The Bomber Mafia - Ch1- Norden PDF

# The Bomber Mafia ## Part One: The Dream ### Chapter One "Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop." 1. Back when the war that would consume the world was a worry but not yet a fact, a remarkable man came to the attention of the U.S. military. His name was Carl L. Norden. Throughout...

# The Bomber Mafia ## Part One: The Dream ### Chapter One "Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop." 1. Back when the war that would consume the world was a worry but not yet a fact, a remarkable man came to the attention of the U.S. military. His name was Carl L. Norden. Throughout his life, Norden shunned the limelight. He worked alone - sometimes returning to Europe during crucial periods to tinker and dream at his mother's kitchen table. He built a business with hundreds of employees. Then when the war was over, he left it all behind. There are no full length biographies of Norden. No profile pieces. *In 2011 I gave a TED talk on Norden and his invention.* "Mr. Norden was content..." No statues in his honor. Not in his native Holland; not in Switzerland, where he lived out his days; and not in downtown Manhattan, where he did his most important work. Norden influenced the course of a war and sparked a dream that would last the remainder of the century. It does not seem possible that someone could have left as much of a mark on his world as Norden did and then disappear from sight. Yet he did. In one 352-page technical book about Norden's invention, there is a single sentence devoted to him: *"Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop, which sometimes was an eighteen-hour day."* That's it. So before we start in on Norden's dream and its consequences - the effect Norden would have on an entire generation - let us start with Norden himself. I asked Professor Stephen L. McFarland, one of the few historians - maybe the only historian - who has really dug into the story of Carl Norden, why there's so little documentary record about the inventor. The professor replied that it is "primarily because he demanded absolute secrecy." He went on to describe the man: "Well, he was extremely prickly. His ego was greater than [that of] any person I've never met. And I said 'never met' because of course I never met Nordern." Norden was Dutch. He was born in what is now Indonesia, then a Dutch colony. He spent three years apprenticing in a Swiss machine shop, then got an engineering degree from Zurich's prestigious Federal Polytechnical School, where one of his classmates was Vladimir Lenin. Norden was trim, dapper. He wore a three-piece suit. Had short white hair with a little cowlick, a thriving mustache, and heavy-lidded eyes underwritten with deep lines, as if he hadn't slept in years. His nickname was Old Man Dynamite. He drank coffee by the gallon. Lived on steak. As McFarland explained: > He truly believed in a very biological sense that sun created stupidity. And so you would never see him outside without a big hat on. His family always was forced to wear hats outside. He was, as a young boy, stationed in the Dutch East Indies, and yet he and his family always wore hats because the sun caused stupidity. McFarland wrote that Norden "read Dickens avidly for revelations on the lives of the disadvantaged and Thoreau for the discussion of the simple life." He hated paying taxes. He thought Franklin Roosevelt was the devil. McFarland described how cranky Norden could be: > There's a famous story where he was looking over a technician's shoulder and the technician got a little bit nervous and tried to strike up a ## "MR. NORDEN WAS CONTENT..." > conversation, looking at him and saying, "Perhaps you could explain why we're making this part this way." And Norden screamed at the top of his lungs at him, after he yanked the cigar out of his mouth, and said, "There's a hundred thousand reasons why I designed that part that way. And none of it is your damn business." So that's how he treated all his employees. He was truly an Old Man Dynamite. McFarland went on explain Norden's perfectionism: > Expense didn't matter - it was "Make it as perfect as possible." I'd seen how engineers know what they know and how they do what they do, but all of them talked about the importance of studying what had been done before. Norden's attitude was, "I don't want to hear about it." All he wanted was blank sheets of paper, a pencil, and a couple of engineering books that were filled with formulas about how to calculate certain mathematical problems. He was a true believer in blank slate, and this reveals his ego. He said, "I don't want to know the mistakes other people made. I don't want to know what they did right. I'm going to develop what's right myself." 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 ## "MR. NORDEN WAS CONTENT..." > 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. >"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 "MR. NORDEN WAS CONTENT..." > 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 "MR. NORDEN WAS CONTENT..." > > 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. ## By the time the United States entered World War II, the military rushed to equip its bombers with the Norden bombsight. Those bombers, in most cases, had a crew of ten men: pilot, copilot, navigator, gunners, and, most crucially, bombardiers, the people who aimed and dropped the bombs. If the bombardier did not do his job, then the efforts of all nine of his crewmen were wasted. "MR. NORDEN WAS CONTENT..." > A wartime military training film for bombardiers explained the importance of the Norden bombsight by showing aerial photographs of enemy targets: > > One of them may be your target. They are the reason for your being here. The reason for all the vast equipment assembled in this and other bombardier schools. For the instructors here to train you. For the pilots here to fly you on your missions. In all likelihood some one of you now sitting in this room will see one of these targets, not projected on a screen but moving under the cross-hair of your bombsight. And where will they fall, those bombs of yours?... One hundred feet off? Five hundred feet? That will depend on how well you'll have taught your fingers and your eyes to match the precision that has been built into your Norden bombsight. Its official name was the Mark XV. It was dubbed "the football" by the airmen who used it. It weighed fifty-five pounds. It sat on a kind of platform - a packing box, stabilized by a gyroscope - that kept it level at all times, even as the plane was bouncing around. The bombsight was essentially an analog computer, a compact, finely machined contraption composed of mirrors, a telescope, ball bearings, levels, and dials. From a moving plane, the bombardier peered through the telescope ## > at the target and made a fantastically complicated series of adjustments. Norden created sixty-four algorithms that he believed addressed every question of the bomb-ing problem, including: How much do the speed and direction of the wind affect the trajectory of a bomb? How much does the air temperature affect it? Or the speed of the aircraft? To be properly trained on the Norden took six months. Just watching the Army training film is enough to hurt your head. The narrator says, > Now look at the line in the flooring. That was your sighting line when you started. Goes straight to the target. I know: when you're up in the air there aren't any nice convenient lines drawn in the ground to help you. Your bombsight; though, gives you the equivalent of them. Remember how the sight's made in two parts? Underneath, there's the stabilizer. And in that there's another gyro, only it has a horizontal axis. > Above that is your sight. The stabilizer is fixed in the longitudinal axis of the airplane. But you can keep turning the sight so that it's always pointing at the target. But the sight is also connected to the stabilizer by rods. By these, the gyro controls the position of the sight, so that no matter how much the airplane yaws, the sight will always point in the same direction. All this so the bombardier could know exactly when to shout, "Bombs away!" McFarland explained one of the fine points of Norden's work: > One of Norden's sixty-four algorithms compensated for the fact that when you drop a bomb it takes thirty seconds to hit the target. During those thirty seconds, the earth actually moves as it spins on its axis. > > So he actually created a formula. If it was going to take twenty seconds for the bomb to hit the target, then the earth would move - I'm going to make up a number - twelve feet. You therefore had to adjust the computer to [the fact that] the target's now moved twelve feet. If you're at twenty thousand feet, it might move twenty-five feet. And all of these then had to be put into this computer. The Army bought thousands of Norden bomb-sights. Before every mission, the bombardier, with an armed escort, would retrieve his device from a vault. He would carry it out to the plane in a metal box. In the event of a crash landing, the bombardier was instructed to destroy the bombsight immediately, lest it fall into enemy hands. Legend has it that bombardiers were even given an eighteen-inch-long explosive device "MR. NORDEN WAS CONTENT..." > to do the trick. And, as a final precaution, they had to take a special oath: "I solemnly swear that I will keep inviolate the secrecy of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and in full knowledge that I am a guardian of one of my country's most priceless assets, do further swear to protect the secrecy of the American bombsight, if need be, with my life itself." In the middle of all this drama and secrecy was Carl Norden. Maddening, eccentric Norden. Before the United States entered the war, while he was still perfecting his invention, he would sometimes leave Manhattan and return to his mother's house, in Zurich. McFarland said this would put US officials "up in arms": > 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 bomb-sight? 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 mendead on battle-fields or lay waste to entire cities. We could reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost.