In an interesting coincidence, I was just reading Kurt Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death. He fought in WW II and was taken as a POW to Dresden where he was promptly firebombed. He asks a close friend of his, Bernard O'Hare, what he learned (from the war). O'Hare (who eventually became a DA) replied "I will never again believe my Government."
> The future DA O'Hare replied, "I will never again believe my Government." This had to do with our Government's tall tales of delicate surgery performed by bombers equipped with Sperry and Norden bombsights. These instruments were so precise, we had been told, that a bombardier could drop his billets-doux down the chimney of a factory if ordered to. There were solemn charades performed for newsreels in which military policemen with drawn .45 automatics escorted bombardiers carrying bombsights to their planes. That was how desperate the Germans and the Japanese were (so went the message) to learn and make use of the secret of our bombings' diabolical accuracy themselves.
> Such a sop to civilian sensibilities nowadays would seem as unintentionally hilarious as a love scene between Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino
It's true that the supposed accuracy of the Norden bombsight was made much of in propaganda; the Carl L. Norden company itself, for instance, bought a block of time in a 1943 Barnum & Bailey circus performance at Madison Square Garden to show a routine involving a clown using the sight to drop a bomb into a barrel. (Here's Life magazine's article on the performance: https://books.google.com/books?id=EU4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA27&ots=...)
But it wasn't all propaganda; the government really did believe the Norden was critical technology, and required a range of extreme security measures to protect it, including having bombardiers check their bombsights out of their planes and into a secured facility after each mission. But it was all more or less for naught, as the Germans had a man inside the Norden company itself who passed them a range of confidential materials related to the sight's design before being caught in the roundup of the infamous "Duquesne spy ring" in 1941. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring for more on the latter.)
> The future DA O'Hare replied, "I will never again believe my Government." This had to do with our Government's tall tales of delicate surgery performed by bombers equipped with Sperry and Norden bombsights. These instruments were so precise, we had been told, that a bombardier could drop his billets-doux down the chimney of a factory if ordered to. There were solemn charades performed for newsreels in which military policemen with drawn .45 automatics escorted bombardiers carrying bombsights to their planes. That was how desperate the Germans and the Japanese were (so went the message) to learn and make use of the secret of our bombings' diabolical accuracy themselves.
> Such a sop to civilian sensibilities nowadays would seem as unintentionally hilarious as a love scene between Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino