Wars bring out the worst in people, but sometimes, also the best—at least in terms of creativity and
inventiveness. World War II was an arms race, and its participants were constantly inventing
new stuff to get a leg up on their enemies. Some of these inventions were great, some were strange
but effective, and others were straight-up weird. The Germans made 1,300-tonne artillery pieces, the
British invented aircraft carriers made of ice, and the Japanese deployed manned torpedoes. But
what about the Yanks? Did they come up with any weird shit during the war? Many would argue that
America's advantage was its industrial capacity, so surely they came up with some mad stuff.
Spoiler: they did, and in this video, we're going to take a look at three weird American inventions.
You may think this first one must have been conceived by an absolute lunatic, but we
beg to differ. Making a bat bomb is a perfectly reasonable and socially acceptable thing to do,
and we're surprised someone didn't think of it sooner.
About a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the White House received a letter from
a Transylvanian—— I mean Pennsylvanian dental surgeon by the name of Lytle Adams. The surgeon
had been sussing out the bats in a cave in a national park a little while back,
when the world’s greatest idea came to him.
What if the bats could be weaponised? What if the Allies could use them to
burn down fricking Tokyo, because why not burn down Tokyo, right?
Bats, in Adams' words, were the "lowest form of animal life[,
and the] reasons for [their] creation [had] remained unexplained"—until now.
This was the reason God made bats: to "frustrate any attempt of those who
dare desecrate [the American] way of life." Finishing Adams' letter, Roosevelt said,
"This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into."
Good on ya, Frank.
Basically, the plan was to get a bunch of hibernating Mexican free-tailed bats
and glue time-released napalm incendiaries to their chests.
The armed bats would then be shoved into a 1.5-meter or 5-foot metal tube.
Each of these tubes could carry over 1,000 bats and would be dropped from an aircraft
at an altitude of 1,200 meters or 4,000 feet. Once deployed, the tube would open, and the bats
would burst into the sky. Ultimately, they would roost in Tokyo, a city composed mostly of wood.
Once the incendiaries pinged, the bats would burst into flames and take Tokyo to hell with them.
It was bloody foolproof.
In May 1943, the bat bomb was undergoing tests in New Mexico when the bats got out and roosted on
a fuel tank which exploded and turned the testing ground to ash. By December, the bat bomb project,
deemed Project X-Ray, had passed into the hands of the Marine Corps.
The Marines tested the bats on a mock-up Japanese village constructed in Utah earlier that year,
and it was a great success. In the words of the chief of incendiary testing, "A reasonable
number of destructive fires can be started in spite of the extremely small size of the units.
The main advantage of the units would seem to be their placement within the enemy structures
without the knowledge of the householder or fire watchers, thus allowing the fire
to establish itself before being discovered." Project X-Ray was looking good, but some idiot
decided it would be better to conduct more tests before unleashing an army of bats on
Uncle Sam's enemies, and the bat bomb was delayed and delayed, until US Fleet Admiral Ernest King
canned the project because it supposedly wouldn't be combat ready until halfway through 1945.
The Yanks would spend their time and money on another
catastrophic project instead—the atomic bomb. Some argue that the bat bomb would have done an
equally good job of ending the war while also sparing thousands of Japanese lives.
A fire, after all, is a little easier to outrun than an atomic blast.
But that's not what happened.
Adams' bats never fulfilled the purpose God had intended.
Pigeons, on the other hand, were frickin' prolific in World War II. They were legit war heroes,
carrying life-saving messages time and time again and winning tonnes of medals.
What you might not have known is that they could also be made to steer missiles—probably.
By 1943, the US was super keen on bombing Germany, but they couldn't figure out how to aim their
missiles straight. That was when an American behaviourist by the name of B.F. Skinner entered
the scene and said, "[It] looks as if the Japs [are] using men [to guide their missiles]. Perhaps
we can get American morale that high, but if not, I can provide perfectly competent substitutes."
And these substitutes were, of course, pigeons. According to a bloke named James Capshew,
author of this article, Skinner's plan was to "construct a missile guidance system utilizing
the conditioned pecking behaviour of pigeons." What this meant was that Skinner would put a few
pigeons in the guidance system of a glider bearing a warhead. The system would consist of three
nose-mounted lenses that projected an image of a bombing target on a screen. The pigeons, trained
to recognise certain images, would then peck these targets when they appeared on the screen.
For this, they would be rewarded with some seed, which would be dispensed by the system.
If the missile went off course, the pigeons would see the image move and follow it while
pecking the screen. This would move the screen, and as this happened,
the guidance system would adjust the glider to recentre the target.
Or something like that. All you need to know is that the pigeons would pilot the damn glider.
Skinner got a grant of 25 gs from the National Defence
Research Committee to bring Project Pigeon to life, but it wasn't enough,
and the men upstairs canned his project in October 1944 because, quote, "further prosecution of this
project would seriously delay others which have more immediate promise of combat application."
In other words, they wouldn't have recognised a war-winning invention if pigeons steered it
into their living rooms and it blew them and their entire families to pieces.
And isn't that just the perfect segway into the
next wacky invention we'll be covering today—farts?
In August 1943, an SOE-bro named T.R. Bird sent a message to an OSS-bro
named Stanley Lovell, explaining how the British were creating a weapon known as
"S liquid." This was a foul-smelling substance that they intended to package
in small gelatine bombs that could be planted in German pockets. Pre-broken,
the bombs would produce a horrendous smell that would ruin the target's sexy Hugo Boss jacket and
make him lose face among his equally well-dressed comrades—because he'd smell like shit.
The bombs could be used to create confusion, and for the purposes of "terrain denial"
(in other words, to empty a room). The Brits had a spray version of S liquid, as well,
and these weapons were designed mostly for use by Allied saboteurs and resistance groups,
not soldiers. It wasn't like they were arming front-line troops for fart warfare.
Once Lovell found out about the SOE's fart juice, he rallied the OSS to begin work on
an American version. The project was codenamed "Why Me?" and for the next two years, the OSS
toiled day and night to recreate, quote, "the revolting odour of a very loose bowel movement."
What they came up with was a concoction of butyric acid, valeric acid, caproic acid,
and skatole—in case you wanted to try it at home.
Lovell believed the Japanese would be especially vulnerable to America's fart juice,
stating, "A Japanese [man] thought nothing of urinating in public,
but he held defecation to be a very secret, shameful thing."
One of the main issues the OSS faced was that, quote, "almost without exception,
the operator was contaminated when squirting the contents of the tube."
So, yes, they could make the enemy smell like fart,
but the fart-minister would smell like fart too.
Either way, the OSS never got to test the substance on the Japanese because
America nuked Japan before they got the chance.
Bat bombs, pigeon-guided missiles, and fart juice—the Yanks certainly came up with some
game-changing stuff during the war, but they definitely weren't as on top of it as the Brits.
Of the three inventions we covered in this video, which do you think was the most insane?
Do you know anything about these inventions that we didn't cover? Can you think of any other wacky
American World War II creations? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.