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The Bat Bomb Invention and Other Odd Facts from History and War

Khalid Elhassan May 10, 2020 33 min

18. “A Perfectly Wild Idea But Is Worth Looking Into“

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Atlas Obscura

Within weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams had drawn up plans for his bat bombs. On January 12^th, 1942, he wrote up a proposal and sent it to the White House. There, the idea would probably have been laughed off and dismissed out of hand, if not for the fact that Lytle Adams was a personal friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

With help from the president’s wife, the proposal made it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desk, and thence to the country’s top military brass. FDR thought it was “a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into“. So he sent Adams to see William J. Donovan, Roosevelt’s chief intelligence adviser and eventual head of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, with a note advising him that “This man is not a nut!“

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.