On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 08:40:18 -0500, "Bill Denton"
wrote:


And the pictures used to fascinate me: they had an octagonal "cut-out" of
the nose of the aircraft. This was to prevent our enemies from examining
purloined pictures to get the details of the Norden bombsite, which was one
of the keys to our bombing successes.

Flash forward to around 1975...

I was working as a disk jockey. We frequently received electronics surplus
catalogues at the station, and I was flipping through one while the records
were playing.

One of the hot items being offered was Norden bombsites, for only $29.95.
Interesting, but I really didn't have any use for one.

A couple of hours later I grabbed the copy for a newscast off the teletype,
sat down, and started reading. At the end of the copy there were always a
few very short stories to enable us to properly time our newscasts. I was
running a little short so I started reading these filler stories.

And one of these filler stories turned out to be interesting: it seems that
one of the men who was part of a plot to steal the Norden bombsight during
the War had just been released from prison.

I thought there was a certain irony that this guy had spent more than 30
years in prison for trying to steal something I could now buy for less than
$30!

Like most legends, the accuracy of the Norden bombsight has been
hugely overblown.

The Norden was developed prior to WWII and it was fiendishly difficult
to manufacture due to the high number of close tolerance fittings,
bearings and shafts that went into it. Plus, it was extremely
intolerant of dust and shocks which are endemic in a combat zone of
course, not to mention the constant upkeep it required while in the
combat zone, which was limited in that there were only so many expert
technicians and a lot of sights. In addition, the training for the
use of the sight occured in the desert southwest where flying weather
was nearly perfect. The bombing runs were conducted at altitudes
normally lower than 10,000 feet. So the target was visible to the
crews for a long time during the approach, the altitude at which they
bombed was very low compared to the height they would bomb from in
actual combat, and nothing disturbed the bomb run.

In actual combat, the heavy bomber crews found things VERY different.
They bombed from *at least* 22,000 feet (many times they were higher
than that), they almost never actually saw the primary target due to
wretched northern European weather and with the Norden you actually
had to SEE the target in order to hit it, they were opposed by vicious
fighter attacks which disrupted the formations not to mention shooting
down numerous bombers, the flak barrages were often deadly accurate
and unavoidable, and the bombs themselves were not aerodynamically
very stable and often wafted away from their intended target.

In addition there was the major problem with daylight bombing over
Europe: If every bomber bombed individually as per training, that
meant each bomber had to approach the target singly, which was
obviously not going to happen as it would string the bombers out for
hundreds of miles and leave them all vulnerable to fighters and flack.
So the bombers bombed from formation. But while in formation, the
bombardiers could not all do their own bomb runs because once the bomb
run was initiated, the bombardier flew the airplane through a linkup
with the auto pilot and the bombsight. You can't have each bombardier
flying his own bombrun while in tight formation or there would have
been many midair collisions. So only the lead bombardier flew the
bomb run. Every other bomber in the formation dropped when they saw
the lead bomber's bombs go, or upon radio signal. The accuracy of the
drop depended on the skill of the lead bombardier (if he was still
alive at that point, the Germans pointedly attacked the lead aircraft
in all formations), and how tight the formation was at the time of the
group drop.

In the meantime the Germans were making smoke upwind of the city, and
the first bomb strikes often caused enough smoke to obscure the actual
target so that the follow on squadrons had to somewhat blindly toggle
into the smoke.

Even when the bombers actually accurately hit the intended target, it
turned out that machine tools of they day were extremely resistant to
blast damage. The Germans also turned out to be extremely good at
repairing damage and renuing production. They also got very good at
dispersing the factories and moving them underground.

The result of all this, and more, was that the heavy bombing campaign
was far less effective at doing what the Army Air Force leaders
postulated they could do at the outset of the war.

The bottom line is that accurate strategic bombing, whether it be
daylight or night, visually or radar guided, did not occur except in a
few very isolated cases, during WWII.

That did not stop the AAF not only from claiming that they exclusively
targeted factories and war related industries only, not city centers,
even though that was patently false. They also claimed that strategic
bombing effectively shortened the war. This despite the fact that
Germany's wartime military production ramped up throughout the war and
actually peaked in late 1944 at the absolute height of daylight and
nightime bombing.

The leaders of the Air Force believed in the fallacy of strategic
bombing throughout the 50's and 60's and a case I think could be made
that they continue to overbelieve in the effectiveness of bombing even
today.

Corky Scott

PS, the Germans had no need for something as complicated as the Norden
bombsight because they did not bomb from great heights nor did they
posses a heavy bomber. Their bombers were for the most part, medium
battlefield support aircraft and dive bombers.