After their 1945 victory over Nazi Germany, Allied forces shifted their focus on forcing to Japan to surrender.
That effort culminated in the first and so far only use of nuclear weapons, which killed more than 200,000 civilians when they were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the world may never have witnessed the horror of the atomic bomb if the US had pressed ahead with a far more bizarre plan: to drop bats fitted with incendiary devices onto Japanese cities.
The idea was dreamed up by amateur inventor and dentist Lytle Adams, who happened to know Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the then US President Franklin.
Mission: Impossible Getting Remastered Blu-ray for 25th Anniversary comicbook.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from comicbook.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By PEGGY MCGLONE | The Washington Post | Published: March 2, 2021
Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more staff and wire stories here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. WASHINGTON The National Gallery of Art will not be open for its 80th anniversary next week and probably won t welcome visitors to its galleries until mid-April. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian museums also remain closed, even as four more nonprofit museums in Washington prepare to reopen this week. Closed to the public since Nov. 21, the NGA had been quietly working toward a March 17 reopening, but Director Kaywin Feldman informed staff Monday that it would not open before mid-April.
National Gallery, Smithsonian take slower approach to reopening, while some D C museums start welcoming visitors back lmtonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lmtonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.