What was Carl Norden developing on his blank sheets of paper? A bombsight. A bombsight is not something that anyone uses anymore—not in the age of radar and GPS—but for the better part of the last century, bombsights were matters of great importance. Let me go further, because there is a real risk here of understatement. If you were to have made a list in, say, the early years of the twentieth century of the ten biggest unsolved technological problems of the next half century, what would have been on that list? Well, some things are obvious. Vaccines were desperately needed to prevent childhood diseases—measles, mumps. Better agricultural fertilizers were needed to help prevent famine. Huge parts of the world could be made more productive with affordable, convenient air-conditioning. A car cheap enough for a working-class family to afford. I could go on. But somewhere on that list would be a military question—namely, is there a more accurate way to drop a bomb from an airplane?
Now, why does that problem belong on the same list as vaccines and fertilizers and air-conditioning? Because early in the twentieth century, the world went through World War I, in which thirty-seven million people were wounded or killed. Thirty-seven million. There were over a million casualties in the Battle of the Somme, a single battle that had no discernible point or impact on the course of the war. For those who lived through it, World War I was a deeply traumatic experience.
So what could be done? A small group of people came to believe that the only realistic solution was for armies to change the way they fought wars. To learn to fight—if this doesn’t sound like too much of an oxymoron—better wars. And the people who made the argument for better wars were pilots. Airmen. People obsessed with one of the newest and most exciting technological achievements of that era—the airplane.
2.
Airplanes made their first big appearance in World War I. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of those early planes. Plywood, fabric, metal, and rubber. Two wings, upper and lower, connected by struts. One seat. A machine gun facing forward, synchronized to fire through the propeller. They resembled something that came in the mail to be assembled in a garage. The most famous of World War I fighter planes was the Sopwith Camel. （That’s the one that Snoopy flew in the old Peanuts comic strip.） It was a mess. “In the hands of a novice,” the aviation writer Robert Jackson says, “it displayed vicious characteristics that could make it a killer.” Meaning a killer of the pilot flying it, not the enemy under attack. But a new generation of pilots looked at these contraptions and said, Something like this can make all that deadly, wasteful, pointless conflict on the ground obsolete. What if we just fought wars from the air?
One of those airmen was a man named Donald Wilson. He served in the First World War and remembered the fear that had gripped his fellow soldiers.
As he recounted in an oral history in 1975:
One fellow killed himself and chose our mess hall as the place to do it. Put his mouth over the muzzle of his rifle and pulled the trigger. And another man while we were in the trenches shot himself in the leg. So those people must have magnified their ideas of the great danger. But I think by and large, the most of us just didn’t realize what we were getting into.
Wilson started flying in the 1920s and ended up as a general in the Second World War. I ran across a memoir that Wilson self-published in the 1970s. It’s called Wooing Peponi, and it looks like a high school yearbook. It goes on forever. And right in the middle, Wilson has this strangely riveting passage about the conclusion he came to in his first years of flying: “Then out of nowhere a vision evolved. As in later years, in entirely different context, Martin Luther King said, in a moving speech, ‘I had a dream.’”
Wilson is comparing his vision of the promise of airpower to the most iconic moment in the civil rights movement. And then he borrows King’s rhetorical pattern as well:
I had a dream…that nations fought each other in order to dictate terms and not to prove supremacy of arms, as military tradition insisted. I had a dream that important nations, the likely adversaries, were industrialized and dependent upon smooth operation of organized and mutually sustaining elements. I had a dream that the new and coming air capability could destroy a limited number of targets within this web of interdependent features of the modern nation. I had a dream that such destruction and the possibility of more of the same, would cause the victim to sue for peace.
In every way, this passage is audacious. There were so few military pilots in the United States back in those days that they all knew each other. It was like a club. A band of zealots. And Wilson said this tiny club with its ramshackle flying machines could reinvent war.