Bat Bomb
An interesting aside to this thread is that Doc Adam's son, Bill , has been close friend for many years. Bill ran gas station in Las Cruces, was a skilled EMT and trainer for the New Mexico EMT system, and then was in charge of the Professional Ski Patrol at the Sierra Blanca (now Ski Apache) ski area in Ruidoso, NM. He married a wonderful woman, Verna, who was raised Amish. Verna owned a home health service in Ruidoso. Sandy and I stayed in their home in Capitan many nights and had business relationships with both of them, as well as a close friendship and mutual involvement with ski patrol and EMT work. Bill had a lot of stories (and a few photos) from his traveling around with his Dad as a teenager, especially in Bracken and Ney Bat Caves, locating and collecting bats for the Bat Bomb project. (The suggested book, Bat Bomb, is good reading: " World War II's Other Secret Weapon, by Jack Couffer, University of Texas Press, 1992"). Some where I have a copy of an image showing the Bill and Doc Adams in the entrance to Bracken. Doc Adams did have an unusual mind and a very focused purpose. His scheme was very well thought out and turned out to be quite effective. The biggest engineering problem was building an incendiary device light enough for the little bats to carry. The incident where some of the bats escaped at a satellite airbase in New Mexico and burned the structures down was definite proof positive. Without a doubt, a few bat bombs would have caused widespread, catastrophic fires raging across the bamboo cities of Japan. Doc Adams (nor any one without top secret clearance - and only a few of those) did not know about the Manhattan Project and the resulting A-bomb, which clearly (from Bill's statements) is why the Bat Bomb project was cancelled just as it was being completed. The US had a much better secret weapon to end the war without years more of massive casualties. Those concerned about the treatment of bats need to remember that this was a desperate war in which many US men and women gave their lives. Bracken and Ney contained massive numbers of bats at the time. The number of bats to be collected for this project was miniscule by comparison with those in the caves. As I implied above, Doc Adams was a bit on the strange side. Bills full, legal name on his birth certificate is "Devil Bill Adams". When Devil Bill and Verna were married, our marriage present to them included purchasing an ordination from one of the better-known mail-order Churches, and presented them with a framed Certificate of Ordination proclaiming that "Reverend Devil Bill Adams" had all the ministerial authority necessary to perform marrials and burials, and all other Church business as allowed by Law. Devil Bill and Verna both though this was just great, and they had the certificate prominently displayed on top of their TV in Capitan. That was all well and good, until Verna's Mom (a very devout Amish woman) visited, and they had failed to put the certificate away. DirtDoc xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Nice little video clip about the bat bomb scheme (but a pox on people > who put ads in front of videos that can't be skipped, at least in no > way that was obvious to me). There is a whole book about it: Bat Bomb: > World War II's Other Secret Weapon, by Jack Couffer, University of > Texas Press, 1992. The weapon was never used, perhaps because 500- > bomber raids with conventional incendiaries proved to do the job just > fine, or perhaps because there was another secret weapon in the > wings.... -- Mixon http://msnvideo.msn.com/?channelindex=4&from=en-us_msnhp#/video/a028c91e-8f5e-43bf-a6a3-4fa70c9f4613 See also 50 Years of Texas Caving , page 22, first paragraph. “The story of Dr. Lytle S. Adams and what was eventually named “Project X-Ray” is truly a Texas-size tale. Briefly, the time was 1942-1943, the US was at war with Japan and the idea was to capture bats, attach incendiary devices and release them over strategic areas of Japan. The bats would take refuge wherever they could and the resulting simultaneous fires would wreak havoc on the enemy. It is reported that the search for the largest concentrations of suitable bats included 1,000 caves and 3,000 mines. Eventually, Bracken and Ney caves were selected as best suited and their entrances were screened to collect the free-tailed bat, Tadarida mexicana . This bat, weighing only one-third ounce, was selected for its ability to carry a bomb-load of one ounce. Although never put into action against Japan, the idea was proven viable when a couple of bomb-equipped bats escaped and the resulting fires burned most of a military installation near Carlsbad, New Mexico.” ===Carl Kunath
