Bat out of hell

“Like a bat out of hell” seems to have been part of the jargon of British Royal Flying Corps pilots in World War I. John Dos Passos used the expression in his novel Three Soldiers, so Americans used it also at that time. The late Charles Earle Funk wrote that he knew and used the term while a college student in Colorado about the turn of the last century. Why would a bat out of hell fly so fast? Simply because bats are nocturnal beasts and would rush to escape the brighter-than-day flames of hell.