Narrator: They're designed to be diabolical and destructive...
They were bombs, hidden bombs, attached to everyday objects.
( explosion, screams )
Narrator: ...concealed killers,
waiting for the unwary to trigger them.
28 men were scalded to death by the steam boiler explosion.
Narrator: From ancient tombs...
A series of crossbows, just waiting for anyone
who would dare to try to rob the grave of the emperor.
Narrator: ...to world wars...
Martin Morgan: This is how bonkers World War II could be.
You had smart people that imagined the weaponization
of the Norwegian roof rat.
There was even a plan to weaponize a chocolate bar.
Narrator: Tonight, we'll explore the evolution of booby traps,
sinister weapons hidden in plain sight.
Not all inventions are made with good intentions.
Unlock the twisted history
behind the world's darkest marvels.
From movies to books,
there's one surefire way to add suspense to a story--
booby traps.
But these devices aren't purely works of imagination.
Ancient Egyptians used them
to safeguard the tombs of pharaohs.
Kara Cooney: The ancient Egyptians believed that you had to take
everything you would need in the afterlife with you.
And the richer people in ancient Egyptian society
had a lot more to take with them.
Things like rare minerals, gold, and silver.
Things like wood that's been imported, like cedar from the Lebanon.
And then all of that material would be collected,
pushed into these tombs, and then sealed up,
locked away, ostensibly for forever.
Narrator: Also inside the tombs are clever traps
designed to trick intruders,
including those following orders
from an infamous general.
August 1799.
Napoleon and the French army invade Egypt.
Fascinated by the civilization's great pharaohs,
Napoleon orders his engineers to map the Valley of the Kings.
There they uncover the tomb of Amenhotep III,
who ruled in the 14th century B.C.
and a booby trap designed to kill anyone who enters.
Kara Cooney: When you go into the tomb,
if you were entering this tomb in the 18th century,
you head straight down and hit a well,
and it is a pit that is 25 feet straight down.
You're on your way in there in the dark,
even if you have a torch, and you hit that well room,
you're gonna fall 25 feet to your death, and then that's it.
Narrator: The well appears to be a variation
on one of the oldest known booby traps-- the pit trap.
Early man uses it to catch and kill animals,
from wooly mammoths to saber-toothed tigers.
After digging a deep hole,
the opening is camouflaged with lightweight debris.
A single step sends unsuspecting intruders
plummeting through a false floor and into a dark abyss.
Kara Cooney: There aren't any spikes at the bottom of it
that we know of, but there's not a way
to walk around the well chamber.
It just goes straight down.
So it is a means of making it very difficult
to get through to the other side of the tomb.
Narrator: The well is just the first line of defense.
Kara Cooney: Behind the well itself
is this false wall that you have to break down.
So you have to figure out
how you're going to bridge this expanse
while at the same time break through this false wall.
And once you get past the false wall,
there's more interesting stuff in store because the tomb turns.
18th dynasty tombs did this all the time.
They had a kind of circuitous route that they would take,
as if we're in the underworld itself
and there's no straight lines anymore
and you can't quite find your way in the dark.
And the tomb of Amenhotep III is meant to replicate that.
Narrator: At the end of this labyrinth
lies the pharaoh's burial chamber,
but it's empty.
The Valley of the Kings was systematically ransacked
at the end of the 20th dynasty
and into the beginning of the 21st.
They had stripped all of these mummies of their precious metals--
silver, gold, all of these things,
And they were able to recommodify
or resell a whole number of things.
Narrator: But some ancient chambers are found perfectly intact,
most famously, the tomb of Amenhotep's grandson-- King Tut.
Kara Cooney: Tutankhamun was a king of the late 18th dynasty.
And yet, when that tomb was found in 1922 by Howard Carter,
an Egyptologist who was working with his patron Lord Carnarvon,
it was found jam-packed with all kinds of stuff.
Aaron Irvin: The discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb was absolutely unprecedented,
a complete tomb, untouched, all of the grave goods intact,
the body intact, the sarcophagus intact.
Tutankhamun's tomb gave us the first complete view
of Egyptian society that we had ever received.
Nothing like this had been discovered up to that point.
And honestly, nothing like this has been discovered since.
Narrator: Despite the vast treasure it holds,
there's no sign of a physical booby trap in Tut's tomb.
But rumors soon spread of a different deterrent,
one that also kills.
Almost immediately, we start to see headlines
talking about the curse of the tomb,
the curse of the mummy.
Reporter: Dateline, Egypt, February 16th, 1923.
Aaron Irvin: It's very easy to dismiss this idea of spells and curses.
But the idea of the tombs as this special place,
as being guarded by this sacred magic
that can strike against you if you do not respect it,
this is not simply invented by the modern media.
The Egyptians themselves thought of these places
as being cursed and protected by spells.
Narrator: Six months after the tomb is opened,
a macabre series of events unfolds.
The man who funded the excavation and all of this work, Lord Carnarvon,
he dies in a very unexpected and strange manner.
Aaron Irvin: George J. Gould,
an American financier who comes to the site,
suddenly comes down with pneumonia later that year
and then dies under mysterious circumstances.
Kara Cooney: There's also Archibald Douglas Reid,
the radiologist who x-rays Tutankhamun,
and three days later, he dies.
Hugh Evelyn White, another British archaeologist who looks upon the artifacts
and then shortly thereafter unfortunately kills himself,
leaving behind a note that he has been overcome by this curse
coming from Tutankhamun's tomb.
Narrator: Are these tragic deaths just a strange coincidence?
Or is it possible they result
from a supernatural booby trap?
Is the curse of the tomb real? Beside the point.
What matters is its effectiveness as a deterrent,
keeping people from breaking into the tomb,
from threatening the body of the pharaoh,
that is what that booby trap is actually all about.
Narrator: Egypt isn't the only culture
that protects its dead rulers with hidden traps.
Over 4,400 miles away,
in the Shaanxi province of China,
there's a booby trap worthy of Indiana Jones
guarding the majestic tomb of the country's first emperor
Qin Shi Huang.
This massive mausoleum is discovered by farmers in 1974.
It is among, if not the most intricate burial sites
for a single human being that's ever existed.
Narrator: Qin commissions its construction
after he takes the throne in 246 B.C.
An estimated 700,000 laborers
spend 38 years building it.
On completion, it's 20% larger than the Great Pyramid.
Greg Jackson: The tomb is surrounded by an army
of 8,000 terracotta warriors.
They are meant to protect his grave.
There's been plenty of work done around the tomb,
but archaeologists are yet to actually crack it open.
And the reason for that, there are still safety concerns.
There's a lot of mercury in there.
We know that from ground samples.
Narrator: According to ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian,
mercury was considered a wonder element
that bestowed immortality.
That mercury can't disappear.
So even if it had evaporated,
that elemental mercury is still present
in some capacity inside the tombs.
And, of course, that's a serious health consideration.
What ends up happening when you get mercury poisoning,
it basically messes with your central nervous system and your nerves,
and it also messes with your kidneys.
It doesn't allow your kidneys to function the appropriate way,
you get buildup of byproducts that ultimately
cause cardiac arrhythmia, and then will die.
Narrator: Surprisingly, the toxic mercury rivers
are not designed for defense.
Something far more deadly takes care of that.
Much of what we know about what's inside the tomb
comes from Sima Qian.
His writings explain that there are booby traps,
a series of crossbows just waiting for anyone
who would dare to try to rob the grave of the emperor.
Narrator: Though many question if the crossbows still work.
So far, there are no volunteers to find out.
Greg Jackson: 2,000 years is a long time.
There's plenty of reason to expect
that those crossbows are not going to fire.
All the same, you got to ask yourself,
do you really want to be the first person
that steps inside the tomb to excavate?
That's going to be the person who really finds out
whether or not they've endured the last 2,000 years.
Narrator: But protecting the dead isn't relegated to antiquity.
Narrator: In 18th century England, the study of human anatomy
is improving medical care for the living,
while also creating a demand for dead bodies.
As medicine becomes more scientific, more formalized,
there is an increased need for cadavers to teach anatomy to students.
The problem is that there are not enough legally available bodies,
and there's a really pressing need to get fresh corpses.
You can't just go dig up somebody who's been dead for two weeks, three weeks.
They are no longer useful to learn anatomy because of decomposition.
Rebecca Simon: So, for fresh cadavers,
you need to employ grave robbers
who are going to be watching out for new burials
and can go in and steal these bodies.
Narrator: Known as resurrectionists,
these body snatchers can make a nice profit.
Cadavers, they're not readily available,
and that's what gives them their value,
so they turn a pretty penny.
Megan Springate: The resurrectionists would sell the bodies
from $5 to $30.
And, if you look at what that's worth now,
it's like $2,000 to $12,000.
So it was not a bad gig.
Narrator: One frequent customer is Dr. William Hewson,
known today as the father of hematology.
William Hewson was a very respected doctor,
and he was very knowledgeable of the human body.
And in 1998, a group of restorationists
went to 36 Craven Street
where Hewson had been living in London,
and they found about 1,200 bones
underneath the foundation of this house.
They were bones from men, women, children, animals.
And the bones showed evidence of scalpel marks and cuts,
like the kind of cuts that you would make
when you were amputating a limb.
Narrator: The grisly discovery gets worldwide attention
because of Hewson's roommate,
none other than Benjamin Franklin,
who worked in London as a diplomat in the mid-1700s.
This led to a whole bunch of questions initially.
Was it possible that Benjamin Franklin
was actually maybe a serial killer?
No. It turned out that Hewson
was actually running an underground anatomy school
and dissecting loads of cadavers.
Megan Springate: The medical schools in London at the time
were teaching anatomy
but not teaching anatomy as in depth
as you would with a cadaver.
So he opened essentially a private anatomy school in the basement of the house
that he was sharing with Ben Franklin,
teaching all of these physicians about anatomy.
But it doesn't last terribly long.
He dies at the age of 34 from septicemia,
or blood poisoning,
probably from his work cutting into cadavers.
Narrator: Hewson isn't the only doctor
looking for fresh cadavers to dissect.
Both private and public medical schools
ramp up their demand, which enrages the public.
The idea that people were being dissected
was absolutely horrific to them,
because if these bodies were cut up,
where would their souls go?
It might absolutely destroy
people's lives for the afterlife.
Megan Springate: And they riot.
They go after the medical schools
because they recognize that
if the medical schools weren't buying,
there would be no resurrectionists.
Narrator: When authorities do little to end the practice,
some take matters into their own hands.
Rebecca Simon: And so, we start seeing people paying others to protect bodies
until the body would be decomposed enough to where it wouldn't be worth stealing.
Cemeteries began erecting watchtowers,
and people were employed to watch over the graveyard
all night to make sure nobody was going to come in.
We also see the use of mortsafes,
these iron cages that were placed over coffins
that would make it impossible for somebody to break in.
Narrator: As countless bodies continue to vanish,
inventors step up with creative deterrents.
The earliest is known as the grave gun.
This gun is a bit similar to a shotgun. It has a shotgun barrel.
It was placed on a grave,
and someone coming up to the grave
would step on a trip wire.
And this would trigger the gun shooting the person
who was coming up to the grave.
The grave gun was set up in a way
so that way it was on a swivel so it could turn towards
the direction of the actual grave robber.
( gunshot )
Narrator: But even grave guns
couldn't stop the most determined robbers.
Anatomists were particularly interested
in different type of people, deformed people,
people who were extremely tall,
people who were extremely short.
These bodies are rare, so grave robbers will earn loads
if they're able to excavate one of these types of bodies for the anatomists.
So an interesting story occurs in 1817.
In this year, a seven-foot-tall soldier died, and he was buried.
Megan Springate: The caretaker of the cemetery
knows that this soldier is going to be a target,
and he sets up the mega grave gun,
which sounds like a terrible B movie honestly.
It is multiple grave guns
pointing at the grave.
This meant that one single trip wire would set off several grave guns at once
to make sure that they're actually going to kill the person
attempting to rob the grave.
One night, the gravedigger heard all the shots go off...
( gunshots )
...and when he and other authorities went to the grave,
they found it actually quite undisturbed.
No one had actually robbed the grave,
but they did find a helmet
that had a single bullet hole in it.
Megan Springate: A bullet in the brain is something
that would have been of interest also
to the anatomy schools.
So it is entirely possible that this resurrectionist
who got shot in the head ended up themself
on a dissection table at a medical school.
Narrator: By 1832,
new laws are enacted in Great Britain
to deter the body snatchers.
The United Kingdom passed the Anatomy Act,
and what this did, is for the first time,
it allowed families to donate bodies of their dead loved ones
to medical schools and anatomists.
It also allowed people to designate their own bodies
after they died in order to go to anatomists,
and any unclaimed bodies,
those who perhaps had no family to speak of,
those bodies could also get donated to anatomists and other medical schools.
And by 1844 in the United Kingdom,
grave robbing had pretty much ceased to exist
because it was no longer a money-making endeavor.
Narrator: But it's a different story in the U.S.
As grave robbing increases, a concerned public
takes extreme steps to protect their deceased loved ones.
Narrator: By the late 19th century,
grave robbing is an issue of public concern.
But one incident in 1878 in North Bend, Ohio,
triggers a national uproar.
John Scott Harrison is an interesting figure in U.S. history.
He's the only man
that is both the father of a U.S. president
and the son of a U.S. president.
Barton Myers: On May 29th, 1878,
John Scott Harrison is buried in an Ohio cemetery.
His family is concerned about the rash of grave robbings that have occurred,
so they put John Scott Harrison's body
in a family vault walled up by brick,
and then hire a watchman to check the grave
every hour for a month.
Narrator: At the burial of his late father,
John Jr. sees something troubling.
Harrison's son notices that one of their family friends--
Augustus Devin, who has died just about 11 days before--
that his grave has been disturbed,
that his body is missing.
The family is shocked. They're outraged.
John Scott Harrison Jr. goes to the police,
seeks out a warrant, so that they can potentially
go find the body of Augustus Devin.
John Jr. and the police
eventually visit Ohio Medical College in Cincinnati.
They begin searching the building with police.
They move through the building to the upstairs
and find a square hole on the second floor of the building.
In that hole, there's a rope.
The rope is attached to a body.
They think they've found Augustus Devin.
When they pull up the rope,
it's the body of Harrison's father,
John Scott Harrison.
Narrator: The discovery causes a firestorm.
This idea that somebody as important as Scott Harrison
can still end up as a successful target of the resurrectionists
really is the spark that kicks off this sort of industry
of booby-trapping graves with explosives.
( explosion )
Narrator: One of the earliest attempts
comes from Ohio inventor Philip Clover.
It's called the coffin torpedo.
Megan Springate: What it is is a bomb that goes inside the coffin.
You can hide it under the coffin trimmings
of the lining on the inside,
or you can hide it under the clothes of the body.
And it is designed so if somebody tries
to remove the body, it explodes.
( explosion )
If you're in close proximity to an explosive device,
the amount of ways that it can actually kill you
and hurt you are innumerable.
You have the concussive forces,
so you can rupture your eardrums.
You can actually collapse your lung,
cause something called a pneumothorax--
basically air around your lung.
Then shards of what's flying at you,
nails or pieces of wood or metal debris,
they are basically flying objects that at a high velocity
could puncture and go into your tissue.
And then obviously, now you have all these open, gaping wounds.
Narrator: That destructive force is unleashed
in a graveyard in Mount Vernon, Ohio,
on January 17th, 1881.
Barton Myers: Three potential grave diggers
are attempting to disturb
the body of the recently deceased.
They hit the coffin, triggering the torpedo.
( explosion )
One of the grave robbers, who we know as only Dipper,
is killed outright by the device.
A second grave robber has his legs broken.
The third left to tell the tale
of what actually occurred that night.
This is the only documented case
of a coffin torpedo actually being detonated.
Narrator: But the coffin torpedo
isn't the only explosive graveyard booby trap.
Thomas Howell, in 1881,
develops a different kind of coffin torpedo,
but he calls it a grave torpedo.
And it sits on top of the coffin,
and any kind of jostling of the coffin
after it's been buried sets it off to explode.
And Thomas Howell took out rather ghoulish ads
in the newspapers to advertise his device.
One of the ads read,
"Sleep well, sweet angel,
let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest,
for above thy shrouded form
lies a torpedo ready to make minced meat
of anyone who attempts to convey you
to the pickling vat."
Narrator: By the end of the 19th century,
body snatching starts to decline.
Six states passed laws making it easier
for medical schools to use unclaimed bodies.
But it takes 30 more years for all of the states
to have enacted these laws
that make the access to legal cadavers
much easier for the medical schools.
Narrator: In 1862, the U.S. enters
the second year of a bloody civil war.
As Union soldiers push into southern territories,
the Confederate Army seems outmatched.
The Union Army and the northern states
have a numerical advantage
in just about every possible way you can imagine.
The South is playing catch up in terms of resources,
ordinance, powder, guns, weaponry.
Narrator: Then a new Confederate general steps in.
Gabriel Rains, he attended West Point.
He had always been fascinated with explosive devices,
gunpowder, how that technology could be used in warfare.
Rains lived by a military maxim--
deception is the art of war.
Narrator: This leads Rains to create a new type of device
called the land torpedo.
Made from a common artillery shell,
it's filled with gunpowder
and attached to a detonator.
Once buried underground,
when the detonator is touched directly,
it explodes.
It could also be detonated through a wire
or a string being connected to the sensitive primer,
and then subsequently to another object.
And then if someone moved that object,
it could detonate the primer
and the subterra shell would explode.
Narrator: Rains' booby traps are first used in Virginia
in the spring of 1862,
the start of a dark new era in modern warfare.
The Battle of Yorktown in 1862.
Confederates that are now being pushed to retreat
fear that George McClellan, the Union general
commanding the Army of the Potomac,
is going to be able to overtake them quickly.
On the evening of May 3rd, 1862,
the Confederate Army is ordered to withdraw from Yorktown.
As they're retreating, Gabriel Rains leaves
a little present for the Union Army.
He orders his men to begin planting subterra shells
all over the position of Yorktown--
the parapets, the fortifications, in the city itself.
They were bombs, hidden bombs, attached to everyday objects.
Coffee pots, a pickaxe, a shovel.
Narrator: After the traps are set,
Rains and his men leave Yorktown
to join Confederate soldiers heading to Richmond.
As the Union army arrived on May 4th, 1862, in Yorktown,
the soldiers stumbled upon Rains' devices.
Booby traps all over town.
Greg Jackson: So as the Union troops come into the camp
that the Confederates have fled,
the Union army is gonna stop and see valuable goods.
This is not a world of mass production.
They're going to grab those items
and confiscate them, bring them in
to their own supply.
As they're picking up coffee pots,
they're picking up all sorts of supplies...
( explosion )
...they're exploding.
Things are going boom.
( explosion )
Several men are killed outright,
another dozen are wounded by Rains' devices.
Narrator: The Union Army's pursuit slows to a crawl
and the Confederates successfully retreat to Richmond.
But Rains' booby traps have a much bigger impact.
The immediate reaction to the use of Rains' devices
at Yorktown is negative.
Both the Union and Confederate Army operated under the Articles of War
at the beginning of the American Civil War.
And it was understood that acts of deception were allowed.
But perfidious acts, acts that were not
to some tactical advantage or military objective,
an act that would just kill or maim for no purpose,
those military acts were not permitted
under the Articles of War.
But we're at a point in American military history,
in world military history,
when the laws of war are very much in a state of flux.
Then enters Francis Lieber,
America's first political scientist and trained historian,
a German emigre who had been in the United States for nearly 40 years.
Lieber eventually is going to be charged
by Abraham Lincoln and his administration
for writing a new code for the laws of war.
Greg Jackson: The importance of the Lieber Code
really cannot be understated.
This isn't something that happens in the 19th century
and then fades out.
It's really the building block
that will continue
to build our concepts
of how warfare should be conducted,
right into the 20th,
and even into the 21st century.
The future Geneva Conventions
and so forth, those all--
at their core, if you will,
the foundation that those were built upon,
it's the Lieber Code.
Narrator: As the Civil War rages on,
the Confederacy continues using nefarious explosive devices.
The most devious design of all debuts in 1864
disguised as a simple lump of coal.
Barton Myers: Another of the most sinister devices
designed by the Confederates during the course
of the American Civil War was the coal torpedo.
Its inventor, Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay,
was born in Belfast, Ireland,
and had emigrated to the United States.
Coal torpedo is an ingenious form of camouflage sabotage,
by taking a small iron canister filled with gunpowder
coated in a mixture of beeswax,
pulverized coal, and coal tar.
What this does is it makes this little tiny bomb
look like a piece of coal.
And when it's thrown into a big pile of coal,
it's basically undetectable.
Eventually, that coal
will be shoveled into the boiler,
and then instead of burning like a piece of coal,
it explodes...
( explosion )
...damaging whatever it is
that the coal torpedo is put inside.
This is at a time when coal powers
almost any major piece of machinery.
This left the Union Army incredibly vulnerable
to this new deceptive technology.
Narrator: On April 15th, 1864,
that vulnerability is made clear
aboard the USS Chenango,
a 947-ton steamboat making its maiden voyage
from New York to Virginia.
The Chenango was a paddlewheel gunboat
that was stationed in New York harbor.
And before it even leaves the harbor,
the steam boiler of the ship explodes.
It kills 28 men, who are scalded to death
by the steam boiler explosion.
Eventually, Courtenay would take credit for this attack.
The coal torpedo was successful.
Narrator: The USS Chenango isn't the only ship
targeted by Confederate stealth attacks.
Barton Myers: On November 27th, 1864,
the Greyhound was headed back down the river toward Fortress Monroe,
and it had Admiral David Dixon Porter on board.
As they're headed back down the river, the explosion
of the Greyhound steam boiler occurs...
...sinking the Greyhound in a catastrophic manner.
Admiral David Dixon Porter, who survived the attack,
believed that the coal torpedo was the culprit,
the technology that had sunk the Greyhound.
Narrator: Ultimately, such tactics aren't enough
to turn the tide of war.
And in 1865, the South surrenders to the Union.
But a precedent is set for using ordinary objects
to hide deadly explosives,
a practice that continues well into World War II.
It's well known and established that during World War II
both the Axis and Allies used some rather crafty
and inventive ways to get at one another.
Narrator: Evidence of this is uncovered in 2015 in England.
Greg Jackson: Victoria Rothschild, she and her family
are clearing out some old things in the house,
and they come across something that belonged to her father.
Martin Morgan: Her father, Victor Rothschild,
had been the head of MI-5 during World War II.
And that, of course, was this counter-espionage
element of the British government.
Rothschild commissioned this self-taught artist
named Laurence Fish to create these drawings
so that they could have a guidebook
that illustrated the types of booby traps the Germans were using.
Narrator: Fish's drawings provide vivid proof
of how far explosive booby traps have evolved since the Civil War.
It was everything from a thermos that concealed an incendiary bomb
to a British mess tin that had a false bottom to it
that concealed an explosive charge beneath a meal of bangers and mash.
Or a can of motor oil that had a false bottom
and below it was an explosive charge.
You could even pick it up and shake it,
and it would sound like a can containing motor oil.
There was even a plan to weaponize a chocolate bar.
This was an exploding chocolate bar
that detonated when you broke off a piece,
and it was thought that this could be used
to assassinate Winston Churchill
because he was a bit of a sensualist
and he had a taste for chocolate.
And if you could slip one of these bars
into his collection of chocolate, you might just get him.
Narrator: While the Nazis are developing
their cunning collection of booby traps,
British intelligence is busy
creating diabolical designs of their own.
Narrator: 1941.
Covert British agents enter Nazi occupied territory
with a mission to sabotage enemy operations
using secret devices worthy of James Bond himself.
Now the Nazis aren't the only ones who can think outside the box.
And the Allies, the British in particular,
they're doing the same.
So with a mandate from the prime minister
to set Europe ablaze,
we have British officers that are behind enemy lines
doing their best to use incognito booby-trapped items
to disrupt the German war effort.
Announcer: Then there's the hollowed-out book.
It detonates immediately when the book is picked up.
The items that were being used ranged from an explosive
that was disguised as a bar of soap,
or an explosive disguised inside a pack of cigarettes.
Announcer: Here, the trap is being set in a motorcycle.
Anyone sitting on the saddle is in danger of instant death.
Just about anything that didn't look dangerous
could be made into something that was in the end actually very dangerous.
Narrator: But the most exotic booby trap
the British come up with sounds insane--
the explosive rat.
The plan was they'd take a couple of hundred rat carcasses,
they would insert small doses of plastic explosive underneath the skin.
And then that rat would be put into German occupied territory,
like in a plant or a factory.
The practice at the time was that if you're
loading a furnace and you see a dead rat, well,
you pick it up by its tail, fling it into the furnace.
That's a good way to get rid of this dead rodent.
So the thinking was that if you could turn dead rats into an explosive,
this could be a great way to disrupt German supply lines and manufacturing.
( explosion )
This is how bonkers World War II could be.
You had smart people that imagined the weaponization of the Norwegian roof rat.
By the time that the project was over with,
it had accomplished nothing.
The first consignment of rats
was intercepted by the Germans
and none of them caused any damage to anything.
Narrator: But the Brits' mission
is not a complete failure.
The Germans realized, okay, they're putting explosives in rats now.
We need to be on the lookout for any rat carcasses.
So, the Germans from that day forward, then suddenly had to look
at every dead rat carcass with suspicion.
Because after all, they might be bearing explosives into the factory.
So be cautious with them.
Announcer: The effect of setting
booby traps in an area
is that troops occupying that area
will have to examine everything
before touching any object
or entering any buildings.
This will tend to slow up considerably
their rate of advance.
As it turns out, the whole thing
is a great waste of German resources,
greater than if rats had actually been thrown into boilers.
The Germans spending all of this time
and wasting all of this effort
being concerned with dead rats
was a better use of the weapon
than the explosives in the dead rats to begin with.
Narrator: While the British are busy hiding bombs in rats,
across the pond, an American dentist named Lytle Adams
envisions an explosive contraption
that's even more bizarre.
Martin Morgan: On Sunday, December 7th, 1941,
Lytle Adams had been on a hike in a cave
where he was admiring bats.
Later that day, he learned of the Japanese attack
on the fleet anchorage at Pearl Harbor in the territory of Hawaii,
and that's where the idea first came to life.
The idea of, "What if we could somehow weaponize bats?"
Because once bats move into something like a cave,
it's really not possible to get them out.
It just so happens that Lytle Adams is acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt.
And because he has her ear,
he pitches the plan about the bat bomb.
Narrator: The bat bomb is an empty bomb casing
filled with over a thousand sleeping bats,
each with a small explosive tied to its leg.
As the bomb is dropped from a plane,
the casing opens, releasing the bats.
The idea is as they would be falling,
they would wake up, and once they woke up,
they would then use their natural nesting instinct
to find places to rest.
At some point, the bats would chew off the charges,
which had a time delay fuse on them, igniting it,
and causing a large-scale fire wherever the bats would nest.
And we have to remember that Japanese architecture is very heavily wooden. Paper.
Bamboo, very flammable materials.
You now have a thousand bats starting to roost
in the eaves of these very wooden and paper buildings.
Well, when they explode,
you're going to cause a thousand-plus fires
all over this very flammable city.
Narrator: The bold idea shockingly becomes
an official U.S. government research experiment
eventually known as Project X-Ray.
This project was no joke.
It fell under the auspices of the U.S. Army Air Force.
Narrator: In 1943, it moves into the testing phase
at remote sites in California and New Mexico.
The testing of the bat bomb program, it doesn't go well.
During a test at Carlsbad's Army Airfield,
six bats get dropped a little early.
They end up lighting buildings on fire.
They light a general's car on fire.
And this really sounds like a disaster,
except the whole point to this is to be destructive.
So, in a weird way,
the disaster of these fires only proves to the Air Forces
that they're going in the right direction,
they should continue to pursue the project.
The bat bomb project is transferred to the Navy.
The project remains alive, and the U.S. Navy continues
the further development of the bat bomb program
until ultimately the chief of naval operations
Ernest J. King cancels the entire project.
Narrator: In 1944, after investing two years
and two million dollars, Project X-Ray is dead.
Among the reasons, the U.S. must focus on
a far more frightening weapon--
the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb.
Booby traps, weapons that wait,
infernal machines.
- ( explosion ) - Whatever name they're given,
these deadly contraptions
have left their devilish mark on history.
They're a testament to the dark side of human ingenuity,
limited only by the twisted imaginations of their creators.