
Norden bombsight - apsec112
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight
======
Wildgoose
I highly recommend reading "Why the Allies Won" by Dr Richard Overy.

Everybody just assumes that the Allies were bound to win, but if you look at
the early period you can see that it was far from inevitable. Overy does a
fantastic job of analysing WHY.

One of the issues he addresses is our bombing campaign which so many people
nowadays love to denigrate. It was actually crucial to our winning.

The Nazis in charge had every reason to downplay the figures of just what it
was costing, but even they admitted to something like 40% of industrial
production lost or diverted to air defence. So much air defence required
against bombers that they lacked air superiority in crucial battles like
Kursk. So much ammunition converted to anti-aircraft production that they
lacked supplies on the front line and even lacked fertiliser for producing
food.

At the end of the day you can only fight if you have the weapons and
ammunition to do it with, so it becomes a battle between respective economies.
On the Axis side only Germany really ramped up production. Russia did an
outstanding job, with her people caught between a vicious onslaught by
National Socialist who called them sub-humans and their own International
Socialist rulers who barely treated them much better.

And nobody could believe what the US economy proved capable of - the most
accurate estimates were made by the British but even these were way off.

It might sound dry but it doesn't read that way - highly recommended.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _it becomes a battle between respective economies_

I tend to think of WW2 as the Civilization video game. If you have more
"production" than the other players, it's pretty easy to squash them like
bugs.

> _Russia did an outstanding job_

There's an argument to make there, that if Russia was a democracy, it would
have crumbled. It was Stalin's iron fist that moved resources where he needed
them that reshaped the whole country into a lean mean fighting machine - at
the cost of tremendous suffering, of course.

~~~
pizzetta
Yes, but it was also his "fist" which through a paranoid mind killed off much
of his military brain trust --which left him with amateurish (unseasoned)
upper ranks to run the military when war actually came.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
That's also true.

------
guiomie
In the 'See also' section: "Mary Babnik Brown, whose hair was used for the
bombsight crosshairs."

The wikipedia articles on Mary Babnik Brown says: "In 1944 Brown was the first
woman to have her hair used for military aircraft bombsights.[6] She saw an
advertisement in a Pueblo newspaper in 1943 that said the government was
looking for hair from women for the war effort, although no details were given
as to how it would be used. The ad said only that they wanted blonde hair that
was at least 22 inches long (56 cm), and which had not been treated with
chemicals or hot irons. The women's hair collection for use as bombsight
crosshairs was a clandestine operation even though they found the hair through
a newspaper advertisement."

I wonder if only her hair was used? Or other peoples hair was used too.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Babnik_Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Babnik_Brown)

~~~
vwcx
This is the coolest historical fact I've learned in the last 365 days. Thank
you.

~~~
verylittlemeat
Apparently not the entire truth:

>There have been some claims and counter-claims regarding what the human hair
was used for. While its use in meteorological instruments such as radiosonde
hygrometers is acknowledged, there are disputed claims regarding human hair
use in bombsight crosshairs, particularly the Norden bombsight. While
anecdotal accounts of human hair in bombsights exist, verifiable accounts only
indicate it was used in precision weather instruments. Surviving Norden
bombsights reveal that the cross hairs were etched in glass by diamond
cutters.

[http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hair-today-
gone-t...](http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hair-today-gone-
tomorrow-all-for-the-war-effort/)

------
kyledehovitz
Any other aviation nerds will appreciate the slaved guns on the B29.

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18343/the-...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18343/the-
cannons-on-the-b-29-bomber-were-a-mid-century-engineering-masterpiece/)

------
Animats
Here's a Norden bombsight training film.[1] This one shows how difficult it
was to operate. The human interface was primitive. There are indicators you
have to monitor but can't see while looking through the eyepiece. The
bombardier keeps lifting their head to read indicators, then looks back in the
eyepiece. It's surprising that they didn't make those readouts visible in the
eyepiece view.

This thing had to be operated while in an aircraft, while being shot at. The
bomber had to fly straight and level during the bomb run. Not fun.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeL-
TitKuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeL-TitKuo)

------
dingaling
Last users of the Norden bombsight were probably US Navy Squadron VO-67, for
interdiction on the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War. They found
suitable equipment in storage but had to track-down retired technicians to
make it work.

[http://www.tailsthroughtime.com/2015/12/navy-observation-
squ...](http://www.tailsthroughtime.com/2015/12/navy-observation-squadron-
sixty-seven.html)

 _" A training film on the use of the Norden was found at the Smithsonian
Institution and was sent to VO-67."_

------
rdiddly
It's too bad there's no Wikipedia article for Norden Systems. The company kept
on doing business for another 65 years after the war, first as part of United
Technologies in Connecticut and then Northrop Grumman, who appear to have
closed it down in 2012.

[http://articles.courant.com/2012-06-08/business/hc-norden-
sy...](http://articles.courant.com/2012-06-08/business/hc-norden-systems-
northrop-20120608_1_northrop-grumman-historic-plant-norden-systems)

------
Florin_Andrei
If you're an amateur astronomer and you use a Telrad finder, that's a distant
descendant (much simplified) of the Norden sight.

Sure there are better solutions nowadays, including finders that are actually
mini-telescopes, but the low-tech Telrad is still popular for its air of
nostalgia.

------
adpirz
Relevant Malcolm Gladwell:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Relevant Gladwell criticism: [http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-
hemmen/forensic-en...](http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-
hemmen/forensic-engineers-short-course-flawed-analysis-or-norden-bombsight-
insight)

------
cpwright
I visited BB-62 New Jersey this weekend, and they have an analog
electromechanical rangekeeper computer. It's really cool to see the gears and
shafts turn, as it continually updates its output (bearing, azimuth) in
response to 14 input variables. It accounts for the target bearing, target
speed, own speed, own bearing, even the latitude is an input to account for
the Coriolis effect.

------
smacktoward
The Norden bombsight is a fascinating example of the way the promise of
technology can run far ahead of the reality.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military, when it entered World
War 2, considered the Norden a war-winning weapon. The entire strategic
bombing doctrine of the Army Air Forces was designed around it, emphasizing
daylight raids on "pinpoint" targets to best capitalize on the Norden's
accuracy.

The RAF advised against such a strategy, having tried the same type of raids
themselves before American entry into the war; they found it impossible under
combat conditions to achieve the degree of accuracy needed to knock such
targets out. The British had switched to the doctrine of night area bombing,
abandoning accuracy altogether to reduce their own casualties, and urged the
Americans to do the same. But the AAF was confident that they would succeed
where the British had failed, because American bombers were equipped with the
Norden bombsight.

Which turned out to not make any difference whatsoever; in the stress of
combat, buffeted by wind and flak and fighter attack, the bombardiers of the
AAF ended up having just as hard a time hitting the target as the RAF's had.
The Norden bombsight was a dud. And because it had led the AAF to organize its
raids during the day, when its bombers were easy for German fighter pilots to
find and shoot down, casualties in the bomber force during 1942 and 1943 were
shockingly high; in one raid alone, the October 14, 1943 attack on the ball-
bearing plants at Schweinfurt (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt)),
26% of the attacking bombers were shot down. Even worse, the casualties were
taken to no practical purpose; the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
([http://anesi.com/ussbs02.htm](http://anesi.com/ussbs02.htm)), a post-war
review of the efficacy of the war's bombing campaigns, found that "there is no
evidence that the attacks on the ball-bearing industry had any measurable
effect on essential war production."

In the end the AAF's daylight raids did help win the war, but not in any way
where the Norden bombsight contributed. As fighters were developed with the
range to accompany the bombers all the way to the target, the AAF changed to a
strategy of essentially using the bombers as bait, luring Luftwaffe fighters
into the air where the AAF's could engage and destroy them. Here America's
greater fighter production and better pilot training gave them the edge, with
the result that by the time D-Day arrived in June 1944 the Allies had won
uncontested command of the air, a dominant position they would never give up.
But when the bombers were just bait, the accuracy of their bombing didn't
matter at all; they could have gone up with any old bombsight, or no bombsight
at all. Which is a sad verdict on the legendary Norden, which just three years
before had been thought able to win the war all by itself.

~~~
DanBC
A good book about the British Bomber Command is _Bomber Command_ by Max
Hastings.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-
Classic...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Command-Pan-Military-
Classics/dp/0330513613/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-
Classi...](https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-
Classics/dp/0760345201/)

The book talks about the change in tactics. At the beginning of the war
targeting civilian areas was clearly a war crime; by the end of the war we had
things like Dresden.

> And because it had led the AAF to organize its raids during the day, when
> its bombers were easy for German fighter pilots to find and shoot down,
> casualties in the bomber force during 1942 and 1943 were shockingly high; in
> one raid alone, the October 14, 1943 attack on the ball-bearing plants at
> Schweinfurt (see
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Raid_on_Schweinfurt)),
> 26% of the attacking bombers were shot down.

Most people don't understand just how high the casuality rates were. The RAF
bomber command lost about 55,000 men of 125,000 total.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Most people don't understand just how high the casuality rates were._

Indeed. There is actually an old board game that teaches this lesson more
effectively than any history book I've ever come across: Avalon Hill's _B-17:
Queen of the Skies_ ([https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1032/b-17-queen-
skies](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1032/b-17-queen-skies)), first
published in 1981.

It's a deceptively simple game: you play as the crew of a single B-17, and
follow them over Western Europe in 1942-43. The goal is to make it through 25
missions, the number real-life bomber crews were expected to carry out before
being rotated back to the States for non-combat duty.

What makes it so effective is that, after a few games, it quickly becomes
obvious that keeping the entire crew alive through 25 missions more or less
requires a miracle. A _really_ lucky player will be able to keep the bomber
itself going to the end, taking occasional casualties and rotating in new
faces to fill their seats, with the result that at the end you look over the
crew roster and find half the people you started out with are gone. And that's
the _lucky_ player! The less fortunate hit one of the many, many catastrophic
failure modes that can bring the entire bomber down in flames long before
mission 25 is anywhere near in sight.

In real life it was so rare for a crew to make it through 25 missions that
when one finally did -- the crew of the _Memphis Belle_
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Belle_%28aircraft%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Belle_%28aircraft%29)),
who flew their last mission in May 1943 -- they instantly became national
celebrities. So the grim odds the game lays out are depressingly accurate.

(Given its age, it's hard to find pristine copies of _B-17: Queen of the
Skies_ today, but there are modern remakes like _Target for Today_
([https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/160903/target-
today](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/160903/target-today)) that are more
accessible. Or, if you're willing to wait a little while and live with a used
copy of the original game, it's not too hard to get one via eBay. I recommend
it if you're interested in the subject; it's a fast play, and since it's a
solitaire game it doesn't require assembling a group to play.)

~~~
woodandsteel
On casualty rates, about 50 million died in the war, which by my calculations
is an average of 35,000 a week for the whole five years.

------
VLM
Something that never fails to amaze me about the Norden is the CEP (which is a
radius, I know...) is numerically about equal to the length of my
grandfather's B-24, which is pretty impressive performance for a box of gears
a couple miles up in the air.

AFAIK no one has ever built a Norden or a Norden inspired sight out of lego or
meccano, which would be interesting to see. I'm not interested in something
visually similar as much as I'm interested in something that operates
identically.

