9. The Plan to Torch Japan With Bat Bombs
After the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted America into WWII, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams hit upon an outside-the-box plan: incinerate Japanese cities with tiny incendiary bombs attached to bats. Although the concept sounds batty, once people got over the fits of chuckles and thought of it seriously, it turned out to have some logical legs to stand upon. So a project was set up to test the effectiveness of Bat Bombs as weapons of war. It turned out to be a viable idea that might have actually worked.
As things panned out, the weapon did not make it past the research and development stage, and the project was shelved before the Bat Bomb ever got deployed and were put to the ultimate test. Thus, there is no way to tell just how effective they might have been in real-life combat. Still, how different would history and our world be if the iconic image of WWII’s end and the start of our current era had not been atomic bombs and mushroom clouds, but clouds of bomb-bearing bats?
