Have you ever heard of "Project Pigeon"? Haw about "Bat Bombs"; ever heard
of that before? I suspect that, like
me, you have no memory of anything like those Top Secret military projects from
the World War II era, even from the time after the war when they were declassified.
There is reference material on the Internet on each of these
projects, neither of which ever came to fruition, but let me briefly describe
them to you to save you the possible trouble of reading all about them.
"Project Pigeon" was the brainchild of a Harvard
Psychologist, B. F. Skinner, who was a well-known animal behaviorist. He worked mainly with pigeons and, when WWII
came along, he wanted to help the war effort.
He obtained a $25,000 grant from the Federal Government to develop a
bullet-shaped explosive projectile that would contain three tube chambers, each
with a pigeon in it. The pigeons had
been trained to peck at images that resembled ships and would be rewarded with
food treats. The main focus was to have the missiles launched over enemy waters
where the pigeons would be seeing actual ships in the frontal tube glass and
their pecking would guide the missile to the ship where it would explode on
impact, damaging and possibly sinking the ship. Of course, the three birds would die in the explosion, but that
was the consequence of war, collateral damage, so to speak.
Fortunately for the pigeons, the project never got "off
the ground" when radar became a reliable means of guiding unmanned
projectiles. "Project Pigeon"
died its own quiet death without taking any of the birds with it.
Now, the "bat bomb" was a little different. This one was conceived by a dentist friend
of Eleanor Roosevelt named Lytle S. Adams.
They were also a form of projectile that was to be dropped from the belly
of an aircraft. Each of the
"bombs" would contain a whole army of bats, all equipped with
incendiary devices strapped to their bodies. This project was designed for the
invasion of Japan, and was designed to start thousands of fires in the nooks
and crannies that were known to exist in the buildings of Japan.
The plan was to have a timer that would open the device and
release the bats. This would be done during the daylight hours over populated
areas, so the bats would fly down to find places of darkness. The incendiary
devices would then ignite and start fires in the eaves and walls where the bats
roosted. Again, the bats would be
consumed by the fire, but hey, that's war!
The bats got as lucky as the pigeons did when President
Harry Truman decided to drop the atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima instead
of invading the homeland of Japan. Of course, the people of those two cities weren't as lucky
as the bats were, but at the time, I think the American people liked bats
better.
Now you know the story of two of the many weird and wacky half-baked projects that were initiated during WWII that never got into the history books. Can you just imagine what a stink P.E.T.A. would have raised if they had been in existence at that time?
