That's How It Happened

On Park Lane is an Animals in War sculpture, about which Monbiot has previously complained. It features pack horses, carrier pigeons, camels, elephants, and even glow worms. Somehow the designers overlooked bats though. Before the Manhattan Project came up with the goods, President Roosevelt authorised a $2 million dollar research project to use bat bombs to destroy Japanese towns:

"By March of 1943 a suitable species had been selected. The project was considered serious enough that Louis Fieser, the inventor of military napalm, designed 0.6 ounce (17 g) and one ounce (28 g) incendiary devices to be carried by the bats. A bat carrier looking like a bomb casing was designed that included 26 stacked trays each containing compartments for 40 bats. The carriers would be dropped from 5000 feet (1525 m). Then the trays would separate but remain connected to a parachute that would deploy at 1000 feet (305 m). It was envisioned that ten B-24 bombers flying from Alaska, each carrying a hundred shells packed with bomb-carrying bats could release a million bat bombs over the target — the industrial cities of Osaka Bay."

If that isn't farcical enough, testing of the bat incendiaries did not go smoothly:

"...in one test, a village simulating Japanese structures burned to the ground...a careless handler had left a door open and some bats escaped with live incendiaries aboard and set fire to a hangar and a general's car."

Naturally there's a book about the bat program, and from its jacket we learn that the: "oddball cast of characters included an eccentric inventor, a distinguished Harvard scientist, a biologist with a chip on his shoulder, a movie star, a Texas guano collector, a crusty Marine Corps colonel, a Maine lobster fisherman, an ex-mobster, and a tiger." Unbelievable that such fantastic source material has never been optioned for a movie.