If insects make you nervous, Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s Six-Legged Soldiers isn’t going to do anything to ease your anxieties. That is why you might want to read it; things that make you uncomfortable must be inherently interesting, right? Even if you love bugs, there still might be something interesting here. (Did I just make an error of judgment? “Bugs” is a pejorative term for insects so I guess it is extremely offensive to oppressed animals. I can hear the raging horde of woke wasps coming after me on Twitter to make sure I get canceled. The joke’s on you because I don’t have a Twitter account.) But despite the interesting subject matter, the realized product of Lockwood’s research is less than stellar.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that insects were being used as weapons of war in ancient times. What could be more detrimental to an army’s morale than being splattered with honey then having a beehive launched into the middle of your battalion? Or how about being routed into a swampy area where malaria-carrying mosquitoes live in abundance? How well can an army fight after some digestive parasite gives them migraine headaches, dizzying fever, double visions, and explosive diarrhea? Those annoying little critters are sometimes deadly, they exist in abundance, and are free for the taking. Why not use them as weapons? It sure beats hand to hand combat where soldier risk getting skewered on a sword, beheaded, or dismembered. Don’t take it too deeply into consideration though because all manner of vermin are hard to control; they don’t obey orders, they don’t go where you want them to, and they are just as likely to attack your own army as they are to attack the enemy’s. A little human ingenuity is necessary here.
So this is where Lockwood starts. From prehistoric times to our own age, people have attempted to use insects as weapons, some more successfully than others. As any broad-scoped popular history book would, this one starts out with the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the predecessors. It draws on the Old Testament as a source, and then looks at a few examples from the Middle Ages. Most of these attempts at militarizing insects are bumbling, awkward failures. Some of the passages are simply conjectural guesswork as to whether or not insects were militarized or what kinds of them were actually used. The author uses science to guess what really happened in these battles, drawing on the symptoms of illnesses and his expertise in entomology to draw some shaky conclusions. The writing is just as awkward, uneven, and bumbling as the historical attempts at fighting enemies with swarms of unruly pests were. I really take issue with the way he dwells so much on the Bible in an attempt to engage the reader. He writes as if he doesn’t have any real interest in Biblical studies, but he wants to throw this stuff in there on the assumption that a lot of religious people without any interest in science might want to read this. This kind of pandering doesn’t do the subject matter justice.
The following sections on World War II and the Cold War are much more interesting and well-written. Lockwood writes about Japan’s infamous Unit 731, the biological warfare laboratory that used living humans as subjects for experimentation. Shiro Ishii, the Japanese equivalent of Nazi Germany’s Josef Mengele, oversaw a project to develop bombs that would spread vector fleas infected with bubonic plague all over China. This is the most chilling part of the book and what makes it even worse is that Ishii was never brought to trial for war crimes; instead America let him off the hook in exchange for the extensive experimental records that were kept in the facility.
Meanwhile, the Americans began running their own biological and insectan warfare program in Maryland’s Fort Detrick. The scientists there went as far as dropping mosquito bombs in Arkansas, as if that state needs any more mosquitoes than they already have, to see how fast a plague could potentially develop. Also of interest during the Cold War were accusations against America during the Korean War of spreading disease-carrying swarms of fleas in China and North Korea. Fidel Castro also became obsessive about accusing America of launching crop-killing potato bugs into Cuba. Maybe that was a result of Operation Mongoose where the CIA tried spiking his drinks with LSD. Lockwood does an interesting job of analyzing whether or not these charges, broughght against the U.S.A. at the United Nations, were based on fact or if they were merely propaganda campaigns.
The final section of the book covers present and future uses of insects as agents of military use.
The author’s writing is uneven. As mentioned before, the chapters on ancient uses of vermin for war were clumsy. The book really takes off in the twentieth century chapters, but even there it is a bit of a letdown. It turns out that insects in the Cold War era were used more as symbolic weapons in propaganda campaigns then they were in actual combat. Experiments with insects as biological warfare tools have also been inefficient and ineffective. So while this section of the book is more interesting and better-written, the subject matter wears a little thin. It also seems like the proof-reader stopped paying attention towards the end of the book because the last chapters are so full of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors that it becomes difficult to read at times.
Six-Legged Soldiers has potential to be a more interesting read than it is. If Jeffrey Lockwood spent more time on the actual writing, it would be better. Still, the subject matter is interesting enough to make it worth reading once. Plus the thought of the Japanese and American militaries mass-breeding insects, infecting them with diseases, and using them in warfare against civilian populations is scary enough to make you keep you awake at night. I’m not an advocate of insomnia, but I fear if we become too comfortable we will also become too complacent and that is not a good thing.
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