Bat Bombs
Human beings are unique in the animal kingdeom in many different ways. We have opposable thumbs,
which we evolved to play Xbox and operate complex TV remotes, and our disproportionately large
brains have allowed us to do incredible things like send people to the moon and invent Fortnite.
But perhaps the most striking difference between human beings
and our animal cousins is the way we’ve been able to take control of the world around us.
We’ve harnessed natural resources to power our homes and chopped down trees to make room for
the cities that contain them. We’ve dug deep beneath the earth in search of precious metals
and gemstones, and we domesticated plants to feed our ever-growing numbers. But it
isn’t just earth that we’ve shaped to suit our needs, the same goes for other animals, too.
Since the first time ancient man forcibly parted a proto-chicken from its unborn child
to make his scrambled eggs, we’ve happily exploited earth’s other tenants for food,
warmth, labour, entertainment, companionship, and medical research - we’ve even roped them
into our wars, and I don’t just mean cavalry charges and carrier pigeons.
Being the endlessly inventive - and occasionally sadistic - species that we are,
we’ve forced animals to fight for us in ways that are both fascinating and horrifying in
equal measure, including bombs made of bats, pigeon pilots, and explosive rats.
But before we get into the ridiculous, perhaps we’d better start with the equine.
Arguably the best known animal associated with warfare is the horse, thought to have
been used as far back as 4000 BC. In the 6000 years since, we’ve used horses to carry us
into battle, transport our equipment, speed up communications, and, in a pinch, fill our bellies.
Horses helped Genghis Khan conquer half the world in the 13th century,
and they were still being used by the Polish army to fight off the Nazis in 1939,
although admittedly that didn’t go too well. Still, it’s no exaggeration to say that an armed
man on horseback was the most devastating weapon in existence for several millennia at least,
with horses only being phased out during the Second World War when tanks made
them effectively obsolete. Do you think our trusty warhorses upset by that turn of events? Nay.
Elephants were also used as cavalry in ancient warfare, first in India around
the 6th century BC. Their main function was to charge and break enemy lines,
sowing panic and fear along the way. As you can probably imagine, they were incredibly
effective - a large unit of war elephants was practically invincible… unless you happened to
know their one fatal weakness, their achilles… trunk, a counterweapon that, once deployed,
would cause even the bravest war elephant to drop 18 kilograms of excrement and run for the hills.
Any ideas what this secret weapon might have been? If you guessed ‘war pig’ then
1. You must have some highly unusual reading habits, and 2. I’m impressed.
As odd as it may sound, pigs positively petrified elephants, rendering them essentially useless.
Still, that seems to have been a fairly well kept secret,
because elephants were still being used as recently as 1987 by the Iraqi military.
Dogs have been employed during times of war for hundreds of years to deliver messages,
take part in patrols and even carry slippers - sorry, supplies - to the wounded. Over 50,000 dogs
were used in WWI alone, thousands of which ended up going to the great kennel in the sky. But we’ve
also conscripted our canine companions in some more creative - and ultimately disastrous - uses.
One of the most brutal doggy duties, dreamed up by the Soviets during the Second World War,
was the anti-tank dog. As the name suggests, anti tank dogs were trained to drop timed
explosives underneath German tanks before scampering to safety to admire the fireworks.
Simple though the idea was, carrying it out in the theatre of war was another
matter entirely.For one thing, the dogs were often confused by wartime conditions and would
run back to their handlers, bombs in tow, with predictably disastrous consequences.
The original plan having failed spectacularly, the Soviets came up with a new one - to use the
dogs as unwitting Kamikaze fighters, armed with explosives that would detonate as soon
as they were released, killing the dog and whatever happened to be nearby. If this is
how man treats his best friends, I’d hate to see what we’d do to our worst enemies.
Still, the dogs had the last laugh - kind of. They’d naturally been trained on Soviet tanks,
but unlike the petrol guzzling tanks used by the Germans, Soviet models ran on diesel. In
the heat and confusion of battle, the dogs relied on their sense of smell to navigate,
and more often than not they headed straight for the comforting, familiar smell of diesel.
Nobody’s quite sure exactly how many tanks were destroyed by the Soviet anti tank dogs - friendly
or otherwise - but the programme was quietly mothballed in 1943 after many mortifying mishaps.
Like most Americans, dentist Lytle Adams was incensed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour,
and he spent much of his spare time dreaming up ways the USA could wreak her revenge. Unlike most
Americans, though, Lytle had a direct connection to the White House via Eleanor Roosevelt,
the first lady, which is how he managed to get a letter through to the President of the United
States. The letter contained an audacious plan that must have been just crazy enough to get the
president’s backing, because it initiated one of the most bizarre projects of the entire war.
This confounding contraption is a bat bomb. A 1.5 metre long bomb, containing 1040 compartments,
each holding a tiny amount of napalm, and something far scarier… a small
but mighty Mexican free-tailed bat. The idea was that the “bomb” would be
dropped from a plane, shedding its casing when a parachute-controlled descent began at a height
of 1200 metres. Having served their time in bat purgatory, the furry inmates would suddenly find
themselves free to go wherever they pleased, taking their tiny napalm payloads with them.
As far as weapons go, the bat bomb was - fittingly - bat shit insane…
but it was also kind of ingenous. Japanese houses are traditionally built of highly
combustible materials like wood and paper, so fire was a major threat. And while
regular incendiary bombs could have been used instead, the bat bomb was far more devastating.
The bat’s payloads were on timers, and once they went off they’d set fire to
whatever was nearby. By that point, the bats would have spread out over the entire city,
and many of them would be happily roosting in hard to reach - but highly flammable - hiding
places like the roofs of old buildings. By the time anyone realised what was going on,
there would likely be hundreds of fires raging all over the city.
Unlike the anti-tank dog disaster, the bat bomb genuinely worked - a fact that was proven
spectacularly when one was accidentally set off in the middle of Carlsbad Army Airfield in New
Mexico during testing. Bats armed with napalm were soon flying around all over the place,
setting fires and roosting in the most awkward, hard to reach places… including
underneath a fully loaded fuel tank. The ensuing explosion destroyed the entire testing area.
Subsquent, slightly more controlled tests showed the bat bomb to be incredibly effective,
and the ingenious weapon may well have seen active service had the programme been completed just a
little bit earlier. In the end, the bat bomb wasn’t declared ready for action until 1945,
by which point the Americans had invented a different kind of bomb - of the atomic
variety. When a single doomsday device can level an entire city in one explosion, painstakingly
glueing tiny parcels of napalm to a thousand Mexican bats suddenly felt like a waste of time.
Another American citizen keen to lend a hand to the war effort was renowned behavioural
psychologist, inventor and patriot, Burrhus Skinner, who, in 1943, aimed to solve the
problem of missiles missing their targets. At the time, electronic guidance was in its infancy and
therefore both unreliable and expensive. And that’s where Project Pigeon came in.
Skinner had experience training pigeons in his psychological research, and he had
a hunch that they’d be surprisingly well-suited to war. Not only do pigeons have good eyesight,
but they remain remarkably unflappable even in the most tumultuous of circumstances (as
anyone who's tried to shoo a pigeon away from their sandwich in the park will already know).
Skiner planned to make use of these admirable attributes by training our feathered friends
as pilots. He designed a specially fitted missile nose cone with a tiny cockpit big enough to house
up to 3 pigeons, each of which would be positioned in front of a live video feed of whatever
target needed blowing up. The pigeons had been conditioned to peck whichever part of the screen
contained the target in return for a few seeds. Depending on where they pecked, cables attached
to their heads would feed information back to the flight control system, which would make the
necessary adjustments automatically if the missile started to go off course. Sadly, the projectiles
weren’t fitted with ejector seats, so a pigeon pilot’s first mission would also be its last.
The first demonstration of the guidance system was successful,
but the programme was terminated in October 1944 as all focus moved to
the Manhattan Project, and though it was briefly resurrected after the war,
improvements in electronic guidance eventually saw the idea shelved for good. Had pigeon
kind shared a collective consciousness, there surely would have been a giant coo of relief.
The Americans’ ingenuity and inventiveness in building bat bombs and pigeon guided missiles
was really impressive, but they weren’t the only ones blowing animals up in the name of
miltary progress - the British also got in on the act, though true to form, their attempts
weren’t quite so grand as those across the pond. The Brits, specifically the British
Special Operations Executive, made all manner of ingenious devices during the Second World War,
but if you’re picturing Q handing 007 an elegantly understated gerbil watch, you may be disappointed.
While the Americans developed their blazing bat bombs and put their pigeon pilots through their
paces, we Brits were busy coming up with…exploding rats. Allow me to explain this highly intricate
device. Take a dead rat, slice it open and fill its lifeless carcass with plastic explosives, then
sew it back up. Voila, you’ve just made your very own exploding rat. Time to take over the world!
OK, so the point of the exploding rat might not be all that obvious at first. The fact
it’s already dead means you still need a person to take it to the place you want to blow up,
at which point you could just do away with the rat carcass entirely. But here’s where the clever bit
comes in - the explosive rats were intended to be left in and around factories and other key
production facilities, specifically those with large industrial furnaces. Dead rats are a fairly
common sight in those kinds of places, and when found they’re disposed of. But you can’t just
dump a dead animal in the dustbin and forget about it - not if you have a sense of smell.
It’s much better to deal with the problem once and for all by shovelling the carcass into a furnace.
With a normal dead rat that solution works just fine. But if your rigour-mortised rodent
happens to contain several grams of plastic explosive, well. There goes your factory.
The idea was genius in its simplicity and it had some success, though not as intended. The very
first batch of stinky and rather dangerous rodents was intercepted by the Nazis before its occupants
could reach their destinations. As a result, not one single furry death bomb was ever thrown into
a furnace. But the discovery of a crate full of exploding rats was enough to set Nazi high
command into meltdown as they imagined God knows how many non-intercepted containers making their
way across the Third Reich. A colossal rat hunt ensued, and so much time and money was
spent searching for exploding rats that the operation was deemed a resounding success.
Since the Second World War, animals in warfare have come along in leaps and bounds. Today,
there are rumours of programmes using dolphins, seals and even spy sharks. But,
regardless of how sophisticated these weapons become, they still rely on innocent
creatures being forcibly conscripted into the unfortunate task of fighting our wars for us.
It doesn’t seem fair really. Someone should call the military wing of the RSPCA.
Thanks for watching.