Or any bombsight I guess.
How did it work? A plane cruising at 200+ can’t just get to a target and drop them straight down, momentum and all you know. Did it view ahead?
I think the idea was to download a list of targets from the Symantec website. The bombsight then either destroyed them or offered to “quarantine” those it was unable to destroy.
But perhaps you are interested in the Norden bombsite. It was a great secret of WW II, but it has since been suggested that it was not especially effective and the secrecy was in no small part aimed at to enhancing its reputation with US aircrews. Its stated purpose was to “drop a bomb in a pickle barrel” by allowing for wind and the speed and altitude of the bomber.
My apologies.
Such a gaffe. Of course I meant Norden.
You know, I saw on the History Channel that a German Spy actually got a hold of the schematics for the bombsight and the Germans took the design and improved upon it- anybody know any other info about this???
IIRC, Cecil once mentioned that the SECOND greatest secret of WWII – presuming that the Manhattan Project was #1 – was the NBS. I remember being quite annoyed that he never explained how the darned thing worked or what made it so special. (Yeah, yeah, I know – “It’s a secret.” [rolly eyes here])
That column might be in the archives.
Reeder
The bomb sight did indeed look ahead, they all do. To get accurate range to the ground, the operator had to focus the sight, on the ground below. I think this process is called “stadia optics” or something really technical, but to get the slant range, you had to focus the sight on the ground below. Once the ground was in focus, then the optics, one for the right eye, and one for the left eye, formed an isosolese (sp) triangle, from which all kinds of information could be inferred. The sight was aligned with the center-line of the aircraft, and things like drift could be inferred by the bombadier. This allowed windspeed and other variables to be inferred. Speed over the ground was known by the pilot, but could be accurately estimated by the bombadier if need be. The same is true for altitude.
The gizmo was and still is very sophisticated. It was a mechanical device as computers were not developed for such purposes. A mechanical engineer had to design the thing, and I doubt a computer programmer could figure out how one works, without becoming an engineer first.
The crosshairs of the sight were made out of spider-webs, because any man-made fiber of the time was too thick at such magnifications to be useable.
The princilples for its operation are just triangulation, and it was a good device that allowed bombadiers to do thier jobs quickly. Alas, the device functioned perfectly well in controlled conditions, it probably never dropped a bomb in a pickle barrel, but I am sure it blew the pickle barrel up trying. In combat, with flak bursts, and fighter planes trying to kill anyone in the plane, the bombadiers were either very lucky or very skilled or both, to get the bomb close to its targets. Hence they still had to drop alot of bombs to destroy one target.
Does this help any?
IIRC, the bombardier also took over control of the plane in the final parts of the bombing run. This means at the very end, the bombardier used what he saw in the bombsight to line up for the final bombing run. This of course made the plane even more susceptible to flak and fighters because it would be flying in a straight line for quite a while until the pilot took over again. Until the RAF and Army Air Force started more night bombing alot of bombers were lost to flak during the finale parts of a bombing run on some of the heavily defended targets like Ploesti (oil fields), Karlsruhe (ball-bearing factories), etc.
You can see one in the Air and Space museum in Washington DC.
This is difficult.
What about the Enigma code being cracked?
Or the deception operation prior to Operation Overlord?
The “greatest secret” catagory is difficult to deal with.
Of course, I’m not suggesting the All-Wise Unca Cecil Adams was wrong.
Thanks Ficer67. That explains it well.
Actually, according to what I’ve read, the Norden bombsight itself flew the plane during the final approach to the target, once it had been fixed on the target by the bombardier.
It was linked up to the crude auto-pilots of the day. So yes, to a large degree, the bombardier was controlling the aircraft for the final part of the run. The massive unwieldy formations had more to do with the flack and fighter damage than the final straight flight of the bombing run.
You want a mechanical computer, go look at the fire control computers for the big guns on a battleship. WOW !!! Those are awesome…
Our pal David Simmons had a number of interesing things to say about the Norden and 9th AF bombing techniques in this thread.
In that thread I described the Norden as a fine-tuneable autopilot. The controls were exactly like those you would find on a metal lathe.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned about it when a (8th AF) veteran explained to me how it worked was that there was a very specific procedure for disabling the device, which was supposed to be performed any time there was a danger of the device falling into enemy hands–including (especially!) when the plane was going down over enemy territory. You were supposed to take your service .45, place it against the section where the gyroscopes were, and put a round into it. The gyroscopes were traveling at such high speed that when you shot it they would (in theory) disintegrate inside the device, destroying just about everything.
I remember asking the pilot I was with if that was a dangerous procedure, with little pieces of 'scope flying around at hundreds of miles an hour. He just chuckled and said something to the effect that if you had to do it, flying parts were the least of your worries.
According to some sources, all the secrecy surrounding the Norden was moot. The plans for the device appear to have been stolen by the Germans in 1937, two years before the outbreak of WWII.
FWIW, you get a rather incredible view through the NBS. I took a flight on a B-17 last year (And you should too; Expensive, but help preserve a bit of history! www.b17.org).
We did a run on the Pontiac Silverdome (Well, flew over it). It was a big target, of course, and the co-pilot (A WW2 vet) said that under such ideal conditions (Clear, low wind, lower altitude), they would have used a far more simple optical bomb sight. (Mounted as a backup up in the nose).
Hmm, I would think that the Ultra/Enigma code breakage was #1. Manhattan Project might be #2. Although the germans were working on one of their own. Maybe the secret was how far along our project was. Oh, the production of the german V-2 rockets might be a big one too.
Lots and lots of B-17’s were shot down over germany. I imagine the Germans recovered plenty of of the bombsights.
Some of the radar and radar countermeasure were based on recovered technology as well.
has a nicely preserved Norden bombsight on display. It WAS very accurate-but only if:
-good visibility of the target was available
-the plane wasn’t jinking and weaving to avold fighters and flak
-the airspeed of the bomber was constant over the bomb run.
From what I can gather, the USAAF was convinced of the viability of daylight bombing, even given the horrendous losses suffered (until the advent of long-range escort fighters).
The British had given up on daylight bombing by 1940-they relied on much less accuracy, but gambled on using incendiary bombs to burn down german cities.
Anybody know if the US strategy was correct? Was the ability to target areas worth the losses?
ralph124c , if you ask the men of 8th AF if it was worth it, you might get a different answer than if you asked Eisenhower. The inhabitants of Dresden surely would have preferred some daylight precision bombing attempts on their city.
The Norden bombsight was an amazing innovation, but it suffered the same fate as everything else then: it was WAR! If you have something that the enemy wants, make them want it even more. If every bomber crew believes that the Norden bombsight is the biggest advantage that the Allies have, then in short order the Axis will think the same thing, by virtue of captured POWs. Even if it proves to be disappointing in actual use, why let the enemy know that? Deception is a vital part of warfare, and can save many lives.
As for the day/night bombing debate, walk into any library or Barnes and Noble and you can find many books on the subject. You can argue either point of view validly, and IMHO it comes down to hunches - some are right, some are wrong. But the men behind each tactic thought they were advocating the best way to defeat the enemy. Since we can’t throw the 8th AF back into German skies in 1943, we can only speculate as to what the outcome would have been.
What I am truly amazed by is that this thread has gone this far without anyone acknowledging how we all should know that the Norden bombsight was one of the most critical pieces of the Allied victory: the Heroes of Stalag 13 had to recover/destroy/recreate a Norden bombsight! They did this by fooling/bamboozling/tricking Sgt Schulz as they snuck the homely British/British/British officer out by use of the sexy French/French/French resistor. They did all of this during Jan/Feb/Mar and were almost/nearly/just about caught red-handed. 
In the case of daylight bombing, it was actually bomber formations that made such flight necesary, during the whole trip, rather than the bomb run.
For anyone truly interested in the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign, you can find the US Strategic Bombing Survey on the web. Several hundred pages, covers the details of the campaign.
The general consensus is that some very targetted campaigns worked fairly well, such as the pre-invasion attacks on the French transport network, and to some extent, the oil campaign, but most of the campaign, on Germany’s industrial centers, produced little result.
With today’s accurate, laser-guided weapons, you can hit any target you aim at with great precision. However, in order to make sure it is the right target there is still the need for a ground controller to give the pilot up to date targeting information.
Bombing of communications, such as the destruction of bridges on the Seine to prevent rapid east-west movement, is effective if it is done immediately prior to attacks - like within a day or so. Otherwise the damage is repaired and although there is some inconvenience and slowdown, movement of supplies and troops is still relatively unaffected.
As a personal example of this, my first mission was to the Belgian town of Houffalize on 1 January 1945. The town was a critical road junction in the middle of the bulge in our lines resulting from the German advance. It was the first day that weather permitted us to fly during the Battle of the Bulge. The strike photos showed considerable damage to the roads and bridges by our raid and those of other groups. We were then grounded again for about a week by weather. Our first raid after the weather cleared was to – you guessed it, Houffalize.