Jan 18, 2022 23:00:00

What is the most crazy rare weapon 'bat bomb' in American history?

In the United States, which was at war with Japan during World War II,

bat bombs that drop bats with explosives were being seriously studied. BioArk, a YouTube channel that publishes various movies about animals, explained about such rare weapons.

The Bat Bomb: America's Craziest Weapon-YouTube


It was Lyle S. Adams, a dentist in Pennsylvania, who came up with the idea of attacking Japan with the Mexican free-tailed bat.

The bat bomb was a strange idea even at that time, but with the recommendation of Donald Griffin, a leading researcher on the echo localization ability of bats, the development will start in earnest with the approval of the president. became.

Adams was one of the earliest scientists to claim that he was 'conscious of animals other than humans,' but he killed millions of bats among Adams and the scientists who participated in the project. It seems that no one argued against it.

Adams came up with the bat bomb because the Japanese houses at the time were flammable wooden structures.

Another reason was the bat's habit of entering the eaves of houses before dawn.

From this point of view, Adams planned that 'if you attach explosives to bats, you should be able to make the whole of Japan a sea of fire.'

Initially,

white phosphorus was planned to be attached to bats, but with the addition of Louis Fieser, who is known for the discovery of vitamin K and the development of napalm bullets , the development team changed from white phosphorus to napalm.

Only a few napalms can be mounted on a single bat, but a single bat bomb could cause 1000 times more fire than a conventional incendiary.

The outline of the bat bomb is as follows. First, put the captured bats in a low temperature environment to hibernate.

Then, attach the explosive, put it in a container, and drop it from an altitude of 4000 feet (about 1200 meters). Then, the bat pops out of the container while slowly falling with a parachute.

However, when I actually tested it, I quickly found that it didn't work. This is because many bats conveniently did not wake up from hibernation and fell to the ground like stones.

On the contrary, some of them woke up too early and escaped, blasting the test site and burning the general's car.

Due to these difficulties, the bat bomb development program was canceled in 1944, and budget and personnel were devoted to the development of another weapon. That is the Manhattan Project, a nuclear bomb development project.

The American bat bomb was unsuccessful, but Adams wasn't the first to come up with the idea of turning a creature into a bomb. One of them is

Olga, the Princess of Kiev, who once ruled the Kievan Rus' Kingdom in Eastern Europe.

It all started when Olga's husband, Grand Prince of Kiev, Igor I, was assassinated by the

Drevlians, a tribe in Eastern Europe.

Olga, who took the regent of his young son who inherited the throne, decided to retaliate against the Drevlians.

He led an army into the city of Drevlians and siege for over a year.

Olga then ordered the Drevlians to 'forgive me, and give pigeons from each household.'

The Drevlians, who believed that the pigeons alone would forgive them, gladly offered them, but Olga ordered the army to tie the pigeons with a cloth of sulfur and set them on fire.

Due to his homing instinct, pigeons flew back to the Drevlians house, and the city was burned down in no time.

Another example is the 'rat bomb ' used by Britain during the war with Germany.

At that time, in Germany, rat carcasses were thrown into boilers for hygiene. There, the British come up with the idea of stuffing a rat's corpse with a bomb and spreading it to a German base, exploding the boiler room and causing a fire in the factory.

In the end, the rat with the bomb was found by the German army at the port, but every time the German army found a dead mouse, it was warned that it was a booby trap and was uselessly nervous. So, in a sense, the British rat bomb operation may be a success.