Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (57 page)

How many fires could be started with bats? “Approximately 200,000 bats could be transported in one airplane,” Adams wrote, “and still allow one-half the payload capacity to permit free air circulation and increased gasoline load. Ten such planes would carry two million fire starters.”

ASSAULT AND BAT-TERY

Perhaps the most impressive feature of bat bombs was not their destructive power, but the psychological impact they could have on the Japanese. The bats would be dropped by planes before dawn, and by the time the bombs went off, the planes would be long gone. Entire cities would ignite spontaneously and burn to the ground...with no warning and no explanation.

“The effect of the destruction from such a mysterious source would be a shock to the morale of the Japanese people as no amount of ordinary bombing could accomplish,” Adams wrote to Roosevelt. “It would render the Japanese people homeless and their industries useless, yet the innocent could escape with their lives.”

How flammable were Japanese cities? When a woman living in Osaka, Japan, knocked over her hibatchi-type cookstove in 1911, 11,000 homes burned to the ground. And it was
raining
.

TO THE BAT CAVE!

President Roosevelt forwarded Adams’s letter to Colonel William J. Donovan, who would soon head the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. “It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into,” FDR wrote. “This man is
not
a nut.”

Dr. Adams got the go-ahead to assemble a 20-person staff and begin working out the details on how such a weapon might be built. What species of bats would be best? What kind of firebomb would be used? How would the device be attached to the bat? How would the bats be dropped over cities? There was a lot to figure out. Here’s what they came up with:

High life: 74% of New York City residents live at least one flight of stairs above ground.

The Bats

The researchers decided early on that they would use a species called the Mexican free-tailed bat. They weighed about half an ounce but were capable of carrying a load of as much as three-quarters of an ounce. Tens of millions of them made their summer homes in caves in Texas and other southwestern states. Just as important, these bats hibernated in the winter. That meant they could be put into artificial hibernation so that the bombs could be attached, then kept in cold storage until they were ready to be released over Japan.

The Incendiary Bombs

One of the researchers assigned to the project was an incendiary bomb specialist—a chemist named Louis Fieser. He devised a tiny bomb that weighed a little over half an ounce and consisted of a timer and a thin plastic capsule measuring three-quarters of an inch in diameter by two inches long, filled with a jellied gasoline he’d invented, napalm.

Initially the designers planned to attach a bomb to each bat’s chest with a piece of string and a surgical clip that mimicked the way baby bats latched onto their mother’s fur with their claws. But that turned out to be too complicated, so they switched to a simple adhesive and just glued the bombs to the bats.

The “Bombshell”

If you just threw a bunch of hibernating bats out of an airplane, their fragile wings would break the moment they hit the airstream at 150 mph or else they would fall all the way to the ground—and die on impact—before they could emerge from hibernation. So the researchers designed a protective bomb-shaped canister to put the bats into. The “bombshell” was cigar-shaped and had fins, just like a regular bomb—except that it was filled with bats and was poked full of holes so they could breathe.

Inside the canister, the hibernating bats were packed into cardboard trays similar to eggshell cartons, and these cartons were stacked one on top of the other. Each bombshell held 26 cardboard trays, each of which held 40 bats. That meant each bomb would contain 1,040 bats.

Look before you leap: All bullfrogs close their eyes when they jump.

HOW IT WORKED

•
The bombshell was designed so that when it was dropped from a plane, it would free-fall to an altitude of 4,000 feet, at which point a parachute would deploy, slowing its descent.

•
When the parachute opened, the bomb’s outer shell would pop off and fall away. The stacked cardboard trays, which were tied to one another with short lengths of string, would then drop down and hang from the parachute about three inches apart, like rungs on a rope ladder.

•
As the cardboard trays dropped into position, a tiny wire would be pulled from the incendiary device attached to each bat. Just like pulling a pin from a hand grenade, when the string was pulled, the firebombs would be armed and set to go off in 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or whatever interval the bombers chose.

•
The bats, now exposed to the warm air and floating slowly to earth, would have enough time to warm up, emerge from their hibernating state, climb out of their individual egg-carton compartments, and fly away to seek shelter.

•
When time ran out, the incendiary device glued to their chest would explode into flames, incinerating them instantly and setting fire to whatever structure they had taken refuge in.

BAT-TLE GROUND

A bombshell filled with bats and tiny firebombs sounded clever, but would it really work? Dr. Adams’s team built a prototype, loaded it with 1,040 bats fitted with dummy bombs, and dropped it from a plane in a remote region outside Carlsbad Air Force Base in New Mexico. The test went off nearly without a hitch: the parachute deployed, the trays dropped open, and the bats awakened from hibernation and flew off in search of shelter from the sun.

The only snafu was that the researchers misjudged how far winds would carry the bat trays. Instead of landing in the middle of nowhere (the project was top secret, after all), the bats ended up flying to a ranch and roosting in the barn and ranch house. The researchers caught up with the creatures half an hour later and collected them as the mystified rancher looked on (he never did learn what the bats were carrying or what they were for).

More of your brain is used to control your thumb than your stomach.

BAT REVENGE

But the real proof of the power of bat bombs came later that day when Louis Fieser, the incendiary specialist, wanted some film footage of a bat armed with a live incendiary bomb actually exploding into flames. He took six hibernating bats out of cold storage and set their bombs to detonate in 15 minutes, figuring that in such a short time, the bats would still be hibernating and wouldn’t fly away.

What Fieser failed to take into consideration was that on a hot New Mexico afternoon, the bats would come out of hibernation quickly. All six bats woke up within 10 minutes, escaped, and roosted in the rafters of various buildings of the airfield where the test was being conducted. Five minutes later the bombs went off, and every building on the airfield—the control tower, barracks, offices, and hangars—burned to the ground.

BAT TO THE DRAWING BOARD

Believe it or not, bat bombs were found to be
more
effective than conventional firebombs. One study concluded that a planeload of conventional firebombs would start between 167 and 400 fires, whereas a planeload of bat bombs would start between 3,625 and 4,748 fires.

So how many bats died in combat during World War II? Not even one. After spending 27 months and $2 million looking into the feasibility of bat bombs, the Pentagon canceled the program in March 1944. The military claimed that the bats were too unpredictable to be useful, but Jack Couffer, a research scientist who worked on the project, has a different theory. Couffer speculates in his memoirs that the government knew the Manhattan Project was making steady progress toward the world’s first atomic bomb, and the military decided to focus on that instead.

Which explanation is true? Only the U.S. government knows for sure. Sixty years later, the reasons for the cancellation of the program, like the blueprints to the incendiary device itself, are still classified.

“A weapon is an enemy even to its owner.”

—Turkish proverb

Mel Gibson turned down the role of James Bond.

There’s no way to explain dumb luck—some folks just have it. Here are a few examples of people who lucked out...in midair
.

H
EADIN’ DOWN THE HIGHWAY

Howard Hamer had only just begun his ascent from the Chiloquin airport in Oregon when his plane inexplicably lost power. Hamer searched for a place to set down his homemade Lancer 235 aircraft and decided that an emergency landing on the northbound lane of U.S. 97 was his best option. But as he was watching for oncoming traffic while attempting to keep the plane’s nose pointed up, Hamer didn’t see the truck right beneath him. Apparently the truck driver didn’t see him, either. When they crashed, the propeller got caught on the truck’s sleeper cabin, and the tail of the plane landed on the truck’s flatbed. Amazingly, both the driver and the pilot walked away unharmed.

THAT’S USING YOUR HEAD

Al Wilson, a barnstorming plane-changer in the 1920s, was flying over southern California when he accidentally fell off the plane’s wing—and he wasn’t wearing a parachute. Lucky for Wilson, Frank Clarke was flying a Jenny biplane just below him. Clarke happened to catch a glimpse of the impending accident and accelerated his plane toward the falling Wilson. Wilson landed on Clarke’s plane headfirst and got stuck in the upper wing, which immobilized him while Clarke landed the plane and saved them both.

ANT SHE LUCKY?

In 1999 amateur skydiver Joan Murray jumped from a plane at 14,500 feet. Her main parachute failed to open. At 700 feet her reserve chute opened briefly but then deflated. Murray hit the ground hard, landing directly on top of a fire ant hill. The ants attacked, stinging Murray again and again. Murray went into a coma, but miraculously, the ants’ relentless assault helped keep her heart beating until she was rescued. (She came out of the coma a few weeks later; she returned to skydiving two years later.)

Sea slugs have 25,000 teeth.

As a kid, Uncle John played a game where he’d substitute new nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech for the ones in a given written passage. The old ones made sense—the new ones made him laugh. If you’re having trouble getting through your daily newspaper, give it a try
.

T
HE GREENSPAN EFFECT

Trying to understand the blathering babble of a government technocrat can be frustrating. And Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is a prime example. A newspaper article that starts, “Alan Greenspan said today...” may generate the numbing sensation of your brain being dropped into a bucket of custard.

But wait! Don’t despair! The BRI has come up with a way for any ordinary person to actually enjoy quotes from Mr. Greenspan.

DIRECTIONS

1.
Take any quote of Mr. Greenspan’s, like this one:

“Spreading globalization has fostered a degree of international flexibility that has raised the possibility of a benign resolution to the U.S. current account imbalance.”

2.
Make a list of the nouns in the quote:

3.
Replace them with some more interesting nouns:

•
globalization

•
degree

•
flexibility

•
possibility

•
resolution

•
account imbalance

4.
Now, fixing the grammar as necessary, the quote becomes:

•
globalization—poodles

•
degree—trousers

•
flexibility—funkiness

•
possibility—exoskeleton

•
resolution—Keith Richards

•
account imbalance—banana cream pie

“Spreading poodles have fostered trousers of international funkiness that have raised the exoskeleton of a benign Keith Richards to the current U.S. banana cream pie.” Isn’t that better?

Q: What chemical is the most utilized by humans? A: Salt. It has over 14,000 uses.

5.
But wait—you can keep going. Make a list of the verbs in the quote and replace them with your own: