a roll of the dice

You may have read the bizarre story about Chinese scientists developing radio-controlled pigeons by cracking open their skulls and jamming electrodes into them (horrifying picture here).

Related reading led me to this amazing/ridiculous story about a secret WWII project run by the United States to turn giant swarms of bats into a military superweapon by equipping them with incendiary explosives and dropping them by the million over Japanese cities. No, really.

The idea was that each bat would be equipped with a small explosive device on a timer. The bat selected weighed about 10 grams but could carry a 30 gram bomb. The bats were to be equipped with bombs, loaded into canisters (picture of the canister here), and dropped out of planes at night over enemy cities. The bats would fly down over the city and find suitable places to sleep out the day - such as nooks and crannies in and around buildings. After the timers reached zero, the bombs (and presumably, bats) would explode, starting a large number of fires across a very wide range.

There are many other bizarre elements to this story. For example:

In May 1943, about 3,500 bats were collected at Carlsbad Caverns, flown to Muroc Lake, Calif., and placed in refrigerators to force them to hibernate. On May 21, 1943, five drops with bats outfitted with dummy bombs were made from a B-25 flying at 5,000 feet. The tests were not successful; most of the bats, not fully recovered from hibernation, did not fly and died on impact.

Or, that in one live test:

a careless handler had left a door open and some bats escaped with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a general’s car

The project was conceived by a dental surgeon and approved by President Roosevelt. The bats were frozen in ice-cube trays. Testing eventually determined that the weapon was likely to be effective.

There is much more here, along with some awesome artwork. The ultimate plan was that 10 B-24 bombers would be able to drop a million bats over a target area, setting thousands of fires in locations likely to remain undetected for much longer than fires started by ordinary incendiary bombs.

Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re a bat, or Japanese homeowner) the project was cancelled when it became apparent that the atomic bomb project would be successful, so we will never know if exploding bats might have turned the tide in the Pacific theatre.