John Lisle

So it sounds like kind of a crazy idea, but he happened to be friends with Eleanor Roosevelt because he had flown planes before and he had given her a ride in his plane and they kind of knew each other.

So he sent this kind of report on the bat bomb to Eleanor Roosevelt.

She gave it to her husband, President Roosevelt, who gave it to William Donovan, the head of the OSS.

And with a note attached to the thing that he gave to Donovan, it said, this man is not a nut.

You know, take this seriously.

Yeah.

So Donovan, of course, he gives this to the research and development branch, Stanley Lovell, that I write about in my first book.

And it becomes this bat bomb project that now Lovell feels obligated to do because the president's saying we need to research this.

So they end up going to Carlsbad Caverns and to some caverns here in Texas.

And they scoop up a bunch of bats and they do a few tests with them.

They actually get a guy named Louis Pfizer who invented napalm to create tiny little incendiaries that you could strap to bats.

This is a little bit of a digression, but Pfizer had been at Harvard.

He was a chemist there.

And when he was inventing napalm, it was like a jellied gasoline.

He would do the tests on the soccer field at Harvard, just like in the middle of the campus.

That's where napalm was invented, just like in the middle of Harvard's campus.

These bombs would be exploding and people would get mad at him.

People would get mad, not because he was detonating these bombs, but because he was hogging the soccer fields and the drill sergeant needed it for practice.

And so there was like these disputes back and forth.

So he was hired by the OSS to create these tiny little incendiaries to strap to these bats.