They Tried To Smash Cities With Bats, Properly Daft
Category: Invention Fails 12th May 2026
Imagine being told the plan to beat the enemy is to put tiny bombs on bats. Not a model, not a metaphor. Real bats. Little critters you find under bridges. That was a proper thing the US military tried in World War II. I know, you think I made it up. Honest, they did.
The idea was simple in a daft way. Japanese cities then had loads of wooden buildings and paper screens. So someone in a lab thought: if bats could be released over a city, they'd find eaves and lofts to roost in. Stick a small incendiary on each bat, they settle, the fuse goes off, and bingo - fires everywhere. Like pigeons with matches. It was called the bat bomb project.
They used Mexican free tailed bats because they fly a long way and like buildings. The bats were to be kept in special containers inside planes and dropped at altitude. When released, they'd scatter and do bat stuff. Tests were done in the American desert, because of course they were. One test went wrong when some bats escaped and caused a fire at a test site. You can imagine the meeting after that one: 'Right, who's responsible for the bats?'
The contraptions were tiny: little incendiary charges in casings strapped to the bats. Sounds medieval but someone had worked out how to attach the flammable bits without killing the bat straight away. It worked enough in lab conditions to convince people to keep going. They even built delivery canisters to carry hundreds of bats. Properly elaborate, for a plan that reads like a madman's bedtime story.
Anyway, the project never reached full use. By the time it was ready the atom bomb came along and basically made the bat idea redundant. So they shelved it, and the bats went back to being bats, which is fair. Still, I like picturing generals sitting round a map, pointing and saying, 'Release the bats.' You'd imagine someone had been on the sauce when that was signed off. History has weirder footnotes than my local pub, and this one just waddles off with a little incendiary strapped to it.