The April Fool Archive

Black Bombers    (April Fool's Day - 1941)


The Elkhart Daily Truth detailed a plan to create a protective air fleet for Indiana at low cost by attaching miniature, eight-ounce bombs to 25,000 crows, which would be trained to release the bombs on the enemy. The report included a photograph of one of the "Black Bombers." The "bomb" in the picture was really a salt shaker, and the crow was stuffed.

Although the crow bombers were an April Fool's day joke, there really was a plan developed and tested by the U.S. military during World War II to create "bat bombs" by strapping incendiary devices to bats, and then dropping the bats on Japanese cities.

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