Rocksprings Bat Bombs & WWII
“We can’t stop here; this is bat country!”Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, marking our official entry into World War II. At the time, an enterprising dental surgeon named Lytle S. Adams was in New Mexico visiting the world-famous Carlsbad Caverns. Watching in amazement the millions of bats emerging from the caverns every night and returning before dawn gave him a diabolical idea. He pondered whether or not bats could be weaponized by fitting them with incendiary bombs and then dropping them from airplanes. Japanese cities were filled with wooden structures, and if bats could be released to roost in buildings before sunrise, built-in timers could ignite the bombs, causing widespread fires throughout a city.
After returning home, Adams wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt communicating his idea. Within days, Roosevelt dispatched instructions for the Pentagon to investigate this idea, with a note saying, “this man is not a nut.”
With the Army on board, the bat-bomb project was soon launched. The conscription of bats seemed to make sense. Bats could fly in darkness, carry twice their own weight in flight, and avoid detection by roosting in secluded places. They could also be manipulated to hibernate and while dormant, required no food or maintenance.
Adams was recruited to work on the project doing research, choosing a suitable species of bat to use and scouting locations where large numbers could be trapped. The Mexican Free-Tail bat was chosen for the operation, and bats were to be collected from the Devil’s Sinkhole near Rocksprings, Texas, along with Bracken Cave near San Antonio and Ney Cave in Bandera. Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico was also to be used as a collection site.
By mid-spring of 1943 testing was begun at Muroc Dry Lake in California with 3,500 bats. After placing the bats in refrigerators to force hibernation, they were placed in canisters and dropped from an elevation of 5,000 feet by airplane. The first test was unsuccessful because the bats could not recover from hibernation quickly enough and failed to take wing.
Testing was relocated to Carlsbad, New Mexico and the experiments continued. This time bats were placed in ice-cube trays to force hibernation. They were then fitted with dummy incendiary bombs, placed in cardboard cartons, and dropped from a B-25. Again, the test was unsuccessful. Many of the bats didn’t recover from hibernation quickly enough, and some cardboard cartons failed to open. Some bats lost their dummy bombs in the drop as well.
More bats were gathered, and tests were tried again. Bats were now given more time to recover from hibernation before being deployed, but many woke up too quickly.
The Army was persistent, and testing continued, with mixed results. After performing live practice runs (with active incendiary bombs), the bats succeeded in burning down the control tower at the Carlsbad Airfield, along with a troop barracks and several other buildings.
Discouraged, in August of 1943 the Army passed the project on to the Navy, who assigned the program to the Marine Corps. The Marines dubbed the enterprise Project X-Ray and began guarding the bat caves in Texas around the clock.
Experiments continued at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Centro, California. The Marines designed some creative egg crate bat trays to fit in the bomb canisters, and with continued efforts, were finally successful. The National Defense Research Committee concluded that the Marines and Project X-Ray had indeed produced an effective weapon with their bat bombs.
By August of 1944, with more advanced incendiary devices ordered and final testing scheduled, Project X-Ray was racing against the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb. Ultimately, it was determined that the bat bombers could not be deployed before the atomic bomb was ready, so the project was cancelled.
In the end, the Mexican Free-Tailed bats were not needed for the war effort, and the Marines stopped guarding the bat caves in Texas. © 2024 Jody Dyer
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