Two hundred and thirty bombers, each carrying eight to nine bombs—so let’s say two thousand bombs dropped in total. And they get eighty hits. That doesn’t sound like precision bombing, does it?
2.
The fundamental problem at Schweinfurt was not the botched execution of the battle plan, however. That was just a symptom. The real problem had to do with the mechanical cornerstone of the Bomber Mafia ideology: the Norden bombsight.
As it turned out, the bombsight did not behave in the real world the way it had in Carl Norden’s laboratory or in military training films. I asked historian Stephen McFarland whether the bombsight worked if conditions were ideal. His reply:
Well, in theory, yes, if you’re talking about strictly a mathematical issue. But remember that when gears and pulleys are moving, they cause friction, and I don’t care how much you polish the ball bearings, I don’t care how perfect the tolerances, you’re still going to run into the issue of friction. And the slightest little bit of friction means that your analog equivalent to that mathematical formula has been messed up. It doesn’t work that way anymore.
The Norden bombsight was a mechanical object. If you built it by hand, you could make sure that every component fitted perfectly and every tolerance was exact. But when the war hit, the military needed tens of thousands of machines.
As McFarland explains, “Once it’s out of the factory, oils will start to thicken. At twenty-five thousand feet, the temperature might be sixty degrees below zero. And the oils that are lubricating the gears and pulleys are going to thicken and therefore cause a little bit of friction.”
Now imagine that temperamental device in the hands of a bombardier—some kid, fresh out of training school—on an actual bombing run.
McFarland continues:
People are shooting at you, and enemy aircraft are coming at you at closing speeds of five hundred, six hundred miles an hour, and all this horrible yelling and screaming and bombs going, explosions going off and everything else—the bombardiers tended to pucker, if I can use that phrase. They would lean forward as they became more and more intent on trying to make sure the crosshairs stayed on the target. And when they did so, they actually changed the angle of vision through that telescope…It was impossible.
And I haven’t mentioned the most important factor of all: the weather. The Norden depended on visual sighting of the target. You looked through the telescope, saw what you wanted to hit, then entered all the information: wind direction, airspeed, temperature, the curvature of the earth, and so on. But of course if there were clouds over the target, nothing worked. In the days before sophisticated radar, there was no way around this problem. You crossed your fingers and prayed for a sunny day. If you got clouds instead, sometimes you would scrub the mission.i But as often as not, you’d go anyway and take your chances. You had to. If you lingered too long on the tarmac, you would lose the element of surprise.
The Eighth Air Force took off in the fog for the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt. They dropped two thousand bombs. And of those, eighty found their mark. Eighty bombs are just not enough to destroy a sprawling industrial complex. When an employee of the Kugelfischer ball-bearing plant—one of the largest in the country—toured the factory after the attack, he found that the upper floor had completely collapsed. There was debris everywhere. But at least half the crucial machinery remained intact. Which meant that he could soon get it back up and running. Haywood Hansell thought he had found the classic choke point—the equivalent of that propeller-spring factory in Pittsburgh. But a plant that can be back up and running within a few weeks is not a choke point.
The best estimate was that the attack decreased German ball-bearing production by around a third. Sixty planes and 552 airmen captured or dead for that? The Army’s official postmortem of its bombing missions—the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—concluded afterward that “there is no evidence that the attacks on the ball bearing industry had any measurable effect on essential war production.”
If this was the Bomber Mafia’s attempt to prove the efficacy of its doctrine, it was a disaster, historian Tami Biddle says:
The Americans were very outspoken about how much superior their method and their technique and their doctrine was, even when they had no grounds to be that bold and that confident, because they hadn’t really proven anything.
They hadn’t done much. But they were, basically, cocky Americans who went into the theater thinking that the rules were going to be different for them and they were going to be able to do things that the British hadn’t been able to achieve.