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.