“Would it make you feel any better, little goil, if you knowed dem people was throwed outta windows?”

– Archie Bunker, in response to his daughter’s concern over how many people are killed in the U.S. each year by guns

Some people are fond of singling out the A-bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, almost as if they were the only attacks on the Japanese mainland that produced civilian casualties. But did you know that there was another plan that came close to being implemented back then, which its creator claimed would have been even more devastating?

The Bat Bombers
According to The Bat Bombers, a report written by C. V. Glines, the U.S. planned, studied, and came close to implementing a project that called for dropping thousands of bats (which are capable of carrying an external load nearly three times their own weight) fitted with small time-delayed incendiary bombs from airplanes over Japanese cities. Theoretically the bats would instinctively take refuge in the nooks and crannies of Japanese city dwellings, the bombs would go off, and the city would be faced with thousands of small fires breaking out all at the same time.

Oversight of the bat bombers passed between services for a while, and finally ending up under the U.S. Marine Corps.

The first Marine Corps bomber-bat experiments began on December 13, 1943. In subsequent tests, thirty fires were started. Twenty-two went out, but, according to Robert Sherrod’s History of Marine Corps Aviation in World War II, “four of them would have required the services of professional firefighters. A new and more powerful incendiary was ordered.”

More destructive than atomic bombs?
Though bats never saw actual combat during the war, Dr. Lytle S. Adams, a dental surgeon who originally conceived the idea of using bats in combat, thought they should have been.

[Dr. Adams] maintained that fires generated by bomber bats could have been more destructive than the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the war. He found that bats scattered up to twenty miles from the point where they were released. “Think of thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously over a circle of forty miles in diameter for every bomb dropped,” he said. “Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life.”

So the question remains to this day - Was Dr. Adams really a genius visionary? Or was he perhaps just a little batty?

Thanks to Duo for the tip!