“That Time They Wanted To Use Glow-In-The-Dark Foxes To Defeat Japan” #MindOfMarlar
#MindOfMarlar is written by Darren Marlar, host of Weird Darkness
About six months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government created the Office of Strategic Services, or “OSS.” Not to be confused with the Nazi SS, the elite guard of the Nazi regime. Someone really needed to be fired over coming up with World War II era acronyms. The U.S. OSS was the forerunner to what would eventually become the CIA. So, kinda like the CIA’s grandpa – only cooler. Although this story is not going to make them look cool at all – not one little bit. The OSS’s job? Get super creative with warfare. You’d think inventing super-spy gadgets and missions would’ve been on the drawing board before we were attacked, but hindsight is 20/20. Or is it 1942 in this case? Anyway – we had to UP our spy game – and fast!
Stanley Lovell, who was kind of like Q from James Bond, was in charge of Research and Development. He was all about trying out crazy ideas to help win the war. And I’m not exaggerating on the “crazy”.
For example… Lovell and his team had some pretty old-fashioned—and totally ridiculous—ideas about gender. They noticed Hitler’s wild mood swings and thought, “Hey, he might be close to the male-female line!”
So, they cooked up a plan to spike his food with female hormones. They figured this would make his mustache fall out and his voice go super high, like a soprano singer. Maybe he’d grow breasts and become top heavy and fall down a flight of stairs – or bust a kneecap after stumbling in high-heels… who knows? To make this happen, they gave one of Hitler’s gardeners the drugs and a big bag of money. The plan was for the gardener to secretly add the hormones to Hitler’s food. But surprise, surprise, it didn’t work. Maybe the gardener took the money and just threw the drugs in the trash. Or maybe Hitler had a woman’s intuition the whole time! Either way, instead of a high-pitched, mustache-less Hitler, we just got a gardener with some extra cash and a good laugh!
One idea came when the OSS found out that Hitler and Mussolini were going to have a big-boy war meeting at the Brenner Pass, right in the Alps between Italy and Austria. Lovell came up with a wild idea for an “attack they can’t anticipate.” And boy, was he right—they definitely would not have seen this one coming. Lovell’s plan was to sneak a vase of flowers onto the conference table between Hitler and Mussolini. The flowers would be in water that had an odorless, colorless chemical. This chemical would get into their eyes and make them go permanently blind by messing up their optic nerves.
But there was a second part to this plan: also they wanted the Pope to help out. Even though the Vatican was neutral during the war, they wanted the Pope to issue a statement saying that God had punished Hitler and Mussolini for being evil. The OSS was basically asking the Pope to tell a little fib – uh, sort of. I mean, yeah, Hitler and Mussolini were definitely evil, but saying it was God who was punishing them couldn’t really be proven. Unless God was using the OSS to do that punishing… huh… I guess the Pope never thought of that though. Whatever. Lovell was perfectly fine with the Pope being a bit liberal with his interpretation of “evil” and “punishment” anyway, because it could stop the war and make the Pope a hero for Christianity. However, the plan fell apart when the meeting was moved to Hitler’s private train, guarded by his best troops. Justice may be blind – but Nazi Germany wasn’t.
Another wild plan the OSS came up with involved arming Chinese call-girls with poisons to take out high-ranking Japanese officers. Sounds pretty simple, right? But there was a catch: the poison had to be nearly invisible because, well, these women didn’t have a lot of places to hide stuff with what they were (or were not) wearing, if you get my drift. You can probably guess how they solved that problem… and I am not about to paint that mental picture for you. Aaaaanyway… they used a weapon based on the deadly botulism toxin (yep, the same stuff in Botox) and smuggled it into Japanese-occupied China. But then, nothing happened. No Japanese officers dropped dead, and the OSS was scratching their heads wondering “why didn’t that work?!?!” Turns out, their contacts in Asia decided to be careful and tested the poison first on donkeys. When the donkeys didn’t even notice they’d been poisoned and just kept doing their donkey thing, the contacts figured the poison didn’t work and called off the mission. What they didn’t know was that botulism is super deadly to every living being… except…donkeys, which are weirdly immune to it. How’s that for ironic? The ONE animal they tested it on! I’ll bet somebody felt like a real jackass after that!
There was also the idea of the “Cat Bomb.” They thought, “Hey, cats always land on their feet and they hate water, right? Let’s use that as a weapon!” The plan was to strap a poor kitty in a harness under a bomb. The idea was that as the bomb fell, the cat would freak out because, you know, water. It would then try to steer itself so it would land on something dry, like a German battleship. The cat would be thinking, “Oh no, I’m gonna land in the water! I hate water! Let’s aim for that ship instead!” And then BOOM, the cat bomb hits the ship and explodes. The cat would be a furry Kamikaze for the cause. They actually tested this concept – and when they did, the cat passed out after falling just fifty feet. So, we never found out if the whole steering idea would’ve worked because the kitty was out cold before it could do anything. I don’t know why the cats were so uncooperative though – I mean, they would’ve still had another eight lives to spare.
So they ditched the cats and went to bats… because it sounded cool. Bat-bombs… and this, before the Caped Crusader showed up with explosives in his utility belt. They tested tiny bombs stuck to bats… but that didn’t work – how’s that for a Halloween trick?
Then they abandoned the animal bombs idea and tried to invent a stink spray that smelled like poop to embarrass the enemy… which I’m sure would’ve failed, because how deadly is it to yell at the enemy, “the one who smelt it dealt it!”? That plan got a rating of P.U. (Pee-yoo)
But the weirdest idea had to be Operation Fantasia – probably named after the movie which came out at about the same time. But this had nothing to do with Mickey Mouse being a sorcerer’s apprentice, or animated dancing hippos. But it was almost as bonkers… the plan involved glow-in-the-dark foxes.
William Donovan, the big boss of the OSS, told Lovell he wanted to “outfox the Nazis and the Japanese.” Allen Abrams, the acting director of R&D wanted a glowing creature, like a dragon, to scare the enemy. Enter Ed Salinger, who was also told about the idea of outfoxing the enemy, and he thought, “Hey, let’s take that literally!”
See… he had worked in Japan before and knew a bit about Japanese folklore. He knew about dragons like Abrams wanted… and, unlike Abrams, also knew that dragons don’t actually exist… but he did know the Japanese attitude toward foxes.
Salinger figured they could scare the enemy with kitsune, mythical fox spirits from Japanese legends. He thought the Japanese were superstitious enough to fall for it (which, to be honest, was a bit racist now that I think about it). Still, they went ahead with the plan.
They first thought about floating fox-shaped balloons over Japan and adding spooky smells and sounds. They couldn’t go with FLYING foxes because, well, those are actually bats – and we all know that didn’t work out the first time. I’m curious about the adding of spooky sounds and smells though. I have no idea what a spooky smell would be – garlic if your enemy was vampires, wolfsbane if you’re trying to scare werewolves, Mexican food if you’re battling someone with IBS issues… but what would a scary smell be to Japanese soldiers? A thousand rotting sushi rolls mixed with some bad wasabi? I guess we’ll never know. That plan popped and flopped.
So Salinger dropped the fox balloons idea and stuck with his idea of using real foxes. They would paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint to make them look ghostly. A thriller of an idea, right? The problem? The glow-in-the-dark paint was radioactive and dangerous. But Salinger either didn’t know that – or more likely, just didn’t care. They painted 30 foxes and let them loose in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park to test it out. Because, hey, if you want to test out something to terrorize and endanger your enemy, you always test it on innocent men, women, and children in your own neighborhood first – am I right? People, understandably, freaked out, running away from glowing foxes.
The next step was to test if the foxes could swim to Japan. They could’ve dropped them in parachutes, but remember how the cats passed out from that? So, why chance it? Instead, they just tossed the foxes into Chesapeake Bay and then, I’m assuming, pointed towards Japan? Surprisingly that worked – the foxes made it to shore! Not Japan’s shore, but back to the U.S. shores – not even Michael Phelps is going to swim six thousand miles from Chesapeake Bay to Japan – even for love of God and country. So the foxes made it back to shore – but the paint did not – it washed off during their swim. See, this is why Mom tells you that you always need to reapply your sunblock every thirty minutes if you’re in the water!
Salinger kept tweaking his flickering fox plan. He even tried making a floating fox device with a skull on its head, thinking it would scare the enemy even more. His team planned to have people act possessed and chant spooky stuff to add to the effect. That’d be a great job, wouldn’t it? “Here, walk over to those Japanese soldiers who are armed with machine guns, bayonets, and swords and act possessed – you’ll be totally fine!”
In the end, the whole idea was scrapped before it ever reached Japan. Lovell, who was skeptical from the start, said the project would be a good lesson in what not to do. Yeah… like don’t go seeking employment from guys named Salinger or Lovell. Unless you plan to be outfoxed by stupidity.
Source: Mental Floss, Crime Reads
Video created by https://www.fiverr.com/vane875
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