Hi Zanth,
>Read and see what you think.
I think the competing Sperry sight gets sold far beyond its value.
The Norden sight was based on a very simple auto pilot that would only correct when the aircraft exceeded a threshold value in yaw, roll, pitch, or dive, and then act with a fixed control deflection until the offending value was back within normal parameters.
The Sperry sight was based on a much more advanced autopilot that would keep track of the second derivative of yaw, roll, pitch and dive and could act when the airplane would only begin to yaw/roll/pitch off the normal position. It could fly the plane much more smoothly as a result, getting the plane to the corect release point with improved accuracy and accordingly, hitting the target with greater precision.
(The Sperry-type autopilot was a major leap forward in technology and dominated the civilian market after the war.)
Additionally, the Sperry-type autopilot used the freely gymbaled gyroscope as a sensor only and needed hardly any setup time, unlike the Norden sight was engaged rigidly with the gyroscope and accordingly required a long straight run-in on the target to give the sight some time to settle.
The article seemsto think strategic bombing was a waste of time, but actually, the opposite is true. It made a huge impact on the ability of the Third Reich to wage war, and it was highly successful both against the communications system and against the petrol industry, reducing the amount of fuel available to Luftwaffe and Heer dramatically. Even the early Schweinfurth raids on the ball-bearing plants were much more effective than the USAAF came to believe - only because WW2 logistics weren't particularly efficient, enough ball-bearings were found resting idly in the shelves of warehouses all around Germany to bridge the production gap.
How effective the strategic bombing was can be judged from the existence of the Fighter Emergency Programme that gave fighter production priority over almost everything else, including tanks (which Hitler was very fond of) and bombers (which Hitler was much more fond of than of fighters). Milch had rated the Me 262 as being of paramount importance for the German war effort because he thought that the jet fighter was the prerequisite for production of any other weapon as the production of other weapons would be brought to a stillstand by the daylight bombing offensive.
Focused on the Norden sight, the article misses a good opportunity to point out what precision bombing really meant in WW2: Dive bombing. If there was any bomber in WW2 that came close to hitting individual pickle barrels, it was the German Stuka which reached an accuracy that far surpassed that of the level bombers.
The mention of the Germans developing their own synchronous sight is interesting, but I'd like to know whether this was really an independend development or whether they were actually copying the concepts of the Norden sight obtained by espionage, as lined out in the beginning of the article.
Anyway, thanks for pointing it out, quite an interesting read!
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)
