was canceled. Another top secret program was found to be far more effective — the Manhattan Project.
Jack Couffer, one of the young men on the team, in his excellent book Bat Bomb, laments the failure to see the plan through to the end: "In looking back, one might view the whole plan simply as a romantic notion, only valid because we were grasping at any straw to save our country from extermination. But bat incendiaries were more or less proven a year and a half before Hiroshima and their deployment might have slowed down the Japanese even if it didn't stop them. We were so close, it seems a pity that we didn't try."
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