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To: ken5050
Recent studies have revealed that senior USAAF commanders knew early on (1943)that daylight precision bombing was very ineffective..only some 5% of bombs dropped hit on or close to the target.

In 1955 I was assigned to what was then the Armament Laboratory at Wright Field. Most of our work was intended to solve the "accuracy" problem. This was before lasers and GPS, of course, so we had to deal with free-fall bombs. That meant correcting for wind drift, and getting velocity, range and azimuth correctly. Eventually we did pretty well. However, the stuff we did then is now obsolete.

To indicate what was possible with what we did then, bombardiers were trained at March Field in California. One of their "practice targets" was the American Can Company factory. They didn't actually drop bombs, of course, but everything was measured, and the point of impact calculated. If you did a good job of manipulating the radar bomb sight, you could hit the factory. The company gave little coin banks, with their logo, to bombardiers who hit (as I recall) the northwest corner of a thousand-foot-long building.

I was sent to take a one-week "familiarization" course there. It included only radar bombing, not any of the celestial navigation, etc., the people getting the full course took.

With only one week's training, I was able to "hit" the required corner of the building. Nearly 60 years later, my coin bank is still sitting on a shelf in my home office.

11 posted on 07/02/2014 5:24:37 PM PDT by JoeFromSidney (Book: Resistance to Tyranny. Buy from Amazon.)
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To: JoeFromSidney
Many thanks for the fascinating, and delightful story. Even more so as it's from a fellow member of the FReeper class of '98. FYI...I found several American Can banks listed here Is yours one of these? I knew that post-war studies by the Air Force revealed how inaccurate the bomb results were. What surprised me, as I mentioned, were the recent revelations that commanders knew early on in the war that they weren't hitting anything most of the time....that the bombing campaign was designed bring the Luftwaffe into combat, where they could be destroyed...by a war of attrition...

FYI..my dad was a C-47 pilot...he dropped Pathfinders on June 5th

14 posted on 07/03/2014 3:33:51 AM PDT by ken5050 ("One useless man is a shame, two are a law firm, three or more are a Congress".. John Adams)
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