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- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
- Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 16:07:00 CST
- Sender: History <HISTORY@RUTVM1.BITNET>
- From: CAMPBELL-JENSEN <CAMPBELLD@APSU.BITNET>
- Subject: Re: The advent of "technological secrecy"
- Lines: 14
-
- The Norden bombsight was the super-secret Air Force weapon on
- ww2. It (supposedly) made the long-range heavy bomber (B-17)
- into a war-winning weapon. The Norden company in New York City
- had an employment policy that strongly discriminated against
- Jews and Italians. It favored Nordics. One of them was a Nazi
- sympathizer who gave a complete set of blueprints to the German
- embassy circa 1937. The Luftwaffe built a replication of the
- bombsight, but decided not to use it (the Luftwaffe failed to
- develop a strategic bombing strategy). It is unclear whether the
- Luftwaffe used its knowledge of the optics to develop tactics to
- neutralize the bombsight. (Late in the war it built dummy
- factories, for example.) The Nazis apparently did not get good
- information on later improvements in the bombsight.
- Richard Jensen
-