Animal missiles

At a delightful Camden Fringe show last night, Helen Keen's It Is Rocket Science, I learned all about Project X-Ray. Work on Project X-Ray began the month after the attack on Pearl Harbour, and was to involve dropping a large number of chilled and hibernating bats, each carrying a miniature incendiary device, over Japanese towns. The bats would thaw out and wake up - hopefully before they hit the ground - and spend the timers' alloted half-hour infiltrating the local bat community amongst the rafters of the town before bursting into flames. The plan was ultimately dropped in favour of the atomic bomb.

Another aborted animal explosive project was the pigeon-guided torpedo. The explosive and propulsive aspects of the torpedo (aka "The egg that moves itself and burns") had long been addressed by Middle Eastern scholars in the 13th century, but guidance was another matter. A 1950s US plan to solve this involved a pigeon, which had been trained to peck at the centre of a piece of paper in the shape of an enemy battleship. When placed in the nose of a torpedo, with a clear view of a real enemy ship through a sheet of electrically conductive glass (rather like an iPhone screen), the pigeon's pecks could be used to control the torpedo's rudder. Like the bat bomb, the pigeon guided torpedo was shelved when superior technology came along - electronics in this case.


Of course the history of animals in warfare is roughly as old as warfare itself. It has included Cyrus's camels, which caused enemy horses to panic when they got a scent of them at the Battle of Thymbra in 547 BC, as recorded by Xenophon; Hannibal's elephants; and the donkey-cart rocket launchers used recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.


History xls: the history of the world in a spreadsheet