The wood-and-paper construction of traditional Japanese architecture made Japanese cities major fire hazards. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pennsylvania dental surgeon Lytle S. Adams got the idea of equipping bats with tiny incendiary explosives and letting them loose in Japan. Adams was an acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and wrote a letter to the White House, in which he claimed that bats, “the lowest form of animal life,” were specifically created "by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life."
 
Roosevelt passed the letter to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, precursor of the CIA) with orders to look into it. Donovan loved the idea and shared it with the head of the Research and Development Branch, Stanley Platt Lovell, known as “Doctor Moriarty” for his inventive schemes. The project was relegated to the Army Air Forces, where Adams assembled a research team including but not limited to a mammalogist, an actor, a former gangster and a former hotel manager. After conducting experiments, the team settled on the Mexican free-tailed bat, which weighed only 0.5 oz (14 g) and could carry an explosive slightly heavier than itself. Permission was acquired from the National Park Service to harvest large numbers of bats. The bombs, glued to the front of the bats, were originally planned to be white phosphorous, but were changed to a new invention: napalm.

A bomb-shaped metal canister 5 ft (1.5 m) in length was designed to carry the bats onboard planes. Each canister could hold 1,040 bats in 26 circular trays; it would deploy a parachute after a brief period of freefall, then open up and allow the bats to swarm free. Dropped at dawn, the bats would follow their instincts and roost in eaves and attics 20-40 miles (32-64 km) from the drop location. The timed explosives would then go off, killing the bats and starting widespread fires.
 
On May 15, 1943, a test went wrong when armed bats were accidentally released at Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base, roosted under a fuel tank and incinerated the test range. The project was handed over to the Navy, who kicked it down to the Marine Corps, who continued experimenting at Japanese Village, a tiny mock village in Utah used for chemical weapon testing.

Crowley was not new to wartime propaganda. He spent World War I in America, where he, perhaps surprisingly, campaigned for the German war effort against his native Britain. He encouraged Germany to attack the British ocean liner Lusitania, claiming that doing so will cow America and guarantee they won’t enter the war. Some historians have suggested that Crowley was actually a double agent in British service, and he was only encouraging Germany because he knew they would eventually torpedo a British ship with American citizens on board, and that doing so would actually ensure America’s involvement. (And that’s what happened historically: the sinking of the Lusitania and the death of 123 Americans onboard became one of the reasons why the U.S. entered the war.)
 
We don’t know for sure, but it seems possible that Crowley also got involved in a specific propaganda effort in World War II: the V for Victory sign. There is no supporting evidence, but he claimed he was responsible for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously adopting the two-fingered “V” gesture, an idea he floated with associates in the British intelligence community, including future children’s literature author Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. According to Crowley, the gesture did far more than just rally people: it was a foil to the magical powers of the Nazi swastika symbol.

We’re not saying we believe in the occult, but for what it’s worth, Crowley has published a ritual called the “Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram” in 1910, well before World War II. In this ritual, the swastika represents the mourning of the Egyptian goddess Isis, while a V shape symbolizes Apophis, who slays Isis’s husband-brother Osiris, caused her to mourn. Therefore, the idea that a “V” would defeat a swastika was already an idea in Crowley’s head a decade before the Nazis adopted that symbol. Whether or not Churchill and many others flashing the “V” helped beat Hitler on the magical battlefield is not for us to decide, but we’ll note that the Allies did win, so it surely didn’t hurt.
 
A witches’ brew and a storm brewing
Britain was beset by peril in the summer of 1940, and the star of the Axis was ascending. Poland, Denmark, Norway and France had fallen; the Battle of Britain was beginning, and the threat of an invasion loomed on the horizon; Italy was gearing up to attack British-held Egypt in Africa. It was in this dark hour that, according to one particular claim, a group of patriotic British witches set their spells in the protection of their country.

That claim comes from Gerald Gardner, a British former public servant, amateur archeologist and anthropologist, and a pioneer of modern Wicca witchcraft. Gardner might have been a bit kooky, but he was a patriot through and through and was ready to serve his country: he became an air raid warden; hosted the local Air Raid Precautions headquarters in his home; and also served in the Home Guard as an armorer, handing out his collection of weapons to the locals and making Molotov cocktails.

He wanted to do more, though, and turned to a local witches’ coven in Southern England where he lived. Before midnight on August 1, 1940 – Lammas Day, an important date in Wicca – the New Forest Coven allegedly met near the town of Highcliffe-on-Sea to perform a ritual called the Cone of Power. According to British Wiccan lore, the spell had already been cast twice before. The first instance was in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was threatening England with an invasion; the Armada was decimated by unusually strong Atlantic storms and British naval action. (An English folk tale claims Sir Francis Drake, the English naval commander, personally joined the “sea witches” in the ritual.) The second casting was in 1805, when England was once again threatened by invasion, this time by Napoleon. That invasion never happened, either.
 
The 1940 casting was the third time, and it was a charm. Replacing the tradition bonfire with a shuttered lantern (likely because of blackout regulations), the “skyclad” (naked) witches danced and spoke their incantations, projecting a magical cone of power towards the Third Reich, aimed at Hitler’s mind. The goal of the supernatural operation was to weaken the Führer’s resolve and implant in him the idea that he cannot cross the sea. Like with Crowley’s “V” hand gesture, we do not make any claims of efficacy; but it’s a fact that Operation Sea Lion (The Sea Lion That Sank), the German invasion of Britain, never manifested.