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Norden Sight


Subdeacon Joe

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Not nearly as accurate as they claimed though.

Which is why Ol' Iron A$$* told his B-29 crews to remove all but the tail guns, and load up with incendiaries to be dropped from 5,000-8,000 ft. Above Ground Level (AGL), at night!  Aircrews thought they were being sent on a suicide mission that low! :o Turned out they had fewer loses than the daylight missions from 30,000 ft.  And they did a number on Tokyo that caused much more damage and casualties than Little Boy or Fat Man did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

*I had another year's worth of engineering classes, but he came down and swore in my AFROTC buddies who were graduating a year ahead of me! :FlagAm:

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Which is why Ol' Iron A$$* told his B-29 crews to remove all but the tail guns, and load up with incendiaries to be dropped from 5,000-8,000 ft. Above Ground Level (AGL), at night!  Aircrews thought they were being sent on a suicide mission that low! :o Turned out they had fewer loses than the daylight missions from 30,000 ft.  And they did a number on Tokyo that caused much more damage and casualties than Little Boy or Fat Man did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

*I had another year's worth of engineering classes, but he came down and swore in my AFROTC buddies who were graduating a year ahead of me! :FlagAm:

Well, the incindiary raids were more efective than the HE bmbs because the Japanese cities were mostly wood. At that point there was no real moral debate over carpet bombing vs precision. It was. "let's get the damn thing over with now!"

In another thread I talked about a cattle ranch in Florida that had been used as a B17 range during the way. FRom the air you could still see the 1,000 ft diameter target areas they were trying to hit. There were a LOT of craters way outside those circles. But the AAF wanted everybody to believe they could drop a 250 pounder in a pickle barrel from 10,000 feet. :D

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The Achilles heal of high altitude bombing is wind. Very hard to take detailed measurements of speed and direction from afar. 

 

Here is a link to a NOAA aviation website that allows you to see winds aloft at various altitudes.  I did it for Dallas TX and the wind direction varied almost 90 degrees between the surface and 50,000 ft. Wind speed also changed based on altitude.

 

Same for Denver CO. Direction only changes 10 or 15 degrees but the wind speed looked like a sine wave as it increased and decreased repeatedly with changes in altitude.

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