In article pm56d059pv74ax.com, wrote:

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

But it was an exquisite piece of machine work. The gyroscopes were
things of beauty, that could run for half an hour after the power
was disconnected.

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.

They did what they could to target factories, but the technology to
do this accurately just wasn't there. American bombing was certainly
"precision bombing" compared to the British, nighttime bombing that
aimed for easily located targets like large cities.

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.

When the man who jumped naked into a cactus patch was asked why he would
do such a thing, he answered, "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
It wasn't until after WWII, when the bomb damage could be accurately
assessed, that the shortcomings of bombing became apparent. In the
fifties, strategic bombing meant nuking whole cities, and the horror of
that just might have kept the Cold War cold, so it may have been quite
successful indeed. By the sixties, "smart bombs" were coming into
existence, and nowadays armies can hit individual buildings from the other
side of the world, so it's not anywhere near the same as it was in
the forties.