“I had a dream that such destruction and the possibility of more of the same, would cause the victim to sue for peace”？ That means he believed that planes could win wars all by themselves. They could swoop down and bomb select targets and bring the enemy to its knees without the slaughter of millions on a battlefield.
But before the dream could be made real, the airmen knew they had to deal with a problem, a very specific technical problem, a problem so consequential that it belongs on the top ten list of problems, along with vaccines and fertilizers. If you thought, as the dreamers did, that the airplane could revolutionize warfare—could swoop down and hit select targets and bring the enemy to its knees—then you had to have a way to hit those select targets from the air. And no one knew how to do that.
I asked Stephen McFarland why it is so difficult to pinpoint a bombing target. His response:
It’s amazing to me. I mean, I just assumed that you’ve watched the videos and the movies. And they say, “Just put the crosshairs on the target, and the bombsight will do the rest.” But there’s an amazing number of elements that [go] into dropping a bomb accurately on a target. If you think about your own car, driving down the highway at sixty, seventy miles an hour, you can imagine throwing something out the window and trying to hit something, even if it’s stationary like a sign or a tree or anything on the side of the road. You get an idea of just how hard that is.
If you’re trying to throw a bottle into a garbage can from a car going fifty miles per hour, you have to perform some physics calculations on the fly: the garbage can is stationary, but you and the car are moving quickly, so you have to release the bottle well before you reach the can. Right? But if you’re in an airplane at twenty thousand or thirty thousand feet, the problem is infinitely more complicated.
McFarland went on:
Aircraft in World War II were flying at two hundred, three hundred miles an hour, sometimes as fast as five hundred miles an hour. They were dropping bombs from up to thirty thousand feet. That would take between twenty and thirty, [maybe] thirty-five seconds to hit the ground. And during that whole time, you’re being shot at. You’re having to look through clouds or…[avoid] antiaircraft artillery. You’re having to deal with factory decoys, smoke screens. There’s the smoke from other bombs, people screaming in your ear, the excitement, all these strange things that happen once war begins.
The wind could be blowing at a hundred miles per hour. You’d have to factor that in. If it’s cold, the air is dense, and the bomb will fall slowly. If it’s warm, the air is thin, and the bomb will fall fast. Then you’d also have to consider: Is the plane level? Is it moving from side to side? Or up and down? A tiny degree of error at the release point could translate to a big error on the ground. And from twenty thousand feet, can you even see the target? A factory might be big and obvious up close, but from that far up, it looks like a postage stamp. Bombers, in the early days of aviation, couldn’t hit anything. Not even close. The bombardiers might as well have been throwing darts at a dartboard with their eyes closed. The dream that the airplane could revolutionize warfare was based on a massive untested and unproven assumption: that somehow, someone at some point would figure out how to aim a bomb from high in the sky with something close to accuracy. It was a question on the era’s technological wish list. Until…Carl Norden.
McFarland says Norden’s design methods were singular:
He had no help. He did it all by himself. It was all in his mind. He didn’t carry notes. He didn’t have a notepad. You can’t go to his archive. There is no such thing. It was all kept in his head, and for a man to keep that kind of complexity in his head…I was just amazed that it could be done that way. But engineers refer to something called “the mind’s eye,” that they see things in their mind, not with their eyes, but with their mind’s eye. And that was truly Carl Norden.
I asked McFarland if he thought Norden was a genius. His reply:
Well, he would tell you that only God invents; humans discover. So for him, it was not “genius.” He would have refused to accept that term. He would not appreciate it, would not accept anyone calling him a genius. He would say he’s just one who discovers the greatness of God, the creations of God; that God reveals truths through people who are willing to work hard and to use their minds to discover God’s truths.
Norden began working on the bombsight problem in the 1920s. He got a Navy contract—although he would later work for the Army Air Corps, which is what the US Air Force was called in those days. He set up shop on Lafayette Street in the part of Manhattan now called SoHo. And there he began work on his masterpiece.