Daily MOS: na na na na na na na na BAT BOMBS

Bath bombs are all the rage now in the self-care universe, but have you heard of a bat bomb?

No lavender scent, but just a smidge of napalm.

Today’s Moment of Science… Wacky Bat Hijinks.

Animals have been used in various capacities in warfare as long as we’ve had animals and warfare. Horses for transportation, homing pigeons for transporting messages, and I assume modern armies have 30-50 feral hogs as their first line of defense. A month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a dentist on a spelunking trip to the Carlsbad Caverns had himself a batty little revelation.

Dr. Lyle Adams observed the bats carrying multiple offspring and deduced they must be quite strong. Given that they seek out a place to hide like a cave during daylight, he hatched a bonkers plan that would have died between his ears, but he shared it with his good friend, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

He figured if they can carry three baby bats, why not one little incendiary device? If they would fly into a cave to avoid daylight, why not one of many buildings made of flammable materials in Japan? Their hibernation could be artificially induced by lowering their body temperature, so why not take advantage of that and keep some hibernating, bomb carrying bats on hand?

Why not turn a small army of bats into unwitting suicide bombers?

Y’all, they fucking did that.

Project X-Ray was set in motion. After much research, they opted for the Mexican Free-Tailed bat. Tiny critters, but there were plenty of them, and that’s what Adams wanted for his revenge for Pearl Harbor; zillions of tiny sentient flying bombs. They then needed to downsize their smallest bomb significantly from two pounds to under an ounce for a bat to carry it. In order to make that small of a bomb worth it, it had to make it particularly blastey.

A half ounce of the most devastating stuff they could possibly find was strapped to the unfortunately plentiful bats: napalm.

Napalm Loaded Hibernating Mexican Free-Tailed Bats. Now that’s my goddamn band name.

Giant canisters designed to store a thousand bats would hold them in hibernation, waiting to be deployed over a target. A timer for the incendiary devices to detonate would be started on their release, just waiting for the bats to go find a cozy home to set ablaze.

I struggle to pinpoint the most absurd part of this fuckery. The one thing they actually set on fire was the Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base when some bats roosted under a fuel tank, kinda proving that the idea goddamn worked. They spent two million dollars researching this and in large part only abandoned it because a nuke would be available first. And did I mention that the US military took this idea from a dentist who was friends with the first lady?

Perhaps most embarrassingly, the president of the United States accepted a plan that suggested “the millions of bats that have for ages inhabited our belfries, tunnels and caverns were placed there by God to await this hour,” and we should use them to “frighten, demoralize and excite the prejudices of the Japanese Empire.”

Yikes, Murika. Given that the only thing this project burned down was an American Air Base, you’re gonna have to sort that out with your God.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, asking you to just leave the bats alone, because they play the long game.

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