12. Testing… “Mishaps”
To deliver the individual Bat Bombs to their target area, the critters were first inducted into hibernation, then the tiny incendiaries were attached to them. Next, they were placed in a special bomb casing that contained 26 stacked trays, each with 40 bats, for a total of 1040 bat incendiaries per bomb. The bombs would be dropped at 5000 feet above a Japanese city, then deploy a parachute and break open at 1000 feet, releasing the by-now awakened bats to fly off and find roosting places.
There were some testing mishaps. The most notable occurred on March 15th, 1943, when armed bats, accidentally released at Carlsbad Army Air Field, New Mexico, set the place ablaze. The silver lining was that it confirmed that weaponized bats can, indeed, start major fires. More controlled weapons testing at a specially designed “Japanese Village” confirmed that Bat Bombs were, pound for pound, between 11 to 21 times more effective than standard bombs. As the project’s chief chemist noted: “the regular bombs would give probably 167 to 400 fires per bomb load where X-Ray would give 3,625 to 4,748 fires“.