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Comment by daymanstep | Hacker News Reader

Precision bombing? With WW2 era tech?

In WW2 you were lucky if you managed to hit a city-sized target, never mind an industrial site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_bombing#World_War_II "These provided impressive accuracy—British post-raid analysis showed that the vast majority of the bombs dropped could be placed within 100 yards (91 m) of the midline of the beam, spread along it a few hundred yards around the target point, even in pitch-dark conditions at a range of several hundred miles. But the systems fatally depended on accurate radio reception, and the British invented the first electronic warfare techniques to successfully counter this weapon in the 'Battle of the Beams' "

I do hope wherever you are from that your cities are larger than a few hundred yards.

The article you link to is about radio navigation based on ground stations. The USA would have required at least an island near the Japanese mainland on which to establish such a ground station, or perhaps a ship if it could maintain an accurate position based on traditional methods.

Even then, I don't think it would be correct to say that the Americans had no other capabilities for targeted attacks. With air superiority you can do strafing at relatively low risk, which is very accurate. And the USA had also developed rockets by this point, which could drastically improve accuracy when compared to unpropelled bombs. They even used these operationally against Japan before the atomic bomb attacks.

The norden bombsight was a game changing piece of tech that allowed more precision than had been possible.

The RAF tended to carpet bomb at night, but the USAF wanted to precision bomb by day.

It was nowhere near as precise as today's tech but it vastly improved during the course of the war.

Ultimately it didn't work because the theory didn't work. German manufacturing was not disrupted by precision bombing enough to matter

Masters of the air also touches on this, and some of the disastrous missteps during the raids that led to aircraft loss

The norden bombsite was a incredibly cool and fascinating piece of technology that did not have the operational performance its designers were promising.

Level bombing with dumb bombs was never going to be particularly precise regardless the sophistication of the bombsite because bombs in free fall don't have the momentum of an artillery shell so their trajectory is less dependable.

The norden also had a multitude of parameters that the bombardier had to input quickly and accurately as they were changing during a bombing run under flak barrage.

That being said the real problem with the air war in Germany was target selection. If you want to know more I'd suggest the book The Collapse of the German War Economy

https://uncpress.org/9780807858509/the-collapse-of-the-germa...

I guess there must be something about cities that attracts bombs then, maybe all these magnets on the fridges in people's homes.

During the bombing of Dresden bombs somehow gravitated towards the city center 2km in diameter, while factories and railway hubs on the outskirts weren't damaged at all.

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