"M. H. Greaves" wrote:

Thats interesting; you'd have thought that every bomber would need a Norden,
because what if by PURE chance the four lead bombers were shot down!?,
another bomber would have to take the lead and surely each bomber had a
responsibility to make sure the bombs were "in the pickle barrel"!? and not
hit any civilian targets such as shools, hospitals and the likes.

By early 1943, the 8th AF had gone over to the lead bombardier system,
bombardiers chosen for their accuracy who were (often) assigned to study certain
specific targets in advance. The biggest difficulty in accurate high altitude
bombing was in seeing and identifying the target. The 8th decided that bombing
by group (for smaller targets, by squadron) was the way to go, as it provided
better target coverage and best compensated for the inevitable errors, and they
found that four bombardiers with bombsights, widely spaced within the formation,
provided adequate redundancy. Offhand, I don't know of any missions where
everyone with a bombsight was shot down, but if it ever happened, most likely
that group would stick with another group in its wing and drop on their bombs (3
groups normally flew together in a combat wing until reaching the I.P. at which
point the groups spaced themselves into trail to bomb). There might also be a
pathfinder a/c, equipped with H2X, G-H, Micro-H, etc. in addition to the visual
bombardier lead a/c. After the first few groups had bombed, the target was
generally so covered by smoke that the target couldn't be seen in any case, so
we tried to pick multiple aim points (or multiple targets) to spread the bombs
around, and also to take advantage of the (predicted) winds so that the aim
points would be visibile. It often didn't work out that way.


The R.A.F. did what was called area bombing, everything was hit in the
general vicinity; whereas the U.S.A.A.F., did daylight precision bombing,
aimed at hitting THE target and thats all.
How could this be done without a bombsight?

The lead a/c had the bombsights, everyone else just toggled when they saw the
leader's bombs (or their smoke markers).

Guy