Not a Nut

In January of 1942, Pennsylvania dental surgeon and amateur inventor Lytle S. Adams had a big idea to share with the United States government. Like many Americans, I’m sure, in the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams had big feelings to work through, a strong sense of patriotism, and an overwhelming desire to help defeat the darkness then spreading through the world.

He knew just how to do it, too. All he needed was the attention of President Roosevelt and about a million bats.

Mexican free-tailed bats emerging from Carlsbad Cavern. Nick Hristov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent vacation to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico to watch thousands upon thousands of bats take flight and begin their nightly bug-hunting expedition had inspired Adams to wonder if a million bats might carry a million tiny incendiary devices to roost in a million hard to reach places within the flammable buildings throughout Japan.

Adams happened to be acquainted with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and so when he sent his cruel, disturbing, and possibly kind of genius idea to the White House, it made it to the president’s desk where Roosevelt wrote in a memo: “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”

With approval of the project, later known as Project X-Ray, Adams began assembling a team of specialists from a wide variety of fields. The list included mammalogist Dr. Jack von Bloeker, as well as Harvard chemist and inventor of napalm Dr. Theodore Fieser. It also included a pilot-turned-actor, a one-time hotel manager, a fitness expert, a former gangster, a lobster fisherman, and a couple of high school student lab assistants, which sounds a bit like the set up to a joke. And in case you forgot, it’s worth mentioning again that the project leader was a dentist.

The team got to work and designed a tube carrier that could hold 1,040 Mexican free-tailed bats, kept just cold enough to maintain hibernation during transport, deploy a parachute at four thousand feet above the ground, and open to release the newly awakened bats, each with fifteen to eighteen grams of napalm glued to their furry chests.

Upon testing, some of the bats dropped to the ground having never woken up, and others flew off into the sunset neglecting to roost, but the bat bombs weren’t entirely unsuccessful. They did burn down a mock Japanese Village. Unfortunately, a handful of accidental releases also managed to completely destroy the Carlsbad auxiliary airfield.

Then after the not-yet-perfected project got shuffled around from branch to branch within the US military for a while, another secret weapons project came to light. While the atom bomb was certainly no less cruel, disturbing, and possibly genius than the bat bomb, it did overshadow Project X-Ray, which was cancelled in late 1944, much to the relief of a million Mexican free-tailed bats.

I don’t often write in this space about the more serious moments in history, at least not very directly, but today marks the anniversary of one of the deadliest attacks ever committed against the United States, and the beginning of this nation’s official participation in World War II. This year more than any other, I feel connected to that moment in history. Largely that’s because this past summer my family and I visited the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Honolulu.

There we stood silent above the watery grave of the USS Arizona where the bones of many trapped servicemen still lie, and watched as small amounts of oil bubbled up to the surface of water that eighty-two years ago today was covered in flames. It’s a somber place that leaves one with big feelings to work through, a strong sense of patriotism, and an overwhelming desire to help defeat the darkness now spreading through the world.

Because I don’t know about you, but to me the world is feeling like a pretty dark place right now. I’m certainly not prepared to assemble a motley crew and sentence a million poor little bats to death, but I can almost understand the sentiment behind Lytle Adams’s big idea. I might even agree with Franklin Roosevelt’s assessment that the man was perhaps not a nut.