The Norden bombsight myth

All the players in WWII who had any serious strategic bombing presence had their own "precision bombsight"; certainly the US, UK, and Germany, and they all thought their own design was the hottest thing ever and jealously guarded its secrecy.

And you know what? They all missed the point. There is no such thing as precision bombing from 20,000+ feet using free-fall ordnance. For the sake of argument, EVEN IF the bombsight and the bombardier had both been PERFECT, the point of impact depends on the time-, altitude-, and spatial-distribution of wind currents all the way from bombing altitude down to the ground. And you can't know that - let alone calculate the correction - without undertaking an extremely elaborate survey. And you can't do that survey in real time. Long before you could have even gotten your intricate survey well under way - let alone finished - it would be utterly obsolete.

The concept of high altitude bombers hitting the "pickle barrel" was one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated. USAAF "precision" bombing in broad daylight only put 20% of its load within a circle 2000 feet (almost half a mile) across centered on the target.

The Norden bombsight was a marvel of engineering and workmanship, but the actual results were that you were lucky to sprinkle your bombs on the right general part of a city. You certainly couldn't hit specific areas of a given industrial plant or military target, and level bombing of ships maneuvering at sea NEVER hit anything. For precision you had to use dive bombing, releasing from a very low altitude, and this became very, very dangerous as AA capability mushroomed.