Most hated Axis interceptor for American bomber crews

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I think that was because they couldn't duplicate certain parts, they did not have all the blueprints needed.
Glider said:
With hindsight I am not surprised about this as claims by many US manufacturers of all types of aviation material tended to be lacking in accuracy and high in anticipation.
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I'm sure North American's marketing department were guilty of that when the P-51 was created...
 
FLYBOYJ said:
I'm sure North American's marketing department were guilty of that when the P-51 was created...
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The Mustang performed as it was supposed to being better than the P40 , I believe that P51 was assigned to Merlin engined variants of the Mustang in use by the US military.

If the P40 performed as some of its advertising blurb suggested the the LW would have surrendered in 1940.
 
Glider said:
...With hindsight I am not surprised about this as claims by many US manufacturers of all types of aviation material tended to be lacking in accuracy and high in anticipation.
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What aircraft company didn't announce optimistic performance figures?

The U.S. manufacturers weren't the only ones...there's plenty of examples from every nation that produced an aircraft and tried to sell it to their government (or foreign governments too, for that matter)

I cannot think of any company that boasted "hey, our aircraft is a pile of crap and cannot fight it's way out of a wet paper bag!"
 

The Germans were at that time one of the worlds most advanced manufacturing nations, they were capable of precision work. There is little doubt in my mind that they had the ability to both copy and replicate the manufacture of the Norden as well as come up with their own version according to their own independent design.

The big advantage of 'espionage' on the Norden was not leaning how it worked (that is relatively easy) nor is even learning how it was designed (the precision manufacture is very hard and one doesn't learn much from blue prints or stolen copies but the Germans were one of the few nations that had this level of ability). The advantage is simply learning what the Norden did and that the Americans had done it. That would be enough to inspire them to do the same. Knowing what the Norden was capable of is also helpful in understanding likely USAAF strategies and tactics. The designer of the Lotfe 7 even says he never saw a Norden till 1942 so its likely the Germans were heading in this direction anyway. There were whole departments in the armed services and defence ministries purely dedicated to developing gyroscopes and 'fire control'. The Germans set up a company to develop gyroscope technology called "Kresielgeraet" in the early 30s and they were extremely influential developing stabilisers for the German Navy, V2 guidance systems and essentially boot strapping the Soviet industry at the time of Nazi communist Collaboration.

After 1941 when the Germans started deploying the Loftfe 7 any secrecy on the Norden was probably completely wasted maybe only carried out as standard operation procedure. You maintain secrecy from the point of view of general discipline and policy, to create a culture of security. There may be greater secrets to maintain and banging on about the Norden creates a smoke screen. By 1942 even the Soviets had a wind corrected bomb sight in service.

For instance if the USA lost a F-14 Tomcat to the Ayotollah Khomeni or the then USSR in the 1970s/80s inspecting the Titanium wing box that made this aircraft possible doesn't matter at all unless you actually have someone able to fabricate that structure.

What is most interesting about the Norden, the Ford Range Keeper, the Mk 54 fire control system on US ships 5" turrets, the M7 director on AAA is the US was investing in fire control technology and it was ready and widely deployed by the time war broke out. Most of it I attribute to the US Navy. For instance it was the Navy that instigated the Norden. It failed only occasionally (eg US torpedos). The Germans and Japanese both turned out to have better optical technology but optical technology was not as decisive as radar linked into the fire control.

It's worth looking at how these computing bombsite came about.

Immagine the problem of a battle ship trying to hit another battleship 30km away. Its the same problems for AAA, torpedos etc.

The target ship is tracked optically in bearing and the range using a coincidence or stereoscopic range finder. The coordinates are now available as polar coordinates represented as shaft turns and are converted to Cartesian via trigonometric cams.

Mechanical computation is done as follows: addition and subtraction via differentials (as in a car) trigonometry and ballistics data via cams, multiplication/division via log/antilog cams and subtraction/addition.

Once in Cartesian coordinates tacho generators or mechanical subtraction measures the speed of the target. This data is then used to set up another computing element that can 'synthesise' the future position of the target given any time. Another section of the computer uses ballistics cams to estimate the flight time of the projectile for a given range. An estimate is made of where the projectile and target meet and if they don't the differences is fed through a couple of times until a solution was reached.

Another element was keeping track of the ship a separate system tracks the direction, speed and position of the ship. (One reason the Bismarck gunnery degraded is that with its rudder jammed the tracking system which relied on rudder position data didn't work)

The problem was the same for firing a big naval guns, firing a AAA gun with a burst time, firing a torpedo and also dropping a bomb via the Nordern, Lotfe 7 or SABS II.

You tracked the target to establish your relative movement against his.

I would assume that neither of these sights required 'tracking', it was optional. The wind drift could be entered manually in which case the long run up to target that the Norden was notorious for wouldn't be required.
 
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If I could recommend one book to read about the raids on Dresden it would be Taylor's, though he is heavily influenced by Bergander. Bergander gives probably the most balanced German view of what happened, and he was there.

"Even in war, the ends must relate to the means. Here, the means seemed wildly out of proportion to the ends. I will not say that Dresden should not have been bombed - it was a rail centre, and thus an important target. I will not say Dresden was an exceptional case as compared to other German cities. But I do not understand why it had to be done on such a huge scale. The only answer, I suppose, is that the allied policy of bombing had developed a dynamic of its own."

He is entirely correct. In fact the allied bomber commanders were largely operating independently of their higher commands/SHAEF.

The attitude of the allied commanders must be remembered. Chester Hansen (an aide to Bradley) recalled a conversation among America's top soldiers in which Bradley suggested

"...that it would be good to fight the Germans all the way to Berlin, to teach them the lesson of death or destruction they have carried to the world. Everyone is in hearty assent. I suggested to Bull [G-3 at SHAEF] that we bomb each town in our path, but 'Pinky' protested that this was not our way of waging war. Patton promptly declared that if it was necessary to have military objectives to bomb, he would declare every switchboard in every town a military objective. The need for harsh treatment of Germany is now more apparent than ever."

These views were here expressed by American commanders, but they would have been absolutely shared by their British counterparts. Operation Clarion, a little remembered foot note to the aerial campaign launched in February 1945, would show how far the allies would go.

When these operations were carried out Nazi Germany and its people were still doing all they could to kill British and American people, together with millions of captive people, with all the means at their disposal. Max Hastings has written.

"Some Germans today brand the bombing of their cities a war crime. This seems an incautious use of words. It is possible to deplore Harris' excesses without accepting that they should be judged in such emotive language. For all its follies and bloody misjudgements, the strategic air offensive was a military operation designed to hasten the collapse of Germany's ability to make war. It stopped as soon as Hitler's people ceased to fight. Most of Germany's massacres, by contrast, were carried out against defenceless people who possessed not the slightest power to injure Hitler's empire. They were murdered for ideological reasons, devoid of military purpose."

He highlights an important distinction.

Steve

Edit: Clarion officially targeted German transport infrastructure, but it hit people who had never been bombed or strafed before. Many thousands of German civilians were killed. Even some involved in the planning, who had no sympathy for the Germans, had reservations. General Eaker feared that the operation, which was explicitly terroristic and designed to demonstrate the ability of the allies to strike at will in every corner of the Reich would demonstrate to the Germans that
"we are the barbarians they say we are, for it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large scale assault on civilians, as, in fact, it of course will be."
General Arnold wrote a pencil note on a copy of the proposal for Clarion
"This is the same old baby killing plan of the get rich quick psychological boys, dressed up in a new kimono."
The operation went ahead anyway.
 
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FLYBOYJ said:
I think that was because they couldn't duplicate certain parts, they did not have all the blueprints needed.
I'm sure North American's marketing department were guilty of that when the P-51 was created...
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They did have all the blueprints as he wasn't captured until much later in the war. As for my comment re the marketing, the B17C was supposed to be operational in the USAAF but when the RAF tried them there were a considerable number of basic problems and the P39 was a similar story.

As for the claimed accuracy of the Norden, if anyone ever did hit a pickle barrel from whatever height was claimed I will eat my hat.
 
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Glider said:
They did have all the blueprints as he wasn't captured until much later in the war.
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I read somewhere that the Germans did not have access to the manufacture of certain components, therefore their "working model' never functioned as well as a regular production model.
Glider said:
As for my comment re the marketing, the B17C was supposed to be operational in the USAAF but when the RAF tried them there were a considerable number of basic problems and the P39 was a similar story.
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For the B-17C, I think for what planners (and marketing folks) "thought" what high altitude air war would be, they believed the B-17C was "combat ready." As far as the P-39? Agree.
Glider said:
As for the claimed accuracy of the Norden, if anyone ever did hit a pickle barrel from whatever height was claimed I will eat my hat.
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Maybe a very large swimming pool. https://video.search.yahoo.com/vide...8ntk8t&age=1407021508&fr2=p:s,v:v&fr=sfp&tt=b
 
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If you drop enough bombs then statistically one of them will hit that pickle barrel. It's why the huge strategic bombing forces were developed. Now a couple of bombers (along with all the other aircraft to protect them and supress defences) can be sent with guided munitions and be sure of hitting that power station/warehouse/factory/Chinese embassy/civil air raid shelter/armoured vehicle/sniper/'insurgent' on a motor cycle etc. Most collateral damage is due to intelligence and targeting failures rather than the inaccuracy of the ordnance. Of course an iron bomb today is just as inaccurate as an iron bomb seventy years ago; navigation has improved.
Cheers
Steve
 
gjs238 said:
Wonder if the bombing results/effectiveness actually differed between the two methods.
It would seem that the bombs from the planes rearmost in the group would fall short?
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The results certainly did differ. I've been looking into this because the British seem to have believed that the American system (bombing on the cue of the leader) gave a less concentrated pattern. American research contradicts this and shows why the USAAFs adopted the system.
Below is the most pertinent page from the October 1943 report of the 8th AF's Operational Research Section.



It was on this data that the decision to use a system of bombing on a lead ship was taken, and this became the standard practice for US Air Forces operating in the ETO, when attacking in formation. The reason for the substantial increase in accuracy were less clear, but the ORS took an educated guess at it anyway.



It is worth pointing out that even in the best case, getting about 1 in 4 bombs within 1000' of the aiming point, is not exactly dropping into a pickle barrel. Cases where no bombs fell within 1000' are discarded from this study

Cheers

Steve
 
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