Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Like the OSS writ large, the OSS/R&D unit had some smashing successes… and some dismal failures.

Some of the lowlights:

1. A cat bomb, 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. Of course, this was a ridiculous idea. 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.

2. The OSS learned that Hitler and Mussolini would be holding a war conference at the Brenner Pass, located in the Alps between Italy and Austria. Lovell proposed an “attack which they cannot anticipate.” He was probably right—they couldn’t have seen this one coming. Lovell’s plan called for smuggling in a vase of cut flowers to be placed on the table between Hitler and Mussolini. In the vase’s water would be an odorless, colorless chemical derivative, which would seep into the two tyrants via their eyeballs. Hitler and Mussolini (and anyone else in that room) would be permanently blinded as the chemical atrophied the optic nerve, rendering it irreversibly nonfunctional. But that was only part one of the plan, and it’s surprisingly the less absurd part. Part two required the assistance of the pope—despite the Vatican being officially neutral during the war—who would issue a papal bull stating that God himself had smitten the two leaders for their evil ways. The OSS was now asking the pope to lie. Yet for Lovell, this would be justifiable: In one action, the pope could stop the war, and would be “advancing the cause of Christianity more than any man on earth.” Okay. Maybe. Unfortunately for Lovell (but fortunately for the immaculate reputation of the Church), the plan fell apart when the war summit was moved to Hitler’s private railway car, surrounded by some of his best troops. The OSS was good, but not that good.

3. Working from their quaintly old-fashioned—and completely ridiculous—views of gender stereotypes, Lovell and his team saw Hitler’s penchant for violent mood swings and poor emotional control as evidence that he was “definitely close to the male-female line.” The plan involved spiking his food with female hormones, to push him over the gender edge, making his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano. They even supplied one of his gardeners with the drugs and a satchel full of money as payment for the operation. Apparently it didn’t work—or perhaps more likely, the gardener took your tax dollars and then threw the drugs in the trash.

4. Another plan called for arming Chinese call girls with poisons or toxins to use against high-ranking Japanese officers who utilized their services. Simple enough, right? The catch was that the poison’s delivery system needed to be just about invisible, since these women didn’t have the means to conceal anything in what they were(n’t) wearing. Odds are, you can probably figure on your own how they solved that problem… And then the weapon, which was based on the highly lethal botulism toxin (fun fact: so is Botox!) was successfully smuggled into Japanese-occupied China. But nothing happened. No high-level Japanese officers were killed, and the OSS was baffled as to why. Only later would they learn that their OSS contacts in Asia, performing their due diligence, decided to test the botulism on donkeys before giving it to the Chinese prostitutes. To their dismay, the weapon didn’t work. The donkeys survived (and in fact, seemed completely oblivious that they’d been poisoned), so the OSS contacts in Asia assumed the weapon was ineffective and scrapped the mission. What they didn’t know: Botulism is so lethal it will kill the living bejesus out of almost everything on earth… except for donkeys, which are one of the few living creatures immune to the toxin. Whoops.

These are just some of the unusual hijinks of the OSS/R&D unit. But the crème de la crème of unconsummated insanity was an operation known as “Capricious.” For Stanley Lovell, this was the high point of his time as the OSS’s Professor Moriarty.

It’s interesting to thinkthat in a war in which tens of millions of people were killed in almost every manner possible—conventional munitions, disease, starvation, genocide, civilian and military purges, and, of course, atomic bombs—nations would be hesitant to use a type of weapon because they thought it wasn’t ethical. And although the United States formed a committee to research the utility of biological pathogens in the war (the Merck Committee, named after its chairman, Dr. George Merck, president of Merck and Company), there was little appetite among the American leadership to go beyond the casual “thinking about things” phase. President Roosevelt was vehemently opposed to the use of germ warfare, and military leaders such as George Marshall and Bill Donovan thought it was an immoral way to fight a war (bullets and bombs only, like God intended). The normally composed and erudite Vannevar Bush was known to say all manner of unspeakable things any time the topic was raised.

As long as the war was going well, biological weapons were off the table. Any conversation about their use was a nonstarter. Any long-term planning for their production was a waste of time. They were simply not to be.

As long as the war was going well.

There are shelves full of books that delve into the war in North Africa between Allied forces and German general Erwin Rommel. There are also a lot of documentaries about Operation Torch and the battle of Kasserine Pass (in case this book fills your reading quota for the year). Maybe you can find one on the History Channel at 2 a.m., after a marathon of Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, or Ancient Aliens . In any case, I won’t spend a lot of time rehashing that history here. All you really need to know is this: In November 1942, America got its first taste of combat against the Germans. And America got thwacked.

It was a bitter pill to take, and a sense of panic began to set in throughout the corridors of the Pentagon. Thousands of American soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing; hundreds of vehicles were destroyed; and there were abject failures at every measurable level of military metrics—command, training, logistics, air support, joint operations, combined arms. Even things as seemingly simple as basic map reading were apparently too onerous for America’s green troops (and their just as green commanders).

Adding injury to injury, the OSS officers in Morocco were reporting that large numbers of Germany’s best and most battle-tested troops were flooding into Spanish Morocco. Francisco Franco’s Spain was nominally neutral, but he was a fascist and highly sympathetic to the Axis cause. Clearly these German troops were entering Morocco with the consent—and maybe even the cooperation—of Franco’s government. This could be a frightening omen for things to come. What if Spain formally joined the Axis? Spanish Morocco could become a staging point for hundreds of thousands of German troops, who could then cut off the vital supply lines to Allied forces who were trying (perhaps now in vain) to dislodge Germany from the African continent.

Something drastic had to be done, and so they turned to Lovell, their evil genius. Now that the handcuffs were off, germ warfare could be the answer to the Allies’ problems in North Africa.