Happy Monday! Hope you had a good weekend. — Dan

The Problem With Dropping Cats From Airplanes

Warfare and technology, for better or for worse, tend to go hand in hand — our desire to gain a military advantage over our adversaries can often lead to a significantly increased investment in research and development that would not be made in peacetime. Today, we have drones, laser-guided missiles, spy satellites, and a lot of other things.

We do not, however, have cat-guided bombs. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

World War II was the first major conflict that involved significant air power — while World War I certainly involved a lot of air combat, it was nothing compared to what would emerge on the global scale thirty years later. But even then, air power was best used on stationary targets — it’s much easier to drop a bomb on something that’s standing still than on something that’s moving. Further, bombing a group of densely packed targets is going to be more effective than attacking a group that is more spread out, because even if you miss your primary target, you’re likely to hit something else.

But one particular type of spaced out, moving target was still worth going for: enemy battleships. Taking out an enemy battleship while it was in open waters, far from anything to attack, made a ton of strategic sense, and bombers were a good way to do that. All you need to do is fly over the target, drop your bomb, and hope for the best. And if you could find a way to guide that bomb to its target, even better.

Guided bombs were ahead of where technology was at the time, but the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, came up with an idea. What if, instead of finding a way to drop a bomb that always found a ship, we dropped a bomb that simply avoided the water? It’s not a totally outlandish idea. But the path the OSS took to get there felt eerily similar to the Monty Python test for determining if someone was a witch. Step one was to find something that didn’t like getting wet, and step two was to tie that thing to a bomb.

And that thing was a cat.

In the book “Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board,” author Vince Houghton, the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum, explained how the cat-guided bomb would work (via here): “[The bomb was] based on the undisputed premises that (a) cats always land on their feet and (b) hate water. The plan was to hang a poor kitty in a harness from the bottom of a bomb, with some kind of device that allowed said kitty’s movements to guide the bomb as it fell. If you dropped it in the vicinity of a naval target (such as a German battleship), then the cat’s natural instinct would be to think, ‘Holy hell, I’m falling into water. I hate water, so let’s try to land somewhere dry. Like that German battleship over yonder.’ And then BOOM. Suicide kitty is a martyr to the cause.”

That was, of course, ludicrous, but the government tried it anyway. And it failed, as you’d expect. But the problem wasn’t the obvious “how is a cat going to change the trajectory of a falling bomb in mid-drop, exactly?” — the cat never got the opportunity to work their midair magic. Per Houghton, the cat passed out early on in the drop: “During experimentation, the test cat became unconscious (and thus ineffective) during the first fifty feet of the fall. We don’t actually know if the harness/ steering apparatus would have worked, since the cat passed out before that technology could be fully vetted.”

As a result, no cats — okay, maybe one cat — were harmed in this experiment.

More About Cats in the Military

Today’s Bonus fact: OSS wasn’t the first organization to try to turn cats into bomb delivery devices. As the Atlantic notes, manuscripts from the 1500s depict cats wearing bags of explosives on them, running, apparently, toward an enemy target. (Here’s an example.) Unlike the cat-guided bombs described above, these were apparently put into action. The primary use case was similar to the orc carrying gunpowder to blow up the wall of Helm’s Deep in the second Lord of the Rings movie — per the Atlantic, “the text accompanying the images is a section entitled ‘To set fire to a castle or city which you can't get at otherwise.’”

From the Archives: Acoustic Kitty: The cats that were supposed to be spies — but failed, because they were cats.

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And thanks! — Dan