6 ms·

Norden bombsight

77 points by apsec112 10y ago

adpirz 10y ago
Relevant Malcolm Gladwell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g
- fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
  Relevant Gladwell criticism: http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-hemmen/forensic-engineers-short-course-flawed-analysis-or-norden-bombsight-insight http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-hemmen/forensic-en...
dingaling 10y ago
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-squadron-sixty-seven.html http://www.tailsthroughtime.com/2015/12/navy-observation-squ... "A training film on the use of the Norden was found at the Smithsonian Institution and was sent to VO-67."
smacktoward 10y ago
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.
- arjie 10y ago
  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
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    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=NweZxvCOCQ&dq=norden%20bombsight%20circus&pg=PA27#v=onepage&q=norden%20bombsight%20circus&f=false 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring for more on the latter.)
- 10y ago
cpwright 10y ago
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.
guiomie 10y ago
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 10y ago
  This is the coolest historical fact I've learned in the last 365 days. Thank you.
  - verylittlemeat 10y ago
    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-tomorrow-all-for-the-war-effort/ http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hair-today-gone-t...
- jat850 10y ago
  This is exactly what I, too, found the most interesting part of the article. Wow. Contributions to the war effort came in any number of unusual forms.
- 40acres 10y ago
Wildgoose 10y ago
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.
- CalChris 10y ago
  Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley talk covers Silicon Valley's role in the bombing campaign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
- qyv 10y ago
  The Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War" has some excellent insight into the WW2 bombing campaign (mostly in the pacific) and the sheer scale of what was done. It is startling to say the least.
- mtreis86 10y ago
  The US Army wrote an entire book on the Logistics of WWII http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-29/CMH_Pub_70-29.pdf http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-29/CMH_Pub_70-... "Many of the logistical problems faced in World War II may never need to be addressed by a future army, but problems of mobilizing, adjudicating competing demands, and fitting strategic ends to material means will inevitably plague future military leaders. They may have better organizations and tools at their disposal, but they can expect that policy guidance will be vague, expectations of field commanders excessive, and complex logistical systems almost impossible to keep in balance in the midst of war's vagaries."
rdiddly 10y ago
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-systems-northrop-20120608_1_northrop-grumman-historic-plant-norden-systems http://articles.courant.com/2012-06-08/business/hc-norden-sy...
kyledehovitz 10y ago
Any other aviation nerds will appreciate the slaved guns on the B29. http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18343/the-cannons-on-the-b-29-bomber-were-a-mid-century-engineering-masterpiece/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18343/the-...
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
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.
VLM 10y ago
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.
Animats 10y ago
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

Norden bombsight

77 points by apsec112 10y ago

adpirz 10y ago

Relevant Malcolm Gladwell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpiZTvlWx2g

fnordfnordfnord 10y ago
Relevant Gladwell criticism: http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-hemmen/forensic-engineers-short-course-flawed-analysis-or-norden-bombsight-insight http://www.martinottaway.com/blog/rik-van-hemmen/forensic-en...

dingaling 10y ago

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-squadron-sixty-seven.html http://www.tailsthroughtime.com/2015/12/navy-observation-squ... "A training film on the use of the Norden was found at the Smithsonian Institution and was sent to VO-67."

smacktoward 10y ago

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.

arjie 10y ago
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
- smacktoward 10y ago
  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=NweZxvCOCQ&dq=norden%20bombsight%20circus&pg=PA27#v=onepage&q=norden%20bombsight%20circus&f=false 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duquesne_Spy_Ring for more on the latter.)
10y ago

cpwright 10y ago

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.

guiomie 10y ago

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 10y ago
This is the coolest historical fact I've learned in the last 365 days. Thank you.
- verylittlemeat 10y ago
  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-tomorrow-all-for-the-war-effort/ http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hair-today-gone-t...
jat850 10y ago
This is exactly what I, too, found the most interesting part of the article. Wow. Contributions to the war effort came in any number of unusual forms.
40acres 10y ago

Wildgoose 10y ago

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.

CalChris 10y ago
Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley talk covers Silicon Valley's role in the bombing campaign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
qyv 10y ago
The Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War" has some excellent insight into the WW2 bombing campaign (mostly in the pacific) and the sheer scale of what was done. It is startling to say the least.
mtreis86 10y ago
The US Army wrote an entire book on the Logistics of WWII http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-29/CMH_Pub_70-29.pdf http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-29/CMH_Pub_70-... "Many of the logistical problems faced in World War II may never need to be addressed by a future army, but problems of mobilizing, adjudicating competing demands, and fitting strategic ends to material means will inevitably plague future military leaders. They may have better organizations and tools at their disposal, but they can expect that policy guidance will be vague, expectations of field commanders excessive, and complex logistical systems almost impossible to keep in balance in the midst of war's vagaries."

rdiddly 10y ago

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

kyledehovitz 10y ago

Any other aviation nerds will appreciate the slaved guns on the B29. http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18343/the-cannons-on-the-b-29-bomber-were-a-mid-century-engineering-masterpiece/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18343/the-...

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

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.

VLM 10y ago

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.

Animats 10y ago

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