Bat Bombs: A Crazy Military Idea that ALMOST Happened

During World War II, the U.S. military developed a top-secret plan to unleash thousands of bats carrying tiny incendiary bombs over Japan, using their natural roosting instincts to ignite entire cities. The idea was bizarre—but in testing, it worked a little too well, with one fiery accident nearly turning the experiment into a disaster. In this episode, we talk about the Bat Bomb program, then play the quiz game with Jonathan Burns! 

In the history of militaries around the world, there have been some ideas that seem crazy when we look at them through a modern lens. One of them that comes to mind is the Camel Corps that was developed in the late 19th century. We did an episode about that one. There have been other strange ideas that never actually saw combat. 

One of them was an aircraft carrier made out of ice. An unsinkable aircraft carrier made of a combination of wood pulp and ice was planned by the British and a prototype was actually built in Canada. It was incredibly expensive to build and very impractical, so the project was never implemented. 

The US Army once tried to build a hover jeep. It was a jeep that could fly like a helicopter over landmines. It was impossible to control and crazy expensive. 

During the Cold War, the CIA implanted listening devices into a cat to spy on the Soviets. The first test run failed when the cat was released… and promptly hit by a car. The project was then scrapped.

There are dozens of examples of these crazy-sounding ideas that have never seen the light of day. One of them occurred during World War II. Around 1942, the American military wanted a way to guide their bombs once they were dropped from a plane. So a famous behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, trained a bunch of pigeons to ride on the inside of the nose cone of a bomb and peck at a small target that would turn the bomb’s direction. Of course, later in the war, radio-guided bombs were invented and used, so Project Pigeon was scrapped. 

Around the same time that scientists were working with training pigeons, another winged creature was being looked at to see if they could help the war effort. 

It started from an unlikely source. A civilian dentist, Lytle S. Adams, was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. And it’s a good thing he was, because otherwise his crazy idea would have probably never been heard or taken seriously. 

Adams was a Pennsylvanian who had been vacationing at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. While in the caverns, he was struck with an idea. While Adams was a Dentist by trade, he spent a lot of time thinking up inventions. In the 1920s and 30s he tried to develop an airmail system to get mail to and from rural and low-income areas. But this new idea was all about what he found in that cave. He looked around and saw hundreds of Hibernating Mexican Free-Tailed Bats, otherwise known as Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats on the walls and ceilings of the cave. He was incensed about the recent bombing of Pearl Harbor and was thinking of ways the U.S. could make their revenge. 

Seeing the bats, Adams thought if there was a way to put incendiary devices on these animals, they could be sent into Japan to roost on the walls and ceilings of buildings there and remotely cause chaos and destruction to Japanese cities. Again – this idea would have been considered crazy if any old person brought it to the White House. But Lytle had the ear of the first lady. He had influence in Washington that he had gained during his air-mail project in the previous decades and he was determined to use this influence to get his bat idea off the ground. 

In addition to the First Lady, Adams’s idea got another supporter. Donald Griffin was a researcher who had pioneered studies on the echolocation abilities of bats. And Donald Griffin happened to work for the National Defense Research Committee, which was a group tasked with coordinating, supervising and conducting scientific research to improve and invent new methods of warfare. So when Griffin heard Adam’s bat bomb idea, he endorsed it to the President of the United States. Lytle S. Adams had written an abstract of his idea, espousing the bat as the lowest of the low creatures. He argued that “reasons for its creation have remained unexplained” and “bats were created by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life.” With the First Lady and Donald Griffin as advocates for Adams, Roosevelt took the idea seriously. He must have known what the public might say, because F.D.R.’s exact words were, “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”

Not only was the idea looked into. It was quickly put into development.

Franklin Roosevelt, with urging from his wife Eleanor and National Defense Research Committee member Donald Griffin, set the Bat Bomb program into motion by recommending it to the Army Air Force. Lytle S. Adams, the man who devised the idea in the first place, headed up the project even though he had no zoological or military experience. He put together a team of people to help bring the idea to fruition. That team included a former hotel manager, a former gangster turned TV actor and a mammalogist, Jack von Bloeker. Some of these people actually enlisted in the Army to join the project and Adams was given the authority to make them Non-Commissioned Officers. 

The goal was to find a way to attach incendiary devices to bats, who would be released into Japanese cities and burn down the buildings. Many of the Japanese buildings were made of paper and wood and were highly flammable. Initially, they wanted to use white phosphorous as the incendiary material, but when Louis Fieser was added to the project, he convinced them to use his new invention. It was a substance that mixed a fuel with a sort of gel – he had named it napalm. So it was determined the bats would carry napalm. The napalm would be put into a small cellulose payload carrier and attached to the front of the bat’s chest with glue. 

As for the bats themselves, it was determined that the Mexican free-tailed bat would be the best type to use – the same ones that Adams had seen in Carlsbad Caverns. They started collecting bats from the caves of New Mexico and Texas – a total of between 6 and 7,000. They had ventured into these caves with giant nets and used smoke to get them to leave their roosting places on the cave walls and ceilings. 

Now it was essential that the bats would be forced into hibernation to be transported and loaded up with the napalm, so they put the bats into ice cube trays in refrigerated vehicles, which artificially triggered their hibernation response and made them easy to handle.

The napalm payload they put on each bat was about the size of a walnut – about half-an-ounce of material. But how would they deploy the bats? They couldn’t just drop them loose from a high-flying B-29. 

What the team came up with was a sort of bomb-looking carrier for the bats. It was about 5 feet long and looked like a bomb. But inside the carrier, would be 1,040 bats. The bomb would be dropped from a plane and at an altitude of around 4,000 feet off the ground, the carrier would deploy a parachute to slow its descent. When it got close to the ground, a door on the carrier would open, allowing the bats to fly out. As part of the release mechanism, a 30-minute fuse would be ignited. This would give the bats enough time to naturally find places to roost inside the buildings before the napalm would ignite.

Once the bats were collected and the carrier containers were built, it was time to test. With 8,000 bats collected and prepared, and millions more that could potentially be harvested from caves, they started some test runs at Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base in New Mexico. At first, they had a problem figuring out the right temperature to force the bats to hibernate because when the carrier would drop to 1,000 feet and open, the bats would fall out, having never woken up. Or if they did wake up, they would fly off and end up far off-target.

Another issue was with the bats’ mating rituals. If a female bat became pregnant, the male bats refused to eat. Because of this, the program had to be run when the bats weren’t in mating season, which limited them to 5 months out of the year. 

By May of 1943, the program was in full testing phase and a huge setback happened. During a test on May 15, armed bats were accidentally released at a time they shouldn’t have been. They flew underneath a fuel tank to roost and blew up part of the test range at Carlsbad. 

At this point, the Army was ready to give up on the project. They handed it off to the Navy, who expressed interest and continued the testing under a new name, “Project X-Ray.” By December, they were over it. They passed it off to the Marines and moved the bats and the equipment to the Marine Air Base in El Centro, California. From this airport, they were tested at a fake Japanese Village that had been built in the deserts of Utah. After that testing, one officer remarked, “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. Expressed in another way, the regular bombs would give probably 167 to 400 fires per bomb load where X-Ray would give 3,625 to 4,748 fires.”

The project was approved and it was decided that Project X-Ray would be carried out in war – ready to go by mid-1945. The total cost spent on the project at that point was $2 million dollars – equivalent to $35 million in modern dollars. All the while, the United States was conducting devastating firebombing campaigns in Japan. They dropped 1,700 tons of incendiaries on Tokyo in March of 1945 and after that, did the same in more than 60 Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and displacing millions. 

The Bat Bomb Project-Xray would have done the same with less bombs and less flights needed. But as the project was moving so slowly – we’re talking 3 years of development so far since it was thought up by Lytle S. Adams – it was soon surpassed by another technology. 

By that August, the Atomic Bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than 2 weeks later, Japan surrendered and Project X-ray was scrapped entirely. 

The people involved in Project X-Ray said that they never really considered the ethical problem of killing thousands – potentially millions of bats for the project. Not only were they pre-occupied with avenging Pearl Harbor, they didn’t see the bats as valuable. But viewed through today’s lens, the idea is absolutely crazy. And I’m betting you didn’t know how close it came to actually happening. It seems fake, but the Internet says it’s true.

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