My grandfather helped in the creation of these sights. USAAF, was stationed in India/Burma. Very smart man by all accounts. G.w. Southard

German's had a spy in the Norden factory who determined the German bomb sight was more accurate so they didn't bother copying the Norden sight..

My hats off to the men and women who created these marvelous inventions. And to those who operated them. And to everyone involved in creating the training material. So many people involved!

Top Secret information at the time, and the best high level bombing sight. It could get a bomb within a mile or so of the target. Amazing how technology changes so quickly.

@jamesricker3997

3 жыл бұрын

3rd best. The Germans and Japanese both had improved versions. Derived from captured examples or in the case of the Germans copies of the plans.

All my life I've heard about the Norden Bomb Sight. A few years ago I finally got to see one in Idaho. And now we get to see something about how it works. I never believe anyone who tries to say our bombing was a mess. We put too much work into making it as precise as we could.

@davidayarra3129

6 жыл бұрын

Michael Dougfir youre talking about the idaho military museum? A very pristine looking one too.

@jaybyrd3240

3 жыл бұрын

Where in Idaho??? Please. My Great Grandmother made many

@michaeldougfir9807

3 жыл бұрын

@@jaybyrd3240 We were traveling. It's a blur now. I would say in the southwest part of the state. Look up warbird museums. I'm sorry I can't do better.

@jaybyrd3240

3 жыл бұрын

@@michaeldougfir9807 Thank you! I will try to find it!

The Sperry was a far superior bombsight but backroom deals secured the contract for Norden even though that bombsite NEVER worked as well as it's reputation and secrecy implied and numerous U.S. servicemen were needlessly killed attempting daytime precision bombing runs because that famous Norden bombsite never delivered the hits it promised. LeMay switched over to mass carpet bombing towards the war's end just to decrease the amount of bombs wasted missing the target. There's other YT videos on this.

wow is that ever complicated!

There's something to be said for mechanical analog computers.

The warming smell of these old videos... 🥰🥰🥰

The norden was... interesting. For one: It wasn't nearly as accurate as the military said it was, however it was one of the best in the war. (The Germans did know about it, and their sight was equal to or, depending on who you ask, better than it) Think about it: This isn't a game, you've got literal hundreds of forces acting on those bombs the moment they leave that bay. For one the wind shear of the aircraft will throw them off the moment they hit the air, then the wind in general will act on it the whole way down, any disturbances in airflow will throw the bomb off even slightly, the bomb's weight will make it a bit unwieldy in the air, making it wobble around quite a bit, and even then you have to account for your altitude, airspeed, and heading. It wasn't "bomb in a pickle barrel at 30,000 feet" accurate, but within 1,000 feet of a target at 20,000 feet is an impressive feat that people need to respect, even if it wasn't as good as it was noted to be

I read where once set, the sight took over flying the plane, and it released the bombs. THEN, the guy yells Bombs Away, and the pilot took over the controls again. Bombardier was instructed that if the plane was going down over enemy territory, he was to use his service pistol and put a bullet through the thing. THEN worry about himself.

@Motor-City-Mike

2 жыл бұрын

That sounds like command in the armed forces. Ground soldiers were trained to stand their ground and lead the plane strafing their position with fire when under attack. Obviously, the soldiers were considered expendable commodities, as compared to their positions. It was war the likes of which we can't conceive of.

More than a few bomber pilots 'kept the plane to themselves' - normally the Norden sight actually flew the plane while engaged. In formation, flak exploding all around, fighters making strafing runs at the plane and the plane quickly gaining elevation as the weight of the bombs fell away, these pilots went by verbal instructions from the bombardier and kept control of the aircraft to themselves. They stood a better chance of bringing the aircraft - and her crew - home, as the Norden had no means to compensate for the battle going on all around her during a bombing run. A fine sighting system to keep the plane/bombs on target during smooth and level flight without the enemy throwing everything it had at the aircraft to knock it out of the sky. During battle situations the pilot and the bombardier working together was the best plan to live to fly another day.

Help him! Help him! Help who? Help the bombardier! I'm the bombardier, I'm all right.

That film would fill my head with "don'ts", but it wouldn't help me understand the theory or why I should operate the device a certain way. In practice the Norden could put about 30% of bombs within 1000 feet of a target from 20,000 feet.

Pawn stars bring me here

And they still could not guarantee a hit within 2 miles of any target

@PeriscopeFilm

2 жыл бұрын

Good comment -- true! -- and thanks for being a sub.

@dukecraig2402

5 ай бұрын

Nonsense, it was far more accurate than that, it could consistently place a single bomb within 400 ft or less from it's aiming point dropped from a B17 at 23,000 ft traveling at 225 MPH. All the nonsense claims by people that it wasn't accurate are from biased people who just want to bash the USAAF, people who want to make a name for themselves or people who just repeat the nonsense myths from the first two groups. All these supposed experts on the subject just want to blame every single bomb that missed it's target on the Norden bombsight when in fact it's far more complicated than that, first off 66% of the bombs dropped weren't even aimed using the Norden bombsight, instead they were aimed using the H2X ground scanning radar system especially during the winter months when overcast skies prevented optical aiming, but they'll take the results from a far less accurate system and pile it undeservingly on the back of the Norden bombsight when it didn't even have anything to do with the results from those mission's because it wasn't even used for them, and they'll unjustly blame other things like lead navigators flying entire formations to the wrong target resulting in it getting bombed and they'll take the results from something like that and enter it into their nonsense math formula as "zero bombs on target" even if the bombardiers absolutely plastered what they were actually aiming at. The Germans lighting off smoke pots to obscure targets, and camouflaging targets and setting up decoys down the road resulting in another "zero bombs on target" result that they'll include in their nonsense math formula which are things that aren't the fault of the Norden bombsight nor should the results from thing's like that be blamed on it. The Norden bombsight was incredibly accurate and worked exactly as advertised by it's inventors and the USAAF, ridiculous claims made by parties outside of them that the same hack historians like blaming on it's inventors and the USAAF are also nonsense, like that pickle barrel claim, nobody in the USAAF or the designers or builders of Norden bombsights ever made that claim no matter how many KZread video creator's say they did, in the first place why would they when from bombing altitudes and with all the more magnification that the sight has you couldn't make out a pickle barrel, the fact is nobody knows where that pickle barrel nonsense started but it wasn't from anyone who had anything to do with the Norden bombsight or the USAAF nor should they be held to task for something they never claimed, most likely it was something that came from your typical newspaper reporter or someone like that but it was never claimed by an official source. Saying that the Norden bombsight wasn't accurate using the same measuring metric that all the supposed experts use is like saying the M1 rifle isn't accurate based on a post war report that found for every enemy soldier killed by an M1 387 shots had been fired by them on average, and since that same report showed that the average distance between infantry engaging each other was 60 yards that means that the M1 can only hit a man sized target at 60 yards once out of every 387 shots so ththerefore it's an inaccurate rifle, well any of us who own M1's will tell you that a service grade out of the rack M1 will easily put 10 shots in a 2½ inch group at 100 yards, post war reports like that don't speak to the accuracy of the M1 or the Norden bombsight, only to the conditions under which they're used. When it comes to what happened in the Pacific the early problem was the ballistic tables for using the Norden bombsight didn't account for the temperature in the jet stream above Japan, another myth is that the USAAF didn't know about the jet stream above Japan but that's entirely false, they knew very well about it and it's speed but what they didn't know was that it was a full 42° C warmer than the temperature at that altitude above North America where the development for the ballistic tables was made and proven at in preparation for the bombing of Japan, when they realized what the problem was the issue was that it'd take about 6 months to realign all the data to come up with the proper ballistic trajectory charts to set the Norden bombsight for bombing from that altitude above Japan, in the meantime USAAF intelligence has determined that since Japan lacked an effective night fighter force coupled with the fact that they had a serious soft spot between 5,000 ft and 10,000 ft with their AA guns it was determined that a quick fix to the problem was night bombing between those altitudes, however in the meantime an adjusted ballistic table had to be developed for high altitude bombing above Japan for when the atomic bomb was ready because any bomber that would have dropped it between 5,000 and 10,000 ft would have been destroyed by the blast, proof that the Norden bombsight was indeed accurate was the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay was traveling at over 300 MPH at an altitude of 31,000 ft when it released it's bomb and ot detonated directly over a point just 800 ft from it's aiming point, nobody else in the world not the Germans, the British or the Japanese were capable of doing that, all the nonsense talk about the Germans or anyone else who supposedly had more accurate bomb sights is just that, talk, the fact is nobody else during the war bombed from the altitudes that the USAAF bombed from, everyone else bombed from lower altitudes and if you remove everything like human error, bombs that were aimed using other systems and all other factors that don't reflect on the actual aiming methods and their results even though everyone else bombed from lower altitudes they still couldn't obtain the accuracy that the USAAF did. Another thing is all the malarkey claims about the RAF and the Germans rejecting the use of the Norden bombsight, neither one would have ever considered it's use, in the first place the Norden bombsight worked in conjunction with the Sperry autopilot system, without it you couldn't use the Norden bombsight, for anyone else to reconfigure their aircraft with the Sperry autopilot system or a reverse engineered copy of it and then retrain their crews for it's use would have been a minimum 6 month program that they'd have had to suspend most or all of their bombing campaign, add on at least another 4 months for reverse engineering the system if Sperry didn't hand you the plans and offer support, and all that aside why would the British even consider it in the first place when optical aiming is done in daylight and they were night bombing which was completely different all the way down to their bombers flew in streams for night bombing instead of in boxes like the USAAF did in daylight, so all that nonsense about other countries rejecting the Norden bombsight are all taken out of context, nobody rejected it "because their bombsights were more accurate", they'd have rejected the idea simply because it wasn't feasible.

I found out my Aunt Charlotte from New Mexico was on the assembly line for the Norden Bombsite.

@zechariahfelipe5909

3 жыл бұрын

Dunno if you guys cares but if you're bored like me atm then you can stream all the latest movies on InstaFlixxer. Been streaming with my brother during the lockdown =)

@traviszahir2699

3 жыл бұрын

@Zechariah Felipe Definitely, I've been using instaflixxer for since november myself :D

The worlds most badly kept secret

This bomb sight is classified. I’m calling the FBI.

Ye another “How did I get here?” Video? Yet, very important if there’s an Zombie Apocalypse. (2019) Turn knob a couple-turns forward, okay got it! Now there’s an app for that.

All this while the Germans are shooting flack at your B-17

These people have no rights to these movies but will get your channel taken down if you upload the same material. They have made themselves the only source for this stuff and are charging people to show un-copyrighted works. Despicable.

@JeffDeWitt

Жыл бұрын

Wrong. They find these films, digitize them, and sell the rights to show their work product while at the same time letting us see them on KZread.

@samsmith1580

Жыл бұрын

@@JeffDeWitt I never said they didn't. And you never refuted what I said.

@JeffDeWitt

Жыл бұрын

@@samsmith1580 What people were doing was copying the video from KZread, cropping out the part with the watermark, and reposting it. There is a HUGE difference between doing that and doing something like finding the video on Internet Archive, cleaning it up, and posting it.

@samsmith1580

Жыл бұрын

@@JeffDeWittThat is simply not true. The vast majority of of videos were independently sourced and digitised. Many were up long before periscope video came along with their version which most of the time was not as well digitised. It's interesting that you justify rather than deny. You are just confirming what we all knew. That you are behind the chanel takedowns of other people posting old copyright free video.

The Japanese captured one in Malaysia on 1942. The Germans were given a copy by someone in the war department who is also a member of the KKK. Germany and Japan were Fielding improved versions in 1943

2020: press red switch, computer will fly from Washington to Iraq and kill thousands, refuel and come home. Then you switch off red switch

@rickintexas1584

4 жыл бұрын

Truth!

What a great piece of propaganda. The real value of the Norden bomb site was the friends it made along the way.

Imagine doing all that with 109s /190's etc, wailing on your squadron, in freezing temps, overcast target, jet stream winds, amount of sorties flown and so forth and so on. War is one long train of logistics that requires every single thing to go right for the mission to be a total success. That rarely happens . Yes we did all we could to avert bombs from civilian targets for a time but some of you I see, need to go a little deeper in the war to see that yes, all sides on purpose, in an attempt to destroy civilian will and sense of nationalism, bombed civilian targets. It failed miserably for both sides and the will of the people held true even in the defeated nations. Any of you that have no sense of Nationalism today, will not be able to defend your countries from aggression and only those who have served have a right to the freedoms they have given us all , with their lives. The rest of us are just hiding behind the real men and women of this world who stand guard. Wherever you are, love your country, and try to make the bad things in it better before you try and make other places better.