“Some bats, if sluggish, plummeted to the ground....”

Background information and commentary by Andrew Carroll: Last week we featured a letter that recommended a rather preposterous idea during WWII to tie little bombs around the necks of a large number of bats, and then release the bats over Japan. This week we focus on an update of how the initial experiments were going. To be fair, they were not a total flop, but in the following July 2, 1943, memo, one of the technical aides on the project, Warren C. Lothrop, explains to his superiors the significant problems they encountered. (WCL is Lothrop himself; LFF is Dr. Louis F. Feiser, a Harvard colleague of Earl P. Stevenson; and CWS is the Chemical Warfare Service, which was tasked with creating the incendiary devices.) This letter is published in its entirety in BEHIND THE LINES, along with a more detailed account of this unusual story.

July 2, 1943

On June 23rd, WCL interviewed Dr. Feiser on the bat tests.

LFF reported that a cooperative group of the Air Corps, CWS, Dr. Adams and himself had spent several days in the far West testing out the Adam's plan. These tests had shown that the bats were not as easy to catch as had been supposed, that they were more delicate than had been supposed, that they were much more difficult to cause to hibernate than had been supposed and that once in hibernation they were not as easily aroused as had been supposed. Furthermore, release of the bats from aircraft was an item which would require considerable experimentation. Some bats, if sluggish, plummeted to the ground, others if put out of the plane at high speed apparently had their wings broken. Lastly the bats were not able to carry the load expected (18 g) but would carry successfully a load of 11 g.

On the other side of the ledger, the bats, once properly gotten into the air, would act as gliders and covered a vast area, many of them not being located afterwards. Moreover they were found in some cases to have entered barns and to have climbed under the eaves of buildings. Because of the wide dispersion, the group did not try to run actual tests using an incendiary for fear of damaging private property.

In the latter stages of the experiment, there was a disaster in which the hangers and outlying buildings of the small airport used burned down. The cause of the fire was never ascertained, but it served to discourage the group....

This report more or less coincides with LFF's own opinion and recommended that the experiments be dropped and that the idea was probably impractical....

Warren C. Lothrop

Less than two weeks later, the Army Air Force deemed “X-Ray,” as the project was being called, impractical. But X-Ray still had its supporters, including Admiral John Sidney McCain (grandfather of Senator John McCain from Arizona), and testing went on for several more months. By March 1944, after spending millions of dollars on the project, the government finally shut it down, focusing its efforts instead on a much more promising device—a nuclear weapon.

NEXT WEEK: A more contemporary example of how animals are used in warfare.