Suicide Bomber Bats
In fact the U.S. Navy experimented with bat bombs, not cat bombs. Ten- to eleven-gram Mexican free-tailed bats carried a 17.5 gram napalm time bomb designed in 1943 by Louis Fieser.
Researchers planned to pack the bats into five-foot-tall steel bombshells the size of a Standard 500-pound bomb. Each shell was filled with circular steel trays about one and a half inches tall, subdivided into small rectangular bat-sized niches and fitted upside down one on top of the other. Hibernating bats with napalm bombs attached to their breasts with surgical clips -thought to simulate the teeth of a baby bat- were to be placed in each compartment. Timing and safety wires connected each bat to the tray above and to the compartment walls. Strings two- to three-inches long connected the trays. On release, a parachute deployed and a mechanical device jettisoned the casing. Trays fell to the bottom of their connecting strings like an accordion and released the timing wires. As the deployed bat bomb descended into warmer air, the bats were expected to wake up, wiggle or fall out of their cubicles, and fly away in the process removing the safety wires and arming the bombs. Each shell could carry 1,030 bats. A twin-engined B-25 could carry twenty-five shells: almost 26,000 individual bat bombs. A Del Mar, California, company owned by entertainer Bing Crosby and his brother Larry was contracted to manufacture the devices.
Napalm, An American Biography by Robert M. Neer, page 48. Photo's after page 86.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
