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The Pentagon’s Plan to Fight Zombies and Other Unusual Military Schemes

Khalid Elhassan August 7, 2021 36 min

The US military has a plan to deal with zombies. AMC Studios

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech to Congress after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Associated Press

6. The President Thought the Plan to Weaponize Bats Had Potential

Within weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lytle Adams had drawn up a plan of action, and 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 Adams was a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife. With help from the First Lady, the proposal made it to the desk of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and thence to the country’s top military brass. The president sent Adams to see William J. Donovan, his chief intelligence advisor and eventual head of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor.

FDR remarked that: “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into“. The connected dentist’s proposal eventually ended up with the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) – a 1940s version of DARPA, which investigated and coordinated research into ideas that might help the war effort. The NDRC forwarded the proposal to a zoologist named Donald Griffin, who had conducted extensive research into animal behavior, and who specialized in bats and their navigation methods. That was when the batty plan began to take wing.

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.