The idea was that you could win wars by destroying your enemy's means of making war. You didn't have to kill them, just deny them the means to kill you. If you could blow up the factories where they produced their weapons, if you could choke off their supply lines, then their war machine would grind to a stop.
The Army Air Force believed this; between the two world wars there was a period of extreme optimism, thanks in large part to a device invented by Dutch-born Swiss-educated engineer Carl Norden. Air Corps bombardiers believed they had a secret weapon, a precision bombsight that would allow them to "drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet."
This was hyperbole, but the Norden bombsight did represent a huge leap forward from the rudimentary sort of airstrikes that took place in World War I. In the early days of the war, pilots dropped small bombs by hand.
Later, bomb racks were attached to the bottoms of fuselages but there was no way to aim. Releasing a bomb was like pitching a baseball from a moving car, only the airplane was moving 300 feet per second. Maybe you'd get better with some experience, but it was art, not science.
Or you could dive at your target, simplifying the equation by pointing your plane almost straight down at it. If you were a pilot willing to play chicken with the ground, to put your plane in a 70-degree dive toward the target, release your bombs at low altitude and then pull back up hard, risking blacking out as the blood rushed from your head, well, it was a lot more accurate.
It could be done. The Luftwaffe did it; the U.S. Navy did it in the Pacific theater. Japanese kamikazes essentially did it. But Norden thought he had a better way.
He was educated at Federal Polytech in Zurich, where one of his classmates was Nikolai Lenin. He came to the United States in 1904 to work for Sperry Gyroscope Co., the forerunner of the Sperry Corporation (which later became part of Unisys). But Norden clashed with his boss Elmer Sperry, and set up his own engineering shop on Lafayette Street in New York City's lower Manhattan.
Those who worked with him described Norden as hubristic, domineering and vain, a relentless perfectionist who was difficult if not impossible to please. But he was also highly ethical, and a committed Christian who insisted he was a designer rather than an inventor because "only God could create." His name was nowhere on the patent application for the bombsight.
Norden began working on the device after World War I because he believed it would save lives and shorten wars. If warplanes could accurately hit military targets from high (safe) altitudes, a lot of collateral damage could be prevented. Civilian lives and homes could be spared. Norden's motivation for "designing" the bombsight was to reduce human suffering.
It took him about 20 years to get something workable, and even then it was unwieldy. Some called it the "single most complicated mechanical device ever manufactured." It was even more complicated than necessary because, like Thomas Edison, Norden didn't trust alternating current and preferred to use mechanical systems instead of electronic ones.
So what he came up with was an analog computer that uses physical phenomena governed by equations identical to the real-world problems for which he wanted to calculate solutions. Theoretically, with the Norden bombsight, all a bombardier had to do was lock the crosshairs on the target and let the machine do the rest. It would calculate and adjust for air density, wind drift, the bombers' airspeed and groundspeed.
The U.S. military was incredibly enthusiastic about the bombsight; it would spend about $1.5 billion (in 1940 dollars) on its development. That's half of what was spent on the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bomb.
Some thought the Norden bombsight was going to make the difference in the war that the U.S. was certain to soon join; it dictated U.S. policy in the first years of the war. While the British engaged in nighttime carpet bombing, the U.S. advocated daylight precision bombing, a tactic made possible by the Norden bombsight.
It took months to train bombardiers to use it. They were sworn to secrecy, and each of the bombsights was equipped with an incendiary device that would destroy it in the event of a crash. It was not to fall into the hands of the enemy at any cost. It was going to be the key to Allied victory.
And it worked. In theory.
But the problem was the bombardier had to see his target to use the bombsight. Which meant it was no good at night. Which meant bombers had to stay beneath the clouds, considerably below the four or five miles up they hoped to be flying. Which meant smoke was a good defense against it.
And even in ideal conditions, bombardiers could still mess things up.
It didn't take long for the U.S. military to give up the dream of precision daylight bombing. We bombed working-class neighborhoods in Japanese cities that had no particular strategic value simply because we knew we could burn them down with our napalm bombs. Another way to shorten the duration of a war is to demoralize a population.
The only way to really win a war is not to fight it. But you have to fight sometimes, because there are belligerent forces in the world that threaten our way of life, those creature comforts to which we have become accustomed.
Sometimes we can find a high-minded rationale to explain our adventures, sometimes it is enough to demonize our enemies. But we fight wars because we perceive an advantage in fighting them, because old people believe something might be gained by the battlefield sacrifice of younger people.
Even with our better computers, we can't factor it all.
We can wiggle a joystick and blow up a car halfway around the world, but we can't say for sure whether that action makes us safer. Once the flak starts flying, the variables multiply. Foreign policy gets enacted by scared 18-year-olds. We can talk all we want about how righteous and brave we are and how the world might look to us for its example, but the world sees us and will make its judgment.
What is well-intended can be folly; a thing can be both miracle and disaster.
The Norden bombsight was not a failure; it just wasn't the magic solution it was hyped as being. The U.S. military continued to use it up through the Vietnam War. When they dropped the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were sighted in by Norden bombsights.
No one told the good Christian Carl Norden that, though. It would have upset him.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
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