cc >> Cassie Immel: Thank you
for watching Wednesday Nite at the Lab tonight.
I'm Cassie Immel and I work here at the Biotech Center.
Tonight we have a special event. It's the 70th anniversary of the
attack on Pearl Harbor, so commemorate that we're going
to have two presenters. The first presenter,
Captain Scott Mobley. He retired from the U.S.
Navy and he is currently a PhD candidate here at the UW
in the History Department. He was part of Operation
Iraqi Freedom, more toward the beginning but he was a part of
it so he's been very proud of this current war that we're in.
He was a former professor of Naval Science here at the UW
from 2005-2008. Then Captain Mobley will be
followed by Lieutenant Colonel Berge,
who is currently the commander for the UW-Madison
Air Force ROTC, Detachment 925. They just won a pretty
prestigious award. They won the Right of Line Award
which designates them as the best small detachment
of all the Air Force ROTC detachments in the country.
That's really based on their cadets so it shows excellent
leadership on his part. He commissioned here at the
UW-Madison also in the Air Force ROTC and he has served in
Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom he flew the B-2, and then he flew
the A-10 in Operation Enduring Freedom.
So without further adieu, and despite all the teasing that
we do between the branches, I'm honored to serve next to these
guys and they're always honored to serve next to the Army,
because we all share that goal of protecting this country and
ensuring that we all have those freedoms.
So I present to you Captain Mobley, who will then
be followed by Colonel Berge. [applause]
Captain Scott Mobley: Thank you, Cassie.
Thanks Tom. Well, I'm delighted to be here
tonight, with you, doing what I love to do best which is talking
about history. Before we start, we've got Army,
Air Force, Navy, any Marines in the room?
Former Marines? How about veterans in general?
All right. Could you stand up for a minute
so we can salute you? All right, then don't.
[applause]
Thank you. [applause continues]
I imagine we even have a few World War II veterans, so please
feel free to correct me as I go along, because most of this I
learned through books, not be real life experience.
My personal history doesn't start in the Navy until the
1970s. As Cassie said, today we
commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Day of Infamy,
7 December, 1941. Over 2400 Americans lost their
lives on that day. A national tragedy that is
surpassed only by the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Incidentally, also several dozen Japanese sailors and airman also
were killed at Pearl Harbor. Much of the death and
destruction on that day was wrought from aerial torpedoes.
Here we have a picture of a Japanese torpedo bomber
unleashing it's weapon on the USS West Virginia there in the
distance. Few weapons systems in WWII
equal the torpedo in combining versatility
with destructive punch. During the conflict, Allied and
Axis Navies deployed torpedoes in every dimension of Naval
warfare, from the air, from the surface
and from below the surface. What's interesting about this
story, and the use torpedo in WWII is that it all started
in Wisconsin. We'll get to that.
Okay. All right.
There we go. Since the theme is science and
engineering, I though we'd do a little physics here.
This is a slide that shows-- Whoops, I think--
How do I back up? Ah, here we go.
This is a photo taken from a Japanese aircraft while the
attack on Pearl Harbor was actually taking place.
You can see up in the upper right-hand corner, up in this
area, we have splashes from torpedoes that had just been
launched by Japanese aircraft like the one we saw in the
previous slide. Over here is Battleship Row.
We've got, basically, the fighting weight of the Pacific
fleet lined up as ready targets for the Japanese.
Some of the torpedoes have already hit their mark.
Over here we have the West Virginia.
You can see it's already listing to Port and we have a oil slick
emanating from the hull. Here we have the Oklahoma which
has also been hit already. Altogether 19 ships were sunk
or seriously damaged at Peal Harbor,
including all eight battleships of the Pacific fleet except for
one that was in dry-dock back on the West Coast.
Four of the battleships were actually sunk.
Two were sunk and never to be raised.
Of those ships that were attacked, two were sunk
by torpedoes, two others were struck by torpedoes and
also were struck by bombs. Altogether, 29 aircraft attacked
these ships, 21 torpedoes have been accounted for, having been
launch and hitting U.S. targets. How did they do it?
Again back to our physics lesson, the approach was low
and slow. Low and slow.
The aircraft would fly at only 150 knots.
That's roughly 40 nautical miles per hour is roughly 45 miles per
hour. So these aircraft are flying
at maybe 160-165 miles per hour. Not very fast.
Low to the water, only 65 feet. Interestingly enough, the
Japanese had to modify their torpedoes, modify the tail
sections, so they wouldn't dive too deeply, due to the shallow
water at Pearl Harbor. So they improvised with
detachable wooden fins that broke off as soon as the weapons
hit the water, to terrible effect.
What did they use? This is the Mark 91 aerial
torpedo that was used at Pearl Harbor.
It's actually very typical of the standard torpedoes of WWII
used by all the Navies. It was steam powered.
Basically, there were four chambers, a pure water tank and
a fuel tank. These would all feed into an
evaporator, and that gray section called the engine room.
the evaporator would mix the water, the fuel and the air and
ignite it. You have what's called 'wet
heat' and that would generate steam, it would expand and go
through a piston engine, that would drive the torpedo through
the water. This particular torpedo had a
warhead, 525 pounds, so it's about the size
of a 500-pound bomb. It detonated on impact against
the target and it could travel at a maximum speed of 42 knots.
So we're talking pushing 50 miles an hour.
It was controlled by a hydro-static pressure sensor
for horizontal control, depth. Then for the vertical control,
it used an installed gyroscope. I guess this diagram doesn't
show the gyroscope. It's usually mounted in the
tail section.
This is a picture of the damage wrought.
This is U.S. West Virginia in dry-dock.
Eventually, five of the eight battleships were returned to
full duty and saw action in the Pacific Theater later in the
war. You can see, there are men,
workers standing there at the bottom of the dry-dock.
You can see the size of the hole that was caused by the
torpedoes. Estimates are that anywhere
from six, to as many as nine torpedoes hit the West Virginia.
These were devastating weapons. These were the ship killers
of WWII.
As I mentioned before, torpedoes were launched from platforms
in the air, on the surface and under water.
This is a PT boat, a famous PT boat.
Many of you probably recall, John F. Kennedy and the story
of PT109. This is a 80 foot Elco boat,
the same class of PT that John F. Kennedy skippered.
It's launching two Mark 13 torpedoes there.
The Japanese had the-- The most fearsome of all the
torpedoes called the Type 93 long-lance.
Many of you may have heard of this.
This was a monster weapon. Half again bigger than any other
torpedo held by any other torpedo operated by any Navy
during the war. It weighed three tons.
It was 24 inches in diameter, and it was 35 feet long,
almost twice as long most other torpedoes.
It carried a thousand pound warhead, a thousand pound bomb
in it's nose, and it had a max speed of 50 knots.
So this torpedo, when it's going at peak speed, is approaching
60 miles and hour, underwater. This photo shows the
USS Minneapolis in 1942. It was hit by one of these
Japanese long-lance torpedoes. As you can see it's lost it's
bow. A lot of damage from just one
weapon.
Now the surface torpedoes were significant, but in terms of
strategic impact we have to look at submarine fired
torpedoes. They had the biggest impact of
all. In fact the Allies had to defer
the invasion of continental Europe until they could contain
the German U-boat threat. It was that bad.
This picture depicts a German U-boat attacking an English
merchant ship in August of 1942. But it worked both ways.
The Germans had the submersible torpedo imitative in the
Atlantic, but the Americans wreaked havoc of their own
in the Pacific. This is a Japanese destroyer
which has just been sunk by a U.S. submarine.
Here's a cut-away of a Gato class submarine.
These were typical of the long range, the big fleet submarines
that were employed by all Navies during the war.
You can see, at the very after part of the submarine, in the
very forward part, are the torpedo rooms.
So the torpedoes were stored in these areas, in these rooms, and
they were launched from there. This particular model had
six torpedo tubes forward and four torpedo tubes aft.
It could carry 24 torpedoes when it departed on a war petrol.
Below is a Mark 14 torpedo. This is a standard U.S. Navy
submarine torpedo of WWII. It operated pretty much the same
way as the type 91 aerial torpedo that we saw a few
minutes ago. It was steam powered and--
Sir. [inaudible]
Right. Tom noted there's two propellers
at the tail end of the section. These are counter-rotating
propellers. The idea is that one torpedo
would rotate to the left and the other to the right.
That would cancel out, whenever a torpedo rotates you get a
moment that tries to walk the stern of the, in this case the
torpedo, one way or the other. So if you have two torpedoes
counter-rotating it cancels that moment and it makes it a lot
easier to control that weapon. Ships, single-screw ships have
a similar problem, and they all have compensating systems to
keep the stern from walking. So that was a good question.
Thanks. This particular torpedo
is a 600-pound warhead. It has a max range
of 4-1/2 nautical miles. Compare that to the long-lance
we talked about a minutes ago, the long-lance torpedo,
the monster torpedo, had a range of over 20 miles.
Note, here at the UW campus, if you go over to the ROTC building
on Old University, you go inside and it's open to the public,
you'll see a static display of a Mark 14 torpedo.
They actually remained in use until 1970.
I was talking to my dad the other day, he's a former
submariner in the 1960s and that was their standard torpedo even
then. So they torpedoes had longevity.
There were lots of problems during the war initially, with
the exploders, and with other issues.
Very frustrating to American submariners, but in the
technical issues were overcome to deadly result.
This slide shows the impact of American submarines on the
Japanese merchant marine.
By the end of WWII the U.S. had reduced Japan's merchant
service to about 10% of it's pre-war capacity, 10%.
90% of the merchant marine was gone.
Japan was isolated by sea and it was operating on a
subsistence economy at the end of the war, cut off from vital
resources, especially oil. This graph shows
the contribution of submarines, mostly through torpedo attacks
made to the Japanese ability to fight the war.
This story is fairly well known. What a lot of people don't
realize is that the magnitude of the fight in the Atlantic was
much, much greater. German U-boats sank nearly
15 million tons of Allied shipping between 1939-1945.
That's three times the amount of shipping that was sunk in the
Pacific by United States' submarines.
Keep in mind that the 5 million tons of shipping in the Pacific
brought Japan to her knees. 15 million tons in the Atlantic
seriously challenged the Allies but did not cause them
to go down in defeat. This is the worst case scenario,
March to August of 1942, this is when the U-boats peaked in terms
of attacks on, successful attacks, upon Allied shipping.
At this point in the war Germans were sinking 700,000 tons of
Allied shipping each month, which was about as twice as much
as ship building capacity was at that time.
So later through a massive ship building program the Allies,
particularly the United States, overcame these losses, and this
in conjunction with a prodigious effort to develop
anti-submarine tactics and technology enables the Allies
to, principally the Royal Navy and U.S. Navy, to contain
the U-boat threat by the end of 1943, although the last months
of the war, U-boats still sank an average of 100,000 tons
of shipping every month. As you can see, the torpedo
played a very significant role in WWII, and torpedo
technology was in many ways a decisive technology,
particularly in the Pacific. The Germans tried to make it
that way in the Atlantic and were unsuccessful.
As I mentioned before, this story starts in Wisconsin, and
it starts with this young man. His name is
William Barker Cushing. He's in the uniform of a
lieutenant during the Civil War in this picture.
Cushing was expelled from the Naval Academy before the war.
Basically, for incorrigible behavior.
[laughter] But after the war broke out they
lowered the standards so he was able to obtain a commission in
the Navy first as a volunteer and later as a regular officer.
Due to his innate abilities he was quickly promoted.
As a matter of fact he made lieutenant after less than a
year in service. By 1864 he earned a reputation
for daring raids and reconnaissance missions behind
enemy lines. He was born in Delafield,
Wisconsin. Just up the road from here.
He was one of four brothers from the Cushing family who all
served in the Union forces during the war.
William was the youngest. Maybe that explains his
incorrigibility. Of note, if you go to the
Wisconsin Veterans Museum, one of the co-sponsors tonight,
there's actually a display with William Cushing there in the
museum. Many of you may have seen it
already. If not I strongly encourage you
go over to the Veterans Museum. It's really a gem of a museum
right here in Madison. There's also a monument to the
Cushing brothers in Delafield. Anyone here from Delafield?
No. Anybody been there?
Did you see the Cushing monument?
No, I haven't seen it either. [laughter]
By mid-1864, Cushing was assigned to plan, because of his
reputation for courage and resourcefulness, he was assigned
to plan and carry out a mission to destroy this ship.
This is the Confederate ship, Albemarle.
It's a 150-foot ironclad warship, draft of eight feet,
four inches of iron plate armor, two eight-inch guns that could
be moved around inside the casement there to point fore
or aft, or out the sides, and what I find particularly
interesting is that is had two engines, 200 horsepower each.
If you think about a high powered outboard motor,
I mean this is maybe four outboard motors.
So by modern standards it was seriously underpowered.
The ship that I commanded for Operation Iraqi Freedom, we were
about the size of the Titanic and we had a 100,000 horsepower.
We could go pretty fast in that ship.
But anyway, this was the deadly danger to the Union forces in
the waters off northeastern North Carolina, Albemarle Sound,
Pamlico Sound area for those of you who are familiar with the
geography. The Albemarle wreaked havoc with
the Union Squadron that operated in this particular part of the
Atlantic Theater. The Albemarle fought
the Union Navy to a standstill. By the summer 1864 it sank one
ship and damaged many others. Something had to be done.
So Cushing concocted a scheme. He sought to employ stealth and
firepower to achieve his mission.
This was his secret weapon. A steam launch, small,
maneuverable, about 30 feet long.
Look at it this way, it's about the same length as on of those
long-lance torpedoes that the Japanese used in WWII, although
it's much lighter, it's much smaller, it's about a tenth of
the displacement, or the weight. Cushing fitted the launch with a
long spar. You can see it extending out the
bow underwater, a long spar, and at the end of the spar was
a charge of about 100 pounds of explosive, and that charge
was called a torpedo. That was the name we used back
then. It was a torpedo.
So you can see that this was a torpedo vessel.
Of note, both the Union and Confederate Navy experimented
not just with steam launches like this, but also with
submersible vessels that also used spar torpedoes.
Many of you are probably familiar with the Hunley which
was recently, well it was recovered within the last
decade, from Charleston Harbor. It had a similar arrangement for
it's weapons delivery system. Can you see a problem with this,
this particular way of delivering the weapon to the
enemy? [inaudible]
Yeah, you've got to get up close and personal.
So, was this a suicide mission? Pretty much.
Despite all the odds however,
Cushing successfully snuck up to the port, into the port where
the Albemarle was docked and he got his steam launch up close
and personal with the target, the Albemarle.
His attack was successful. This is a graphic Depiction, one
of the best ones I've seen. You can see up here on the upper
right, there are sailors that are firing rifles into the
cockpit of the boat and also one of the eight inch guns is being
fired at the moment of impact. Under cover of darkness,
Cushing is successful. However, most of his crew
is killed or captured. Cushing himself however,
managed to escape. In a very interesting account of
two or three days on the lam behind enemy lines trying to get
back to the Union forces. Here's photographic proof of
Cushing's success. This was taken a few months
after Cushing sank the Albemarle.
This is it. This is the Albemarle, taken by
a local photographer. For his gallantry and his
leadership Cushing received a promotion to Lieutenant
Commander, Commander. A side note, one of his
brothers, Alonzo Cushing, was present at the Battle of
Gettysburg. As a matter of fact, Alonzo
commanded a Union battery, artillery battery, which was the
focal point for Pickett's Charge.
He was killed in that battle, wounded three times but
continued to maintain his station and encourage his men to
return fire. Interestingly enough, in May of
2010, thanks to former Senator Russ Feingold, Cushing was
approved for the medal of honor posthumously, over hundred
years later. So I don't think he's been
awarded it yet, but he's going to be.
That was William Cushing's brother, so a very courageous
family. With Cushing's success, other
navies took notice. They also took notice of the
drawbacks of his delivery method.
This is a slide of a British Steam launch a few of decades
after the Civil War, experimenting.
This is actually a video clip and you can go on-line and watch
the explosion from the steam launch.
So other navies, not just the United States Navy, begin to
explore ways to employ stealth, speed and, oh yeah,
survivability with torpedo delivery platforms.
It's obvious these weapons pack a mighty punch.
The Albemarle was the first battleship, a capital ship,
to be sunk by a torpedo that was ironclad.
Some other torpedoes had been used in the Civil War against
wooden ships, but this was an ironclad ship.
A cheap steam launch with a small crew did in an expensive,
high-powered warship, battleship.
This man, pictured on the right, is the man who solved the
problem, or helped solve to problem of survivability.
This is Robert Whitehead. He invented a reliable, working,
self-propelled, self-guided torpedo in the 1870s.
The Whitehead torpedo became the prototype for modern torpedoes.
Here he's pictured in his workshop in Croatia, of all
places. He was under the employ of the
Austro-Hungarian Navy at the time.
That's his son next to him. He helped with experiments.
Literally, Whitehead created these torpedoes in his garage.
In his garage. You can see behind him there,
the workshop. Interesting historical side
note, Whitehead's granddaughter later married a young Austrian
Naval officer. You know the story don't you?
His name was Georg Ludwig von Trapp.
Von Trapp became a submarine ace in WWI, on the other side, not
the side the Americans were on. He became an ace, a very
accomplished submarine officer. Very interesting situation
for Whitehead's granddaughter, Agatha, because she was
a British citizen in Austria-Hungary during the war.
She was basically an enemy, a non-combatant.
But they got through it and the couple went on to have seven
children. Unfortunately, Agatha died in
the 1930s leaving the children motherless, so von Trapp brought
in a nanny to help take care of the kids.
Her name was Maria. You guessed it.
This is the von Trapp family singer, the "Sound of Music."
Remember Christopher Plummer playing the role of von Trapp?
So there's a connection between Wisconsin, Cushing and the
torpedo and all this. I just thought that was
interesting how it all ties together.
Needless to say, the Whitehead torpedo improved the
survivability of the delivery platform and the crew that
steered the delivery platform. These early torpedoes used
compressed air as their load of force, their propulsion.
Here's a picture of a Whitehead torpedo from the 1890s and
here's one of the more modern delivery vessels, you see this
is the descendent of Cushings steam launch.
This is the USS Stiletto, a US navy torpedo boat in the late
1890s, launching a Whitehead torpedo.
Of course, with more capable torpedo boats, they're faster,
stealthier, they can standoff so it's easy for them to get in and
deliver their weapon against the enemies capital ships.
These torpedo boats became threats to the battle lines of
the world's big navies. They needed to create a new type
of ship to screen the battleships and these cruisers
from the pesky little torpedoes boats.
How do you solve this problem? You make a ship that's bigger,
faster and more heavily armed. They call these bigger, faster
and more heavily armed ships 'torpedo boat destroyers'.
This is the Genesis of the modern naval destroyer.
This is DV1, the first US Navy destroyer, the USS Bainbridge.
It was launched in 1902. These ships were created to stop
the torpedo from being a threat. In the end they ended up
carrying torpedoes themselves. Navies also looked to underneath
the water to find stealth with which to deliver their
torpedoes. I mentioned the Hunley and the
Civil War experiment, the submersibles.
By the end of the 19th century modern submarines had been
developed. This is the USS Holland, the US
Navy's first submarine. You see in the bullnose of the
ship, there's a man bent over and he's looking into the
torpedo tube of the Holland. Finally, navies looked to the
air for delivery of torpedoes. This is a Douglas DT2 seaplane.
It was one of the very first torpedo aircraft in the world,
much less in the US Navy. The US Navy actually pioneered
aerial torpedo tactics. Developments that Japanese
watched very closely and learned from.
It came back to haunt the United Stated of 7 December, 1941.
I have here some suggested reading.
I realize that your not going to write this down, but there's
some interesting books that address some of the topics I
presented today. If you are interested I can--
grab me after the session tonight and I'd be happy to send
you an e-mail with both, the suggested reading and some
websites of interest as well. With that I'll turn it over to
my Air Force colleague. [applause]
Lt. Col. Todd Berge: All right, can you here me?
Lieutenant Colonel Todd Berge.
Don't use the flight suit I guess, huh?
Is that better? All right.
Todd Berge. I'm the Deck Commander here at
the University of Wisconsin, Det. 925.
What's interesting is that I actually graduated from here
about 18 years ago as a cadet myself.
Who'd ever have thought that I'd be back, actually standing in
front, in a classroom like this. I've been doing it for
a year and a half as a professor over there at the ROTC
detachment, and I actually love being back.
During those 18 years I've been around the world, around the
country, flying the A-10 fighter and the B-2 Stealth Bomber, so I
was very honored to be asked to come back here and talk about
where my roots came, especially as a bomber pilot.
In the B-2 we talk about precision a lot.
Here's a lot of technology that goes into precision.
They also talked about precision bombing in WWII.
As I'm going to talk about just how, kind of, flawed that was.
It really wasn't all that 'precision,' especially what
we're talking about today. Yes, Science and Technology in
WWII, but I'm actually going to tell you how science and
technology may be kind of fail a little bit.
It was maybe not as successful as what the scientist thought or
hoped. Hopefully, I'll show you that in
a little bit. But in the end, we won, right.
So that's cool. Here's what I'm going to talk
about. Mostly I'm going to talk about
bombers, right? Flying, 'cause I'm in the Air
Force. The B-17 Flying Fortress, the
Norten Bombsight that was of course used in the B-17 and just
about every aircraft during WWII as far as the heavier bombers.
Precision daylight bombing, and them I'm going to talk about
someone, Jack Miller. He was here in Madison, actually
was a student in 1940, here at the UW.
Then he went and fought in the war as a B-17 pilot.
He flew in the Schweinfurt missions, both of them.
I actually interviewed him 18 years ago as part of
my senior thesis. I was a History major.
So I'll talk a little about him. Then, what precision is, back in
WWII and then what it is now. You'll get to see some pretty
cool pictures. Hopefully, you'll think
they're cool. I think they're cool.
All right, the B-17, the Flying Fortress.
Why was it called the Flying Fortress?
Well, the engineers, back in the '30s, they had this problem of
fighters coming up and shooting these big bombers, these big,
slow, big targets, down. So they said how can we stop
this from happening. They basically outfitted this
airplane with a whole bunch of 50 caliber machine guns.
We've got twin 50 cals. here, we've got twin 50 cals.
in a ball turret, we got a 50 cal. on each side, those are
called waste gunners, we got a top turret here with a 50 cal.
We got two twins in the nose and then they later added on a
chin turret for twin 50 cals. This picture also shows the bomb
bays here. And if you can see, they're kind
of small which I'll get to-- actually it says right on there,
4000 pound payload. Sounds like a lot, it's really
not. That's only about eight 500
pound bombs. In comparison, the B-2 that
I flew, we could drop 80 500-pound bombs.
It was big payload back then though, 70 years ago.
A crew of ten, we'll talk about that, what was
significant about that. The self-defense, all those
50 cals., the engineers thought, would defend it
from enemy fighters. Not only did they do that but
when you fly in formation, you've got B-17s all around you
you are also armed with all those 50 cals. so it's not just
10 or 12 50 cals. aimed at enemy fighters coming at you, it's
dozens, maybe hundreds. When you think about that,
that makes sense, certainly nobody would attack
this flying fortress. It's bristling with defenses.
Well, again, it sounded good. It worked okay, but as we found
out, it was actually a bit of a failure.
It is not work so well and the Americans were very behind on
building fighter escorts. We had the P-47, Thunderbolt,
very cool airplane, very good, but it did not have very long
legs, meaning it couldn't go very far.
They didn't have in-air refueling back then, and they
didn't have very good external fuel tanks.
So what would happen is that the B-17s would take off from
England, get over to about France then their escorts would
turn around and have to go back to England.
And right about then the Germans, and Jack Miller, this
is a quote from him, The Germans would escort them
the rest of the way to the target, and the rest of the way
back to France, until the P-47 could pick up the escort then.
Kind of a little bit of morbid humor there but that's the way
it was. As you can see, a lot of
technology, engineering, went into this, but perhaps it didn't
work too well. Again, American ingenuity, we
did then see the need during the early parts of the war,
hey this isn't working out too well, we're going to need a
better escort. Anybody know what morphed into
that then? Yeah.
The P-51 Mustang! Awesome airplane.
I really wish I could fly one. Maybe someday at an air show
I'll have enough money to go up in one.
But yes, very good airplane and, later stages of the war, the
P-51s could take off with the B-17s, and along with their
armament and the escorts, the losses during the raids went way
down to acceptable numbers. What's acceptable, I don't know,
but better than what before the P-51 was out.
All right. Another piece of technology
that's in a B-17, and you can tell this is a pretty new
picture here. This is the Norden bombsight
right here. Developed back in the late '30s
and extremely complicated for the time.
It was one of our most guarded secrets during the war.
We definitely tried our best to keep any of these out of the
German's hands. Still, today, most of you
probably have heard of the Norden bombsight.
I'm going to go against the grain a little bit and say it
wasn't really all that, that it was cracked up to be.
If you read enough you'll see that it definitely wasn't.
Now, was it good? Yeah, absolutely.
It was better than just doing this, but doing what the B-17
was supposed to do effectively, again we had to use some
American ingenuity and do it a little bit different.
Still used. We actually used this bombsight
all the way into Vietnam, believe it or not.
That seems crazy. I'm sure it got tweaked and
stuff over the years, but it got literally used up until 1967,
was the latest date that I read. So, during the development of
it, they actually were out at, they were probably out in Utah
or Nevada out in the desert out there, they were actually
getting bombs from high altitude, over 20,000 feet,
consistently within what's called a CEP, circle error
probable, of 75 feet. Wow, that's awesome.
That's actually pretty decent even today.
Believe it or not. Especially with a dumb bomb, an
unguided bomb. Well, I've dealt with engineers,
I don't know if any of you are engineers, but I kind of know
how that goes. Here's the military going whoo,
we got this awesome bombsight. We can get bomb within 75 feet.
This is awesome. Nobody's going to be able to
stop us. So you can see how we got this
precision daylight bombing theory from the tests.
Well, the winds are probably always the same out in the
desert there, humidity, yeah not so much, and we've been there
forever so we know the conditions, we know the
elevation, we know everything. So they're going up there
testing this. Sure, they get pretty good at
hitting these targets, right. So we go into the war thinking
we've got this Norden bombsight, Bam!
We've got the Flying Fortress, Bam!
Nobody's going to hit us. Daylight precision bombing.
We're going to be able to go over France and Germany with
hundreds of bombers and we're going to use this awesome Norden
bombsight and do precision. We're going to be able to hit
factories, anything we want.
Well, that didn't work out so well.
Interestingly enough, the Britons used
a totally different tactic. They all flew at night and used
radar to find cities and different targets, and in the
end their precision was about as good as ours.
But we had a lot more B-17s. It just wasn't nearly as
successful as we thought, and I'll show you some pictures
later. The bomb procedures,
interesting enough, are still similar today, even when I
started flying the A-10 and dropping bombs, it kind of used
some of the same tactics that they used back then a little
bit. What would happen is the pilots
would take off from England, you'd fly a route over and the
bombardier, you can see right here.
There's a little rubber eye piece, there's a saying, you
could always tell a bombardier by the ring around his eye.
He kind of looked like a racoon, because that rubber would melt
off onto their eye. So the navigator and the pilot
worked together, to get to what's called the IP, initial
point, and an IP is usually something very identifiable, a
big lake, a big bridge, a very significant bridge that's going
across a river, something easily identifiable.
Then the pilot would put it on autopilot and the bombardier
would actually start flying the plane.
You'd know before the attack, they do their study with the
intelligence officers and stuff, this is your IP and they'd have
pictures, and this is the heading, airspeed and altitude
that you're going to fly from that IP to the target.
They'd have a time and everything.
They'd know exactly, even if you couldn't see the target you
could actually get close if you were going to drop the bombs.
Actually everything went over to that bombardier, and he had a
little joystick that he could fly the plane.
Now he's looking down and he, the bombardier, is flying the
plane. Again, supposedly,
theoretically, when he found the target, the bomb bays
are already open and he pickles the bombs off and
they come out and hit the target.
Then immediately the control of the plane would go back to the
pilot and they'd do their evasive actions and get out, and
hopefully get back to England. Like I said, it didn't work all
that well. Most of the bombs were going
outside of a thousand feet of where they were supposed to go.
So that 75 feet? It wasn't working so well.
Actually, they came up with some new tactics over there.
They'd go up and get they best bombardiers and navigators and
fly in the lead aircraft in that flight.
Now everybody would go over the target.
Right before the target all the planes would open their bomb bay
doors, and that lead guy would fly over the target they would
all drop their bombs on that lead guy.
Everybody's dropping on that same target before, but they're
all missing because they're all flying in the same airstream and
that bombsight is okay, but their bombs are probably going
missing in the same spot. Now if the lead bombardier gets
at least close, now you get this mass formation of bombs coming
down and odds are that somebody's going to hit the darn
thing, right? So, that's what they did.
Finally, we got better results. Using the bombsights, still, but
just with pure American attrition and fire power
overwhelmed the enemy. Pretty cool.
All right, so let's get back to this daylight precision bombing.
I kind of already told you the actual procedures of using the
Norden bombsight and the plane itself.
I already talked a little bit about how we would almost
overwhelm them with our defenses.
But they had fighters that would come up.
And of course, the Germans were very innovative, too.
They would come up with their own tactics.
One of the things that Jack Miller told me that I'll get to,
too, is they would sit back. You've got this mass formation
of B-17s. They would sit up here and have
big rocket pods, and just lob rockets.
It's a target-rich environment, right?
If I threw a rock at a big bunch of birds, you know, if I'm above
them, I'm probably going to hit one.
I'll get lucky, right? That's what they would do.
A lot of the gunners, the tailgunners especially
fell prey to this. One of his did.
They'd get killed because it would blow up the tail.
A lot of times, it would bring the whole plane down, but in his
instance, it just killed his tailgunner.
But you know, when you're sitting or standing off that
far, the 50 cals were just not effective at all.
They also added that chin turret that I showed you before.
Originally, you didn't have that.
They could just come right at you, because the two guns up
front and then the top turret and the bottom turret, there was
a cone in there that they'd be relatively safe in with 50 cal
power. So our tactics changed.
We got that chin turret and eventually tightened it up
a little bit. Flak.
Does everybody know what flak is?
The flak was so thick you could walk on it.
Well, I've seen pictures that Jack Miller took, and it was.
Actually, more planes were brought down from flak, which 50
cals don't do anything against, than the fighters.
That may be a little bit-- I'll tell you what flak is,
if you don't know. It's anti-aricraft artillery.
So, the Germans were on the ground with big, huge guns.
Ba-boom, ba-boom. You see them in the movies.
It's the black puffs of smoke. It's just shells that
are exploding, and now you get shrapnel that goes all over
the place. What the Germans would try to do
is not necessarily shoot a plane down with that flak, but they'd
hope to at least shoot out an engine.
Because if they got one engine out, what could that plane not
do? It could not stay in formation,
because it's got three engines now, or two engines instead of
all four. So, that plane is losing
air speed. It's losing air speed.
It might be still flyable, just fine, but it's losing air speed.
It can't keep up with the rest of the formation.
Now it truly only has those ten guns, and not the dozens,
hundred guns protecting it. He said, immediately, you'd get
a dozen German fighters on you, and they'd finish you off in a
heartbeat. So flak would injure the plane.
The fighters would take them down the rest of the way.
Very scary. Very scary.
So, fighters, flak, failure. My three Fs there.
And it was. Our commanders eventually
admitted it. So, we had the beginnings of the
technology. It just wasn't quite there yet.
It made sense before the war. It seemed like it was
unstoppable. It just wasn't quite there yet.
Tremendous losses during the war.
I put this picture up here. This is actually a German B-2
rocket site. So you can see a B-17 could
usually drop about eight bombs. You can imagine how many B-17s
it took. You start looking, and gee,
that's pretty precise. Look at all those craters all
over the place. They really smacked that target.
Well, I'm not so sure. I mean, look at most of them.
They're out. They've killed some corn cobs.
All right, good. This looks like it's basically
just a berm, all right? It probably didn't do anything,
even those craters there. Inside, okay, that's just a
little blast pad there. I don't really see anything on
the rocket launch itself. This building, sure.
I mean, this was probably operational in a day or two
again. Who knows how many crews got
shot down, or killed trying to attack this target.
It was really maybe out for, like I said, and I'm guessing,
but not very long. So we definitely needed
something different. All right.
Again, very cool. Jack Miller, 18 years ago, I was
just a young kid myself. I didn't really appreciate it.
I did. I thought it was really cool.
But I really appreciate it now, the time that I got with him.
When he lived out on the west side of Madison there, I went
out to his house, sat with his wife, interviewed him with, you
know, a little tape recorder. He showed me pictures.
When he was flying, he had a camera.
He'd be flying, you know, on his bomb runs, and he'd just
randmomly snap pictures. He had them in this book.
Incredible pictures. They really should be in the
Historical Society here. Really cool stuff.
You could see the flak and German fighters.
And these are pictures that he took.
He told me stories, really cool. Kind of a side note.
I came back here a year and a half ago.
I was unpacking all my stuff, right?
I came across my paper. I hadn't seen it in 18 years,
probably. I'm like, oh, this is cool.
Gosh, I wonder if Jack's still alive.
I told my wife about him, and she's like, why don't you look
him up. Yeah, well, you know.
He wasn't doing too good 18 years ago, he's probably not.
Well, why don't you try. So I tried and I failed.
Then with some help from Michelle, who comes to my debt a
lot, and my admin assistant Barbara, and my wife, I
eventually tracked him down again.
Unfortunately, he did die four years ago.
But his wife is still alive, and I ended up getting a hold of
her. Me and my wife went out there.
This is about not quite a year, maybe ten months ago.
We went back out there, the same house, and met his wife again.
She remembered me. I sat in the same chair, and got
to see all the same stuff again, and showed my wife.
It was so cool. So cool.
But he is a true Madison war hero.
The stuff that he did and the stuff that he told me,
unbelievable. I mean, I still get shivers to
this day. He saw things at 22 years old,
I mean, that I can't imagine at 41 years old.
He was on the first and second Schweinfurt missions, if you've
ever heard of those. Those were the ball bearing
factories that we went after. Everything is made out of ball
bearings, and is still today. But we knew that if we took out
those ball bearings, we could bring down the German war
machine. So we again used our ingenuity,
and we tried to use German technology against them by doing
a split campaign from the first one.
We took off with 146 planes, B-17s initially, and they knew
the German radar would see them, right, and that the fires would
come up. It was kind of a normal raid,
right? Then, the second wave of 230
were going to take off right about the time the Germans were
out of gas. Then we'd be able to go attack
the Schweinfurt factories without any fighter opposition.
Brilliant, right? Kind of using, like I said, the
technology against themselves, if that makes sense.
The bad thing was, anybody ever been to England?
The weather sucks over there, right?
So, the first group takes off, and the second group is in a
different part of England, and they were fogged in.
They can't take off. So we finally take off, and they
get formed up, and they start trundling over.
It's about the same time that the German fighters get refueled
and re-armed. So the Germans got two groups
that day. It was horrific losses.
You can see 24 out of 146 lost over Regansburg, 36 out of 230
lost over Schweinfurt. Remember, there's ten men in
each of those aircraft, so you've got to add a zero onto
each one of those airplanes that were lost.
Very sad. Very frightening.
You know, they had to do 25 missions.
You do 25 missions, now you do the math.
That's more than ten percent. Being an air crew over there,
what are your odds? Not very good.
He was in with that. The first part of this is 1943,
the first part of the war there, when they didn't have the
escorts and stuff. The odds of you getting to 25
missions were just so low, and so scary.
So sure enough, they didn't do very good on the first attack,
so they decided to do another one.
This time, all right, we're not going to mess around with a
split campaign. We're just going to go with
everybody, full-scale attack. Again, did not work so well,
60 out of 290 crews were lost. Finally, Jack did complete his
25 missions. You can see in the parenthese
there, that his bomb group, the 95th bomb group
started with 410 men. At the end, only 39 that he
started with actually got their 25 missions in.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
I was reading a lot in being a history major and in teaching
history to my cadets and other students.
You read a lot that the bombing campaign, and I kind of put a
little bit of a negative spin on it, but to be honest with you,
it's not how I feel. I think it was a success.
I asked Jack this question. I said, hey, I've been reading a
lot, a lot of things say that, you know, German war production
actually increased throughout the war.
In spite of all our bombing, their productivity increased.
So a lot of people think the bombing campaign was a complete
and utter failure. I disagree.
He disagreed. The amount of energy and you
know parts of the German war machine that were spent trying
to shoot these B-17s down was tremendous.
So I do believe that it shortened it.
How could it not. Yes, the production increased,
but the amount of fuel, and weapons, and all this stuff that
the Germans had to pull in to air defense, certainly shortened
the war. Again, kind of my opinion, but
I've got an expert there that backed me up on that one.
All right, I believe this was the first Schweinfurt mission
here. Again, you can see a lot of
craters here, but again, corn cobs.
Here's some craters over here. You can see them.
Those are around some buildings and stuff, but wow.
Now go back to those losses of aircraft and lives.
There's some way up here. Is that worth it?
Is that precision? Yeah, that corner's black,
expecially in that black, it's not working so good.
Can you see it now? [inaudible]
Okay, well, I'm not supposed to move, but it's hard to see the
craters. They didn't do much damage
at all, which is depressing. So, did we learn anything from
it? I think so.
I think I'm somewhat living proof that we did.
Because back in World War II, we used to talk about how many
planes we were going to send against this target to hopefully
ensure that it was destroyed. But now, I flew the B-2 here,
and we talked about, hey, I've got one B-2, how many
targets can I hit. No kidding.
You'll see that here in a second.
This is a picture, and I'm sure you can see this one.
This is a picture in actually Japan, from B-29s.
Again, not too precise. Probably a lot of rice
was destroyed here, but that's about it.
If those were on the cities, how many civilians
are being killed there? A lot.
So, definitely not very precise. Here, also Japan.
Again, showing the lack of precision, or even the care
for precision. This was the fire raids over
Tokyo. You can see whole city blocks
are burned to the ground. They used incendiaries there,
because what did the Japanese build most of their buildings
out of? Wood and paper.
They blew up pretty good, but they burned even better.
So our tactics changed over there.
We flew a little bit lower altitude and dropped hundreds of
thousands of incendiary bombs. We actually killed more people
than the atomic bombs by doing these tactics.
So, that was precision then. This is going to be some
precision now. This is a target in Iraq,
a Bagdad Regime Command Control facility.
This is the before picture. This is the after picture.
Now, it looks like, well, that's pretty good, right?
Well, if you can see, there's a little hole there.
I'm telling you, that's right where that bomb
was supposed to go. I mean, it might be a couple
feet off to the right there, but still, that's pretty precise.
The way we fuse our weapons, we don't want it to blow--
The dome, who cares about the dome?
We care about what's underneath it, right?
So we fuse our weapons to go off after it initially hits, and
blow up inside the building. Same thing here.
You saw the before picture and where this was supposed to hit,
and it did. There's the little hole, right
there, a little bit of charring there.
Well, what happened? We were almost too precise,
because our satellites and planes went over after we
dropped on night one here and said, well, you guys didn't hit
this target. Oh, yeah, we did.
Well, it's fine. The target's fine.
Your bombs didn't go off. So, we had to hit it again.
Now we had the fusing to go off on the roof.
Well, who cares about the roof, right?
Okay, you guys hit the target, okay, great.
Well, afterwards, once we had control of Iraq, our guys went
in there. I wish I had this picture.
But I have a picture of this blue dome from inside, and it is
just demolished, everything inside.
I mean, nothing. So, what did I say, we're almost
too precise there, right? We had to go back and hit it
again, even though it was fine the first time, when we did our
job the first time. All right, here's some
leadership headquarters, before and after.
Again, you can see a little hole there.
This one, it did cave in the whole roof.
Is that precision. One plane did that, all right.
Those are two bombs. That's it.
Com site, you can see those two buildings there.
There's the blue arrow, before. After.
Oh, by the way, is anything touched around it?
These could be houses, anything. Here's pre-strike.
Post-strike. There you can see that building
is totally collapsed. That one's collapsed.
These are partially. This one's collapsed.
Here's another one before and after.
Oh, look at this. Very afraid of attacking--
[inaudible] It's like a church.
A mosque. That's very hairy,
attacking a target like that. But because of our precision, we
were comfortable with doing it. A buddy of mine attacked this
one. Again, a mosque,
a childcare facility. Usually, you wouldn't want
to go after that one. Well, we did.
And I've got a better picture of this one.
I wish I had it tonight. But here you can see a little
bit of a hole here. But all these buildings that the
bomb actually fused, they hit above the second floor.
You can see all the windows are blown out in the second floor.
The mosque and the childcare facility are just fine.
Here again, here today, gone tomorrow.
Here today, gone tomorrow.
I'm going to go through these fairly quickly, but they're
kind of cool pictures. Here's in Afghanistan.
Again, showing precision. Look at these hangars.
And bam, right on top of the hangars.
This one's really cool. Look at this.
You can see the airfield here. You don't have to even hit
buildings. Is this airfield usable?
No. So even if they have fighters,
or whatever, they're not going to use them.
There's another one, before and after.
So, precision, yesterday and today.
I think we've come a long way. We've learned from our failures.
That's all I have. [applause]