The United States was engaged in a number of secret aviation projects during World War II. Two of them, not revealed to the public for many years, involved American fliers that were being trained to attack enemy forces and die in the process, kamikaze style. However, these fliers were not humans but common bats and pigeons, drafted to make surprise bombing raids on enemy forces.

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A dental surgeon from Irwin, Pa., is credited with the idea of using bats as bombers. And a behavioral psychologist, also a Pennsylvanian, showed how pigeons could guide bombs directly to surface targets. The two projects were not related, and the two men never met.

Dr. Lytle S. Adams was vacationing in the Southwest on December 7, 1941, when he heard the shocking news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Adams immediately headed home. He had just visited Carlsbad Caverns, N.M. — believed to house the world’s largest bat colony — where he had been fascinated by the bats that emerged nightly to feed on insects. Thinking about that impressive colony, the dentist asked himself: ‘Couldn’t those millions of bats be fitted with incendiary bombs and dropped from planes? What could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack?’ he recalled in a 1948 interview.

He stopped by Carlsbad on his way home and captured some Mexican free-tail bats, the most common species in North America. The free-tails, also known as guano bats, are small brown mammals capable of catching more than 1,000 mosquitoes or gnats in a night. Weighing about 9 grams, the free-tails can carry an external load more than twice their own weight.

Back home, Adams looked up everything he could find about the tiny mammals and discovered that although bats are frequently vilified by the public, they are not usually dangerous to humans. They aren’t blind, don’t get tangled up in one’s hair and don’t attack people. Although generally considered evil in Europe, they symbolize prosperity and happiness in China. The Navajo Indians believe them to be intermediaries between men and the gods. They range in size from the bumblebee bat of Thailand, which weighs less than a penny, to the mastiff bat, North America’s largest flying mammal with a 22-inch wingspread, and the giant flying fox bat with a 6-foot wingspan, found primarily in Indonesia.

Adams became convinced that bats could be used as bombers. On January 12, 1942, he sent a letter to the White House proposing that the government investigate this possibility. His suggestion was considered, along with hundreds of others from well-meaning citizens with war-winning ideas, but his was one of the few that reached the desk of the commander in chief.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt forwarded a memo to Colonel William J. Donovan, then coordinator of information, with a cryptic notation: ‘This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.’ In fact, Adams had already made a name for himself as an inventor. In the 1920s and ’30s he launched a 15-year campaign to perfect an airmail pickup system (see ‘People and Planes’ in the March 2005 issue).

Donovan sent the proposal to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) of the National Inventors Council. After reviewing Adams’ idea, a memorandum titled ‘Use of Bats as Vectors of Incendiary Bombs’ was sent to the committee on April 16, 1942, by Donald R. Griffin, a special-research assistant. He described the proposal as using ‘very large numbers of bats, each carrying a small incendiary time bomb. The bats would be released at night from airplanes, preferably at high altitudes and the incendiaries would be timed to ignite after the bats had descended to low altitudes and taken shelter for the day. Since bats often roost in buildings, they could be released over settled areas with a good expectation that a large percentage would be roosting in buildings or other inflammable installations…when the incendiary material was ignited.’

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