Norden Bombsight - Background

Background

The Norden was initially developed by the Navy in order to provide a system capable of bombing ships from outside the range of their defensive guns, and the Army took up the design for similar missions. Hitting small targets of this sort demanded high accuracy, and the Norden company joked that they could hit a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet. In operations, the Norden proved to be far less accurate than in testing, and early attacks by the US Navy and USAAF in the Pacific failed to hit their targets. The USAAF continued using the Norden for point attacks during the initial operations over Germany in 1943, but post-raid reconnaissance demonstrated the bombers were putting only 24% of their bombs to within 1,000 yards of their targets. This was not due specifically to problems in the Norden, but due largely to its accuracy requiring proper setup and conditions that rarely held in practice.

Given this poor performance, the USAAF placed its most experienced and accurate bombardiers aboard each formation's lead bombers (primary and deputy lead) and had the remaining airplanes open their bomb bays and drop their bombs when the leader did. This practice, which greatly increased circular-error accuracy, saw the replacement later in the war of many combat crews' commissioned-officer bombardier with a technical-sergeant "toggleer."

The supposed great secrecy of the device was also widely promoted, to some degree to invent a mythology to boost its reputation. In fact, the Norden received reduced classification long before the war, was declassified in 1942, widely written about in the press in 1943, and shown publicly in 1944. The basic concepts were well known even earlier, and other air forces had been working on similar designs around the same time, notably the RAF's Automatic Bomb Sight. It was also known that Herman Lang, a German spy working at the factory, leaked the design to the Abwehr in 1938. The Carl Zeiss Lotfernrohr 7, widely deployed by the Luftwaffe, was an advanced mechanical system technically similar to the original Norden bombsight.

The Norden's reputation was further enhanced after the war, when it was repeatedly pressed into service over the following decades. Bombing had moved to nuclear weapons, where a 3,000 foot CEP was considered good enough, and the development of precision bombsights had largely been ignored. Invariably, when tactical bombing was required in the non-nuclear conflicts that followed, the Norden was returned to service, time and time again. The last combat use of the Norden was in the US Navy's VO-67 squadron, which used them to drop sensors onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail as late as 1967. The Norden remains one of the best known bombsights of all time.