The FBI sent agents with him to try to protect him. The British supposedly thought that he was working for the Germans as a spy. And [the Army was] afraid that the British would try to capture him. But he absolutely insisted. He said, I’m going to Switzerland. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. And of course, the laws of wartime were not yet in effect because the United States wasn’t in the war. So legally there was no way they could stop him.
Why did the military put up with him? Because the Norden bombsight was the Holy Grail.
Norden had a business partner named Ted Barth. He was the salesman, the public face. And he claimed, the year before the United States joined the war, that “We do not regard a fifteen-foot square…as being a very difficult target to hit from an altitude of thirty thousand feet.” The shorthand version of that—which would serve as the foundation of the Norden legend—was that the bombsight could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up.
To the first generation of military pilots, that claim was intoxicating. The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden. And why spend so much on a bombsight? Because the Norden represented a dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore. We wouldn’t need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We could reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost.
Footnotes
i In 2011 I gave a TED Talk on Norden and his invention.
Chapter Two
“We make progress unhindered by custom.”
1.
Revolutions are invariably group activities. That’s why Carl Norden was such an anomaly. Rarely does someone start a revolution alone, at his mother’s kitchen table. The impressionist movement didn’t begin because one genius took up painting impressionistically and, like the Pied Piper, attracted a trail of followers. Instead, Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the école des Beaux-Arts at the same time; then, Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Académie Suisse; Manet met Degas at the Louvre; Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre’s studio; and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne; and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois, trading ideas and egging each other on, and sharing and competing and dreaming, all together, until something radical and entirely new emerged.
This happens all the time. Gloria Steinem was the most famous face of the feminist movement in the early 1970s. But what was it that led to a doubling of the number of women elected to office in the United States? Gloria Steinem plus Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Tanya Melich coming together to create the National Women’s Political Caucus. Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.
For those caught up in the dream of changing modern warfare, that place where friends spent time with one another and had long arguments into the night and saw that look in their comrades’ eyes was an air base called Maxwell Field. Maxwell Field was—and is—in Montgomery, Alabama. It was an old cotton plantation converted to an airfield by the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. In the 1930s it became home to something called the Air Corps Tactical School, the aviation version of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Much of the base today remains the same as it was when it was built, in the 1930s: everything is in pale yellow concrete or stucco, with red tile roofs. There are hundreds of elegant houses for the officers, built in the French provincial style on quiet curving streets lined with giant ring-cup oak trees. In the summer, the air is thick and wet. This is deep inside Alabama. The grand nineteenth-century buildings that make up the Alabama state legislature are just down the road, a few miles away. It does not feel like the birthplace of a revolution.
But it was.
In those years, the Air Force was not a separate branch of the military. It was a combat division of the Army. It existed to serve the interests of the ground forces. To support, assist, accompany. The legendary Army general John “Black Jack” Pershing, who commanded the American forces in World War I, once wrote of airpower that it “can of its own account neither win a war at the present time nor, so far as we can tell, at any time in the future.”i That’s what the military establishment thought of airplanes. Richard Kohn, chief historian of the US Air Force for a decade, explains that in the early days, people just didn’t understand airpower: