In December 1941 a Pennsylvanian dentist on holidays in New Mexico, was enjoying exploring the famous caves of Carlsbad Caverns. Dr Lytle S Adams was very impressed by the activity of about a million bats flying around in the dark in the caverns that were their home. He was still vacationing at Carlsbad on the evening of the 7th when news came through about the surprise Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour. Adams, like every patriotic American was shocked and appalled at the attack, but unlike most every other private citizen, Adams decided, more or less immediately, to actually do something about it.
The small town dentist from Irwin, Pa. devised a plan of action…within one month he submitted a seemingly preposterous proposal to the White House – Adams proposed using bats as flying incendiaries to hit back at Japan in its own cities! An apparently hare-brained notion like this from a suburban dentist could normally be expected to receive short shrift from bureaucrats and military authorities, but Dr Adams had some special connections, he was a friend of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. This guaranteed Adams’ proposal would get a good official hearing from the Military, and eventually (through a recommendation from leading zoologist Donald Griffin) the approval of President Roosevelt.
The right bat for the operation
Adams reasoned that radar-guided “bat bombs” would wreak havoc when dropped on Japanese cities because the buildings and other structures were made largely of wood, bamboo and paper. The idea you would think, to most reasonable ears, would sound ‘batty’! Adams however can’t be accused of not doing his homework…he researched the subject of bats extensively, eventually selecting the Mexican or Brazilian Free-tailed Bat (Tadarida Brasiliensis), highly prevalent in the southern regions of the US, as the optimal candidate for the task.
Mexican F-tailed Bat-cave, Carlsbad
What made the Mexican bat an attractive choice to Adams and his team of field naturalists (and to the NDRC – National Defense Research Committee) was that it weighed only ⅓ of an ounce, but could carry three-times its weight (one ounce!) Other biological factors in favour of using bats as carriers was that they occurred in large numbers, their proclivity towards hibernation and dormancy meant that they didn’t require food or maintenance, and their capacity to fly in darkness and locate dark, secluded niches to hide in during daylight [‘Bat Bomb Video’, www.wizscience.com].
Destruction by weaponised bats – the theory
The US Military embraced Adams’ idea and developed a strategy to weaponise the bats: attaching micro-incendiary devices to thousands of captured bats…the Pentagon boffins devised canisters (each had compartments housing up to 1,000 hibernating bats) to transport the bats in. B-24 Bombers would release the canisters over Japanese industrial cities initially in the Osaka Bay area of Honshu at 1000 feet. The casings would break apart at high altitude, the now awake bats would scatter and roost in dark recesses of buildings all over the city. The bats, attached to the micro-bombs by surgical clips and some string, would bite through the string and fly off. The time-activated explosives would then cause countless fires to break out all over the targeted city [Anders Clark, ‘NAPALM BATS: the Bat Bomb!’, 3-Mar-2015, Disciplines of Flight, www.disciplesofflight.com].
B-27 Liberator flying over Carlsbad National Park
Bat bomb trial-and-error
The Military labelled the bat bombs Project X-Ray and soon got down to testing Adam’s secret weapon. The first bat test the Army conducted was in May 1943 in California. Several thousand bats collected from New Mexico were induced into hibernation and then dropped from a refrigerated aircraft using dummy bombs. Unfortunately things did not go to plan…many of the bats didn’t wake from their hibernation and merely crash-landed on California soil, while only some of them managed to fly away. The attrition rate for the Army’s test bats was accordingly high. Altogether over the Project’s lifespan around 6,000 bats were used in the Bat Bomb tests (about 3,500 of these were collected from the Carlsbad Caverns) [CV Glines, ‘The Bat Bombers’, Air Force, Oct 1990, 73(10); Clark, op.cit.]
1943: Army Bat Bomb test goes haywire!
The location got changed to an Army auxiliary airfield near Carlsbad (easier access to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of bats from the caverns). Eventually the Army loaded the bats with explosives to trial some live runs. Again the bats performed erratically as glide missile pilots but this time with unintended and negative results…an Army aircraft hangar caught fire, as did a car belonging to an Army general [Clark, op.cit.]. Disillusioned by the reverses, the Army hand-balled the Project on to the Navy and Marine corps.
The Marines and the Japanese Village
The Marine corps in particular took on the renamed “Project X-Ray” with some enthusiasm…after several encouraging tests the test site was moved to the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where a mocked-up Japanese Village had been created in 1943✱. The Dugway tests went better than the earlier ones, according to the testers “a reasonable number of fires” were successfully ignited, and a NDRC observer present commented that “It was concluded that X-Ray is an effective weapon”.
Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah
Tests at the Dugway, Utah, site continued in 1944 with the Marine corps believing that the Bat Bomb Project could be deployed against Japan by mid-1945. The Navy hierarchy however was unhappy at the prospect of a delay of another twelve months-plus and canned the project altogether. The US subsequently focused on bringing the atomic bomb to a state of readiness, and the outcome of those efforts altered the course of both the war and of postwar history.
Dentist-inventor Adams was extremely disappointed when the Military pulled the plug on the project. Adams maintained that what happened with the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided if the US had stuck with his bat-delivered bombings: (would have caused) “thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously … Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life” [‘Top Secret WWII Bat and Bird Bomber Program’, 6-Dec-2006, www.historynet.com].
PostScript: Project Pigeon, BF Skinner’s birds of war
Before the idea of bat-bombing Japan briefly captured the imagination of the US defence establishment, serious consideration had already been given to weaponising pigeons to be used in warfare! The notion was first mooted by influential, pioneering US behavioural psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner in 1939. Skinner believed that the humble feral street pigeon, Columba livia domestica, had the innate attributes (excellent vision and extraordinary manoeuvrability) to be trained to guide glide missiles. The behaviourist utilised his technique of operant conditioning to train the birds by rewarding them for pecking a moving image on a screen which accurately steered the missile they were piloting towards their intended target✫ (and unfortunately also towards their own destruction!)
BF Skinner’s pigeons of war
Skinner got some backing from business and the NDRC for Project Pigeon (as it was called), and he was able to demonstrate success with trained pigeons, however the government/military was never more than at best lukewarm on the Project…ultimately by 1944 the Military abandoned the Pigeon Missile because of concern that its continuation would divert crucial funds away from the “main game”, the construction of an atomic bomb. In 1948 the Navy revived the Project, now renamed Project Orcon but in 1953 it was dumped for good when the superiority of electronic guidance systems was established [Joseph Stromberg, ‘B.F. Skinner’s Pigeon-Guided Rocket’, The Smithsonian, 18-Aug-2011, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Project Pigeon’, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon].
Footnote: the US Military’s experiments on bats and pigeons were classified and conducted covertly under a wartime information blackout. They would not of course have been condoned by the American Humane Society (for the welfare of animals) had the organisation known of them.
▦ See also related blog JUNE 2017 on USA/Japan conflict in World War II: Project Fu-Go: Japan’s Pacific War Balloon Counter-Offensive
∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸
✱ two mock-up enemy villages were constructed on this same site side-by-side, a Japanese one and a German one
✫ Skinner, also an inventor, devised a nose cone (attached to a explosives warhead) in which up to three pigeons could perch and pilot the missile’s trajectory
By the mid 1930s the allure of “scientific racism” was on the wane in advanced western countries❈. Although scientists were in the thick of the movement both as eugenicists and as propagandists, significant numbers of scientists and politicians never bought the shonky scientific approach of the eugenics movement☫. Many in the science community never accepted the methodology for the eugenicists’ grand schemes[1]. Information on heredity was far from comprehensive in that era, the science was misguided and there was a vastly imperfect understanding of genetics, at best rudimentary, at the time. Eugenic hygiene organisations were unable to produce reliable statistics. As John Averell pointed out, “proof’ of research” in the field comprised “primarily statistical correlation within conveniently constructed ‘races’ rather than individual case studies to see if the desirable characteristics were actually inherited”[2].
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/image-8.jpg”> Mendel’s schema[/The scientific genesis of the 20th century eugenics movement was located in the rediscovered research of 19th century Austrian monk Gregor Mendel. Mendel experimented in plant hybridisation and his laws of inheritance based on the crossing of garden peas✥ were the foundation for the theories of eugenicists like American Charles Davenport. Davenport et al applied the Mendelian method to human traits such as eye colour which he argued was inherited (as the colour of Mendel’s pea plants were). The eugenicists employed an overly simplified dominant/recessive scheme to account for complex behaviours and mental illnesses, this was a fundamental flaw in their thinking (derived from ‘pedigrees’ based on Mendelian inheritance), a single-gene explanation of human characteristics and conditions. Contemporary science unequivocally accepts that these traits are in fact shaped by (many, many) multiple genes, ie, the existence of polygenic traits[3].
Although eugenics was portrayed by its adherents in the early 20th century as a “mathematical science”, a clinical method of predicting traits and behaviours and controlling human breeding, its drew criticism from scientific quarters on a number of levels. The ‘evidence’ was typically shoddy, such as the research into determining just who was to be classified as being ‘feeble’ and ‘unfit’ in society. The eugenicists relied often on subjectivity, second-hand accounts and hearsay to establish the lineages of the ‘undesirable’ gene pool (see PostScript 1), or on visible observable (physical) features (the resort to phrenology and the like). The theories of eugenics did not seem adequate to explain some traits, such as shyness – rather than being an immutable genetic condition, this could be subject to change over time (ie, some people grow out of shyness!). In addition eugenicists took no account of factors external to a person’s gene makeup in the categorisation of the ‘unfit’, such as his or her contracting a transmissible disease such as syphilis[4].
The scrutiny on eugenics, its growing characterisation as a pseudoscience unable to stand up to academic scientific rigour, prompted some proselytisers of eugenics to claim that eugenics was more than merely science, that it was tantamount to a new religion or moral code[5]. One of the eugenics practitioners who typified this was Alexis Carrel, an American-based French surgeon and Nobel Laurette biologist. Carrel’s eugenics was a strange mix of science, religion, clairvoyance and ultra right-wing politics … his extreme ideas were infused with an anti-materialist, holistic spiritual mysticism. In his 1935 international best-seller, Man, the Unknown, Carrel warned against the degenerative effect of modernity and outlined his notion of an autocratic utopia in which the dysgenic elements were eradicated from society[6].
The eugenics scene in Australasia mirrored Europe and America in questioning the correctness of the ‘science’. The scientific community although entrenched in the vanguard of the eugenic movement threw up its share of dissenters from within its ranks. One such was geographer Griffith Taylor who championed “racial hybridity” and cast serious doubts on the goal of race purity and its assumptions that underpinned eugenics. Moreover there was a lack of cohesion and camaraderie among the individual eugenicists who are often rivals of each other … this of itself did not make for a strong, lasting movement in Australia[7].
J B Watson, Behaviourist
The Behaviourist counterpoint:
The rise of behaviourism in the West as a valid analytical tool for explaining human nature was a counterweight to the biological determinism of eugenics whose advocates preached that biology was destiny. The behaviourist backlash against the persuasive eugenics ideology was led by pioneering American psychologist John B Watson▣ around the time of the Great War. Watson, rejecting Freudian concepts of the unconscious mind, or that mental states or ‘instincts’ were significant, arguing instead that observable behaviour was the key to explaining human traits and complex mental states. In doing so, Watson was also refuting the view that heredity played a role in this construct. For Watson, and for B F Skinner who later took up his mantle as a radical behaviourist, the environment, modelled behaviour, was the source of human change. The work of Watson and Skinner and other behaviourists undercut the eugenics movement’s singular reliance on nature by shifting the debate to the significance of nurture in the process[8].
PostScript 1: ‘Feeble’ family studies template
The belief of eugenicists that all social ills – poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, criminality, venereal disease, epilepsy – could be traced back to one genetic flaw, and that intelligence was determined by heredity, was shaped by seminal pioneering studies in the field. One of the most influential was by psychologist Henry Goddard (1912) who analysed the genetic pattern of one man’s lineage (known as “Martin Kallikak” – fabricated name derived from the conjunction of ‘kallos’ beauty and ‘kakos’ bad). ‘Kallikak’ produced two widely divergent types of families (one ‘good’, one ‘bad’), which despite being nurtured in two radically different environments, the patterns of which Goddard concluded was solely the result of heredity[9].
PostScript 2: Polygenism debunked
The polygenists accepted that the species had more than one origin (cf. monogenism – deriving from one, common ancestor). Morton (see FN 2 below) believed that races were arranged in order of intelligence … the fairer the skin the more intelligent. DNA evidence, tracing human markers, has disproved the theory by proving that all Eurasians, Americans, Austronesians, Oceanians and Africans, share the same, common ancestor[10].
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
❈ Scientific racism uses ostensibly scientific or pseudoscientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify racial inferiority or superiority, Scientific racism’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
☫ Scientific racism was denounced by UNESCO in a 1950 statement on race
✥ for what Mendel described as ‘factors’ (the “heredity unit”), the early eugenicists substituted the word ‘genes’
▣ Watson’s life reads like some kind of early 20th century Mad Men persona (influential ad man, marital infidelities, monumental falls from grace, self-exile, etc)
[1] for instance in the interwar period, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a Noble Prize winning evolutionary biologist, rejected the eugenicists’ inadequate methodology, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] this view prescribed a hierarchical order of races, an Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, a Nordic ‘race’, and so on down the line. Polygenists in the 19th century like Samuel G Morton contended that different races were in fact different species, each with separate origins, ‘Science: 1770s-1850s: One Race or Several Species’, RACE, www.understandingrace.org; J Averell, ‘The End of Eugenics … or is it?’, Melrose Mirror, www.melrosemirror.media.mit.edu
[3] ‘Mendelian genetics cannot fully explain human health and behaviour’, DNA from the beginning, www.dnaftb.org; ‘Rocky Road: Charles Davenport’, www.strangescience.net
[4] Eugenics and scientific racism had been described as “folk knowledge validated by scientific inference”, S A Farber, ‘U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907-39): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective’, Zebrafish, 2008: December; 5(4), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
[5] A H Reggiani, ‘Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds’, in S Currell [Ed.], Popular Eugenics, National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
[6] ibid
[7] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’ (Unpub. PhD, Dept of History, University of Sydney, July 1996), www.kooriweb.org
[8] ‘Eugenics movement reaches its height 1923’, A Science Odyssey (PBS), www.pbs.org; ‘John B. Watson’, Wikipedia, www.em.n.wikipedia.org
[9] ‘Kallikak Family’, http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/356/Kallikak-Family.html
[10] ‘Scientific Justifications for Racism’ (Polygenism), www.sites.google.com
Carlsbad Caverns, NM.
Mexican F-tailed Bat-cave, Carlsbad
B-27 Liberator flying over Carlsbad National Park
1943: Army Bat Bomb test goes haywire!
Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah
Dentist-inventor Adams was extremely disappointed when the Military pulled the plug on the project. Adams maintained that what happened with the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided if the US had stuck with his bat-delivered bombings: (would have caused) “thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously … Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life” [‘Top Secret WWII Bat and Bird Bomber Program’, 6-Dec-2006, www.historynet.com].BF Skinner’s pigeons of war
