BOVINE BALLOONS AND THE ODIFEROUS OPTION
Clark, James
BOVINE BALLOONS AND THE ODIFEROUS OPTION By James Clark When Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer labored in Los Alamos to perfect the atomic bomb, they were not the only scientists who...
...But recently I happened upon some declassified references to them in the National Archives...
...He confirmed that fecal odors are not especially repulsive to the Japanese...
...Eine Kuh...
...and hired the consulting firm of Arthur D. Little Company to work on it...
...Figuring out how to attach the bombs to the bats and how to teach the bats to drop their bombs proved a little tricky, and the project appears to have faltered in late November 1943, when a scientist advisor to the OSS decided to test the bat-bombs...
...The balloons would be filled with helium and floated at low altitudes over enemy lines...
...According to the OSS files, 10,000 orders for the chemical were received...
...The idea was to make balloons shaped like animals...
...Japanese: "I had a valuable conversation with a Navy doctor, who recently returned from Saipan and other points, where he became intimately familiar with the Japanese and their customs (and odors...
...On March 14, 1945, fewer than five months before the end of the war, the chief of the OSS research branch, Major John M. Jeffries, realized that "at present not a great deal is known about its possible use and there are very few calls for it from the various theaters...
...Revisionist historians can laugh all they like, but they cannot assume that the floating cow idea is dead...
...The device was listed in an OSS catalog of available weapons, but no one knows if it was ever actually used...
...Ada s, ha "ordered Lieutenant Holt to prepare for a test to be held on the desert in which 10,000 assemblies [i.e., bats] were to be used...
...Nor have their efforts proved to be the nation's best-guarded military secret...
...On December 28, 1944, a chemist for Arthur D. Little wrote the OSS that the scent in question might not bother the...
...Perhaps it would not hurt to mention that I am not making any of this up...
...But the smell, surprisingly enough, was not sufficiently repulsive...
...For more than a year, the government conducted tests using various chemicals, only to find out that the Japanese weren't using tracking dogs in combat...
...But how many people are aware of the simultaneous race to develop 52 other war-winning weapons that was carried out by the Office of Strategic Studies...
...According to an OSS memo, the soldier would smell so bad that his mere presence would "instinctively cause natural repulsion and make a person so contaminated a source of derision or contempt ." But what kind of odor would do the trick...
...But the project was eventually dropped, apparently because the scientists were unable to come up with a chemical that reeked of AngloSaxon...
...special gloves...
...They found out that the Japanese ate so much fish that they already smelled like fish...
...The CIA doesn't want to discuss Project Dog Drag either, but some of the project's documents have been declassified...
...One solution briefly considered was for the underground member to wear a protective garment...
...In the ensuing pandemonium, he and his fellow soldiers would throw down their rifles and flee the flying cow...
...The olefactory research that went into Dog Drag was just a warm-up for the most remarkable device of all...
...The scientists of OSS were now free to devote the final days of the war to another great project called Explosive Coal...
...The bats would be transported to Japan and let loose in Tokyo...
...The scientists weren't about to give up...
...The OSS quickly named the mystery chemical "Who Me...
...James Clark is deputy managing editor of The Orlando Sentinel...
...The idea was to build a bomb shaped like a lump of coal and place it aboard a train...
...The plan was to package the offending chemical in a small, portable container...
...The detailed chronicles of many of these weapons are still classified top secret...
...But the scientists ran into the inevitable problem: the containers had a habit of leaking, leaving the person who applied the liquid smelling worse than the target...
...In 1943, the OSS came up with Project Bat...
...If the scientists could invent a chemical that smelled like sweaty white Americans, the Japanese would be so repulsed they would give up and go home...
...A German soldier would look up, see a flying cow, and scream out "Eine Kuh...
...Imagine thousands of Japanese troops so humiliated by their smell that they could no longer fight for the Emperor...
...Then somebody realized that it would be ludicrously easy for the Japanese to spot the underground members if they were all wearing...
...The scientists then tried skunky odors and the smell of decaying bodies, but they couldn't come up with the right formula...
...They decided to try a fishy smell, but struck out again...
...The CIA solemnly proclaims that Project Fantasia is a top secret project and will not say whether it has ever floated any cows over enemy lines...
...He called the project off...
...On November 20, 1943, the research and development branch of the OSS wrote, "The problem is to provide civilian populations with a small container holding a liquid that, squirted in very small amounts, on invading troops, as in a crowd, would produce unmistakable evidence of extreme personal uncleanliness...
...Then they moved on to a formula that would smell like unwashed feet...
...Just as the application problem was about to be solved, disaster struck...
...When Holt pointed out the tremendous hazard the program posed for Southern California, Adams was most indignant...
...Therefore odors that could ostracize a Jap among his kind must be based on other than the fecal concept...
...The lieutenant finally had to tell him that such an experiment would not be performed even if he, Holt, had to stand in front of the arsenal with a machine gun to prevent it ." Like Project Fantasia, Project Bat is still top secret...
...It didn't take the boys at OSS long to come up with the answer, and in due time it prepared a paper entitled "Facts About Feces" (complete with a bibliography, which included "Latrines of the East...
...The idea behind dog drag was simple: an American soldier being chased by a Japanese soldier using a search dog would throw a chemical packet on the ground that would confuse the animal's sense of smell...
...Along with Projects Emily Post, Pneumonia, Joe Lewis, Maude Miller and Aunt Jemima, it remains top secret 40 years after the war...
...The scientists worked on scores of formulas and according to an OSS memo finally found the solution in late 1944: "body odors of the AngloSaxon race...
...A member of the underground would surreptitiously squirt the chemical on an enemy soldier...
...Forty years later, the human drama of the Manhattan Project is common knowledge...
...BOVINE BALLOONS AND THE ODIFEROUS OPTION By James Clark When Edward Teller and J. Robert Oppenheimer labored in Los Alamos to perfect the atomic bomb, they were not the only scientists who attempted to harness nature's mysteries in order to stop the Axis...
...Pr more than a year, scientists worked around the clock to develop the chemical that would win the war...
...The idea was to attach small bombs to the wings of bats, which would fly into buildings and drop the bombs...
...Consider Project Fantasia...
...In a declassified secret letter, one of the men working on the project described the problem: The scientist advisor, one Mr...
Vol. 16 • November 1984 • No. 10
