ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 28, 1996 TAG: 9610280115
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, CALIF.
SOURCE: JOANNE GRANT KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
WHAT IF another World War II research team's fiery secret weapon had taken flight over Japan?
Now it can be told.
It's the story of the World War II secret weapon that's well, still a secret to most people.
Every kid knows about the atom bomb. But how many know about the bat bomb?
Yes, you read that right. The bat bomb.
Sure, it sounds strange. Even President Franklin Roosevelt, a staunch supporter of the device during its testing, acknowledged its inherent nuttiness. But it was very real.
Some of its earliest testing occurred at Moffett Field, then a Naval Air Station, south of San Francisco Bay. But you tell that to the people at Moffett now, and they laugh. They think you're making something up.
But we couldn't make this stuff up.
``Nobody at Moffett had the slightest idea of what to do with us,'' Jack Couffer, 72, a member of the team behind the weapon and author of the aptly named 1992 book ``Bat Bomb,'' said by telephone from his home in Kenya. ``Nobody knew what we were doing.''
In the early days of World War II, the bat bomb was the focus of Couffer and about a dozen other men from various branches of the armed forces who hoped it could be used in the Pacific Theater to ``frighten, demoralize and excite the prejudices of the people of the Japanese Empire,'' according to its inventor.
Why haven't more people heard of this after all these years?
``I figured no one would have believed me,'' explained San Jose-born Denny Constantine, 71, a member of the bat bomb team and now one of the nation's foremost bat experts.
The bat bomb was simplicity itself.
It would work this way: Tiny incendiary bombs would be attached to millions of bats. Then bunches of bats would be placed in egg carton-like trays inside a sheet metal bombshell. As the bomb was dropped, the shell would open to release the bats and their little bombs all over Japan's major cities. Theoretically, when the bats went to roost, fires would flare up in remote crannies of the wood and paper buildings found throughout Japan.
No, the Humane Society wasn't consulted.
The bomb's designers figured that after a demoralizing (for the enemy as well as the bats) series of flash fires throughout its major cities, Japan would surely capitulate.
This bold team of ordinance innovators was led by Dr. Lytle S. ``Doc'' Adams from Pennsylvania, a practicing dentist and oral surgeon who dabbled in loopy inventions. Ol' Doc Adams' bomb plans were once mistaken for the Manhattan Project by some Washington, D.C., functionary, which led the exasperated inventor to wonder why the government was messing around with such a stupid idea as an atom bomb when bats were sure things.
When Adams wrote to the president to outline his plan, Roosevelt was interested enough to order a reply.
``This man is - not - a nut,'' FDR, obviously hedging his bets, wrote in a memo. ``It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.''
It was a wild idea proffered by wild men doing wild, if not downright weird, things. But they were intent on their mission: They found the bats in caves; they devised the ``bomb'' they would attach them to; they tested the project.
One of the team especially involved in those tests was Tim Holt, the actor who would become an even bigger one after the war in the film ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'' When you consider that the team's mascot was a worn-out tiger, Holt's involvement seems one of the least incongruous of the many nutty elements of the bat bomb's story.
In 1942, when the project was just getting started, the bat bomb team needed to test how much weight a bat could carry. They needed a big place. When they found out about the dirigible hangar at Moffett, they went batty.
Built in the early 1930s to accommodate the massive USS Macon airship, the hangar is 1,133 feet long and 308 feet wide. It's big enough that 10 football fields could fit inside. It's so big that fog sometimes forms near the ceiling, 198 feet up. Its size made it perfect for the bat tests.
With a special permit from the National Park Service, the team collected 100 bats at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, loaded them onto an Air Force B-25, along with their equipment, balance scales and an assortment of weights, and took off for Moffett.
When they arrived they found the hangar waiting, an empty hulk shaped like a whale. When the 500-ton doors rumbled closed, ``it was as if we had been swallowed alive,'' wrote Couffer, who went on to become a screenwriter, director and producer.
``Open light bulbs hung from a rib cage of catwalks high above,'' Couffer wrote. ``Our figures seemed tiny on the vast plain of the concrete floor, and our voices echoed oddly in this immensity of space.''
Couffer said the group stayed at Moffett just for a night. They came in, did the tests, and left the next day. His memories of the visit intermingle with those of spending childhood summers at an uncle's nearby ranch, so he knew the area fairly well. But he isn't surprised no one remembers the bomb.
``We didn't tell the newspapers,'' Couffer said. ``It was secret.''
Since his visit, the big hangar has changed a little. Some structures have been built inside as the use of the base changed. It's used as a maintenance hangar for airplanes. Rooms built inside are used as classrooms.
``It's underutilized right now,'' said Carl Honaker, who was the No.2 man at Moffett when it closed in 1993. ``There are only four airplanes, and there used to be 24.'' Today, Honaker works for NASA and serves as president of the Moffett Field Historical Society, which has a museum in the hangar.
Honaker was also one of those who laughed when asked about the bat bomb. Like most people, he was unaware of the project that occupied the intrepid team throughout much of the war.
Oddly enough, it's not mentioned in any histories of Moffett.
After the Moffett tests, the team continued to find caves teeming with the right kind of bats. The members eventually designed the right-size bombs to attach to the bats. They tested their idea, once burning up an Army airfield in New Mexico. Although that was an accident, it confirmed the timer's accuracy.
Constantine said that ``under the proper circumstances,'' the project would have worked. That included collecting the bats in the fall, when they had a good layer of fat to protect them. ``They were learning their lessons'' about the bats' habits, he said of the team.
He was probably right. But we'll never know. History took another course.
LENGTH: Long : 117 linesby CNB