Now I Know Read Free

Britain to Gibraltar to deliver the sensitive documents—a belief strengthened by the June 4 death notice in the
Times
. German leadership shuffled their defenses to buttress their positions in Greece, Sardinia, and Corsica, leaving Sicily mostly unguarded. When Allied forces invaded Sicily on July 9, the Nazis thought it was a feint, as the documents suggested; by the time the Germans reinforced the island on July 12, it was too late. Roughly two weeks later, the Axis began their retreat from the island.
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    BONUS FACT
    Famed baseball manager Billy Martin wasn’t a William Martin. His real name was Alfred Manuel Martin Jr., but Alfred Sr., his father, skipped town when Billy was very young. Around the same time, Billy’s maternal grandmother started calling him “Bello”—the Italian-masculine for “beautiful”—and Billy’s mother, Joan, adopted “Billy” as his nickname. Because of Joan’s hatred for her ex-husband, she hid Billy’s true name from him; according to Wikipedia, it was not until Billy started school that he learned his true name. When the teacher called “Alfred Martin,” Billy ignored her, believing that she was referring to someone else.
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BAT BOMB
USING BATS IN UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE
    During the final days of World War II, the United States, apparently believing that Japan was unlikely to surrender otherwise, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The death toll from these two bombs numbered as high as 250,000 when one factors in those people who died up to four months later due to burns and radiation sickness. Research into the creation of an atomic bomb began in 1939, and the Manhattan Project, which developed the science behind the weapons in earnest, began in June 1942. But in March 1943, the United States was developing another weapon that would have spared many thousands of lives.
    Unless, that is, you count the lives of the millions of bats that would have died in the process.
    In the mid-1940s, many Japanese buildings were still constructed out of wood and paper, which, of course, were flammable. If the United States Army could figure out a way to start fires in a large number of buildings spread out over a wide area, the Japanese infrastructure and economy would suffer but the direct loss of life would be relatively small. But that seemed impossible. Napalm strikes could start fires everywhere, but they wouldn’t spread. Carpet-bombing with many small warheads would increase the area of the strike but most likely wouldn’t cause many fires. And of course, the death toll from either of those routes could still be large.
    But a few months before the Manhattan Project got underway, a dental surgeon named Lytle Adams came up with the idea to use bats—those nocturnal flying mammals—as part of the strategy. As he would later tell
Air Force Magazine
, after seeing millions of bats flying around caves in Carlsbad Canyon in New Mexico, he immediately thought that they could be used as a way to spread firebombs throughout Japan. He collected a few of them himself, did a little research, and found that even tiny bats weighing well under a pound could carry three times their weight in explosives. He pitched his plan to the military (a procedure that was apparently not uncommon at the time) and the brass agreed that this was something to look into.
    Adams’s theory was straightforward. Collect a million bats and strap timed incendiary devices to their backs while they hibernate. Stick a thousand of them each into a thousand bombs designed to open at high altitudes. Fly over Japan at night, drop the bombs, and then let the bats fly around. When daybreak comes, the theory went, the bats will hide in dark places—and given where they are, the most common hiding place will be attics. The timer ticks down and shortly after, without obvious explanations, hundreds of thousands of Japanese buildings start to burn to the ground.
    The idea soon became more than a theory. By March