cc
for watching Wednesday Nite >> at the Lab tonight. you
I'm Cassie Immel and I work here
Tonight we have a special event. at the Biotech Center.
attack on Pearl Harbor, so It's the 70th anniversary of the
to have two presenters. commThe first presenter,oing
Captain Scott Mobley. He retired from the U.S.
Navy and he is currently
in the History Department. a PhD candidate here at the UW
Iraqi Freedom, more toward the He was part of Operation
it so he's been very proud of this current war that we're in.
He was a former professor of
from 2005-2008. Then Captain Mobley will beW
followed by Lieutenant Colonel Berge,
who is currently the commander
Air Force ROTC, Detachment 925. They just won a pretty
prestigious award.
which designates them Thas the best small detachmentrd
of all the Air Force ROTC detachments in the country.
That's really based on their
leadership on his part. He commissioned here at thet
UW-Madison also in the Air Force
Operation Enduring Freedom and ROTC and he has served in
In Operation Iraqi Freedom he flew the B-2, and then he flew
the A-10 in Operation Enduring
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
ensuring that we all have those of protectfreedoms.country and
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.
Air Force, Navy, any Marines Before we start, we've got Army,
Former Marines? How about veterans in general?
All right.
so we can salute you? CouldAll right, then don't.nute
[applause]
Thank you.
I imagine we even have a few [applause continues]
feel free to correct me as I go Walong, because most of this Ise
learned through books,
My personal history doesn't start in the Navy until the.
1970s.
commemorate the 70th anniversary As Cassie said, today we
7 December, 1941. Over 2400 Americans lost their
lives on that day.
surpassed only by the attacks A of September 11, 2001.is
Incidentally, also several dozen
were killed at Pearl Harbor. Japanese sailors and airman also
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
warfare, from the air, in every dimension of Naval
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.
engineering, I though we'd do a Sincelittle physics here.e and
This is a slide that shows--
How do I back up? WAh, here we go.-
This is a photo taken from
attack on Pearl Harbor a Japanese aircraft while the
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
Over here we have the West already hit their mark.
You can see it's already listing Virginia.
emanating from the hull. to Port and we have a oil slick
has also been hit already. Here we have the Oklahoma which
or seriously damaged Altogether 19 ships were sunk
including all eight battleships of the Pacific fleet except for
one that was in dry-dock back on
Four of the battleships were the West Coast.
Two were sunk and never to be actraised.unk.
Of those ships that were
by torpedoes, two others were struck by torpedoes and
also were struck by bombs.
these ships, 21 torpedoes have Altogether, 29 aircraft attacked
launch and hitting U.S. targets. been accounted for, having been
Again back to our physics lesson, the approach was low
and slow. Low and slow.
The aircraft would fly at only
That's roughly 40 nautical miles 150 knots.
hour. peSo these aircraft are flyinger
at maybe 160-165 miles per hour.
Low to the water, only 65 feet. Interestingly enough, the
Japanese had to modify their
sections, so they wouldn't dive too deeply, due to the shallow
water at Pearl Harbor.
detachable wooden fins that broke off as soon as the weapons
hit the water,
What did they use? to terrible effect.
torpedo that was used at Pearl This is the Mark 91 aerial
It's actually very typical of the standard torpedoes of WWII
used by all the Navies. It was steam powered.
Basically, there were four
a fuel tank. chambers, a pure water tank and
evaporator, and that gray section called the engine room.
the evaporator would mix the
ignite it. water, the fuel and the air and
heat' and that would generate steam, it would expand and go
through a piston engine, that would drive the torpedo through
the water.
warhead, 525 pounds, so it's This particular torpedo had a
of a 500-pound bomb. about the size
the target and it could travel It detonated on impact against
So we're talking pushing at a maximum speed of 42 knots.
It was controlled by 50 miles an hour.
for horizontal control, depth. a hydro-static pressure sensor
it used an installed gyroscope. TI 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
Eventually, five of the eight battleships were returned to
full duty and saw action in the Pacific Theater later in the
war.
workers standing there You can see, there are men,
You can see the size of the hole at the bottom of the dry-dock.
torpedoes. that was caused by the
from six, to as many as nine Estimates are that anywhere
These were devastating weapons. toThese were the ship killersia.
of WWII.
As I mentioned before, torpedoes
in the air, on the surface were launched from platforms
This is a PT boat, and under water.
Many of you probably recall, a famous PT boat.
of PT109. JThis is a 80 foot Elco boat,
the same class of PT
It's launching two Mark 13 that John F. Kennedy skippered.
The Japanese had the-- torpedoes there.
torpedoes called The most fearsome of all the
Many of you may have heard of the Type this.ng-lance.
This was a monster weapon.
torpedo held by any other Hatorpedo operated by any Navyer
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
So this torpedo, when it's going speed of 50 knots.
60 miles and hour, underwater. at peak speed, is approaching
USS Minneapolis in 1942. This photo shows the
Japanese long-lance torpedoes. It was hit by one of these
bow. As you can see it's lost it's
A lot of daweapon.om just one
Now the surface torpedoes were
strategic impact we have to silook at submarine fired of
torpedoes.
all. They had the biggest impact of
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.
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
Here's a cut-away of a Gato class submarine.
These were typical of the long
that were employed by all Navies range, the big fleet submarines
You can see, at the very after during the war.
very forward part, are the part of the submarine, in the
So the torpedoes were stored in these areas, in these rooms, and
they were launched from there.
six torpedo tubes forward and four torpedo tubes aft.
It could carry 24 torpedoes when
Below is a Mark 14 torpedo. This is a standard U.S. Navy
submarine torpedo of WWII.
way as the type 91 aerial It torpedo that we saw a fewsame
minutes ago.
Sir. It was steam powered and--
Right. [inaudible]
at the tail end of the section. TomThese are counter-rotatingers
propellers. The idea is that one torpedo
would rotate to the left
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.
counter-rotating it cancels that So if you have two torpedoes
easier to control that weapon. moment and it makes it a lot
a similar problem, and they all Shave compensating systems toe
keep the stern from walking.
Thanks. SoThis particular torpedoon.
is a 600-pound warhead. It has a max range
of 4-1/2 nautical miles.
we talked about a minutes ago, Compare that to the long-lance
the monster torpedo, the long-lance torpedo,
Note, here at the UW campus, if you go over to the ROTC building
on Old University, you go inside
you'll see a static display of a and it's open to the public,
They actually remained in use Mauntil 1970.do.
I was talking to my dad the other day, he's a former
submariner in the 1960s and that
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
technical issues were overcome submariners, but in the
This slide shows the impact of to deadly result.
Japanese merchant marine.e
By the end of WWII the U.S. had reduced Japan's merchant
service to about 10% of it's
90% of the merchant marine pre-war capacity, 10%.
Japan was isolated by sea and it was operating on a
subsistence economy at the end
resources, especially oil. of the war, cut off from vital
the contribution of submarines, mostly through torpedo attacks
made to the Japanese ability to fight the war.
This story is fairly well known.
realize is that the magnitude of What a lot of people don't
much, much greater. thGerman U-boats sank nearlys
15 million tons of Allied shipping between 1939-1945.
That's three times the amount of
Pacific by United States' shipping submarines.nk in the
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
of attacks on, successful wattacks, upon Allied shipping.s
At this point in the war Germans
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
anti-submarine tactics and effort to develop
to, principally the Royal Navy technology enables the Allies
the U-boat threat by the end of 1943, although the last months
of the war, U-boats still sank
of shipping every month. an average of 100,000 tons
played a very significant role As you can see, the torpedo
technology was in many ways a decisive technology,
particularly in the Pacific.
that way in the Atlantic and The Germans tried to make it
As I mentioned before, this story starts in Wisconsin, and
it starts with this young man.
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]
lowered the standards so he was Bable to obtain a commission iny
the Navy first as a volunteer and later as a regular officer.
Due to his innate abilities he
As a matter of fact he made lieutenant after less than a
year in service.
for daring raids and By 1864 he earned a reputation
enemy lines. reconnaissance missions behind
Wisconsin. He was born in Delafield,
He was one of four brothers from Just up the road from here.
served in the Union forces the Cushing family who all
William was the youngest. Maybe that explains his
incorrigibility.
Wisconsin Veterans Museum, one Of note, if you go to the
there's actually a display with William Cushing there in the
museum. Many of you may have seen it
already.
go over to the Veterans Museum. IIt's really a gem of a museumu
right here in Madison.
Cushing brothers in Delafield. There's also a monument to the
No. AnyoAnybody been there?eld?
Did you see the Cushing monument?
No, I haven't seen it either. [laughter]
By mid-1864, Cushing was
reputation for courage and assigned to plan, because of his
to plan and carry out a mission resouto destroy this ship.signed
This is the Confederate ship, Albemarle.
It's a 150-foot ironclad
four inches of iron plate armor, warship, draft of eight feet,
be moved around inside the two eight-inch guns that could
or aft, or out the sides, and what I find particularly
interesting is that is had two
If you think about engines, 200 horsepower each.
I mean this is maybe four a high outboard motors. motor,
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 Union Squadron that operated The Albemarle wreaked havoc with
Atlantic Theater. in thThe Albemarle foughtf the
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.
firepower to achieve his He sought to employ stealth and
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
the displacement, or the weight. smaller, it's about a tenth of
long spar. Cushing fitted the launch with a
bow underwater, a long spar, You can see it extending out the
a charge of about 100 pounds and at the end of the spar was
was called a torpedo. That was the name we used back
then. It was a torpedo.
So you can see that this was a
Of note, both the Union and Confederate Navy experimented
not just with steam launches
submersible vessels that also liused spar torpedoes.th
Many of you are probably
was recently, well it was farecovered within the lastich
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
enemy? delivering the weapon to the
Yeah, you've got to get up close [inaudible]
So, was this a suicide mission? aPretty much.
Pretty much.
Cushing successfully snuck up to Despite all the odds however,
the Albemarle was docked and he got his steam launch up close
and personal with the target, the Albemarle.
His attack was successful.
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
fired at the moment of impact. of the eight inch guns is being
Cushing is successful. Under cover of darkness,
is killed or captured. However, most of his crew
managed to escape. Cushing himself however,
two or three days on the lam In a very interesting account of
back to the Union forces. beHere's photographic proof ofet
Cushing's success.
after Cushing sank the This was taken a few months
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,
focal point for Pickett's artillery baCharge.which was the
He was killed in that battle, wounded three times but
continued to maintain his station and encourage his men to
return fire.
2010, thanks to former Senator Interestingly enough, in May of
approved for the medal of honor posthumously, over hundred
years later.
awarded it yet, but he's going So I don't think he's been
That was William Cushing's to be.
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
after the Civil War, Steam launch a few of decades
This is actually a video clip and you can go on-line and watch
the explosion from the steam
So other navies, not just the United States Navy, begin to
explore ways to employ stealth, speed and, oh yeah,
survivability with torpedo
It's obvious these weapons pack dea mighty punch.s.
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,
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
Here he's pictured in his prworkshop in Croatia, of alls.
places. He was under the employ of the
Austro-Hungarian Navy at the
That's his son next to him. He helped with experiments.
Literally, Whitehead created
In his garage. these torpedoes in his garage.
the workshop. YInteresting historical side,
note, Whitehead's granddaughter later married a young Austrian
Naval officer.
His name was You know the story don't you?
Von Trapp became a submarine ace Georg Ludwig von Trapp.
the side the Americans were on. in He became an ace, a verynot
accomplished submarine officer. Very interesting situation
for Whitehead's granddaughter,
a British citizen in Agatha, because she was
She was basically an enemy, Austria-a non-combatant.he war.
But they got through it and the couple went on to have seven
children. Unfortunately, Agatha died in
the 1930s leaving the children
in a nanny to help take care of motherless,the kids.rapp brought
Her name was Maria. You guessed it.
This is the von Trapp family
Remember Christopher Plummer singer, the "Sound of Music."
So there's a connection between plWisconsin, Cushing and thep?
torpedo and all this. I just thought that was
interesting how it all ties together.
Needless to say, the Whitehead
survivability of the delivery platform and the crew that
steered the delivery platform.
compressed air as their load of Tforce, their propulsion.d
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
1890s, launching a Whitehead navy torpedo boat in the late
Of course, with more capable torpedo.
stealthier, they can standoff so torpedo boats, they're faster,
deliver their weapon against the it's easy for them to get in and
These torpedo boats became enemies capital ships.
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?
faster and more heavily armed. You make a ship that's bigger,
and more heavily armed ships They call these bigger, faster
This is the Genesis of the 'torpedo boat destroyers'.
This is DV1, the first US Navy modern naval destroyer.
It was launched in 1902. destroyer, the USS Bainbridge.
the torpedo from being a threat. These ships were created to stop
carrying torpedoes themselves. In the end they ended up
the water to find stealth Nawith which to deliver theirath
torpedoes.
Civil War experiment, the I mentiosubmersibles.y and the
By the end of the 19th century
developed. modern submarines had been
Navy's first submarine. TYou see in the bullnose of the
ship, there's a man bent over and he's looking into the
torpedo tube of the Holland.
air for delivery of torpedoes. Finally, navies looked to the
It was one of the very first This is a Douglas DT2 seaplane.
much less in the US Navy. The US Navy actually pioneered
aerial torpedo tactics. Developments that Japanese
watched very closely and learned
It came back to haunt the United from.
I have here some suggested Stated of 7 December, 1941.
I realize that your not going to reading.
some interesting books that address some of the topics I
presented today.
grab me after the session tonight and I'd be happy to send
you an e-mail with both, the
websites of interest as well. With that I'll turn it over to
my Air Force colleague. [applause]
Lt. Col. Todd Berge:
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,
What's interesting is that Det. 925.
about 18 years ago as a cadet I actually myself.ed from here
Who'd ever have thought that I'd
front, in a classroom like this. be back, actually standing in
a year and a half as a professor I've been doing it for
detachment, and I actually over there at the ROTC
During those 18 years I've been around the world, around the
country, flying the A-10 fighter
was very honored to be asked to acome back here and talk about I
where my roots came, especially as a bomber pilot.
In the B-2 we talk about
Here's a lot of technology that goes into precision.
They also talked about precision
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.
WWII, but I'm actually going to Yestell you how science and in
technology may be kind of fail a
It was maybe not as successful little bit.
hoped. as what the scientist thought or
a little bit. HBut in the end, we won, right.n
So that's cool. Here's what I'm going to talk
about.
bombers, right? Flying, 'cause I'm in the Airt
Force.
Norten Bombsight that was of The B-17 Flying Fortress, the
about every aircraft during WWII course used in the B-17 and just
Precision daylight bombing, and athem I'm going to talk about.
someone, Jack Miller. He was here in Madison, actually
was a student in 1940, here at
Then he went and fought in the the UW.
He flew in the Schweinfurt war as a B-17 pilot.
I actually interviewed him missions, both of them.
my senior thesis. 1I was a History major.
So I'll talk a little about him.
WWII and then what it is now. TYou'll get to see some prettyin
cool pictures.
they're cool. HI think they're cool.k
All right, the B-17,
Why was it called the Flying Fortress?
Well, the engineers, back in the
fighters coming up and shooting these big bombers, these big,f
slow, big targets, down.
this from happening. So they said how can we stop
airplane with a whole bunch of They basically outfitted this
We've got twin 50 cals. here, we've got twin 50 cals.
in a ball turret, we got a
called waste gunners, we got 50 cal. on each side, those are
We got two twins in the nose a top turret here with a 50 cal.
chin turret for twin 50 cals. This picture also shows the bomb
bays here.
of small which I'll get to-- And if you can see, they're kind
4000 pound payload. aSounds like a lot, it's really,
not.
pound bombs. That's only about eight 500
I flew, we could drop 80 In comparison, the B-2 that
It was big payload back then 500-pound bombs.
A crew of ten, we'll talk tabout that, what was
significant about that. The self-defense, all those
50 cals., the engineers thought,
from enemy fighters. would defend it
when you fly in formation, Not only did they do that but
you are also armed with all those 50 cals. so it's not just
10 or 12 50 cals. aimed at enemy
dozens, maybe hundreds. fWhen you think about that,s
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
building fighter escorts. We had the P-47, Thunderbolt,
very cool airplane, very good,
legs, meaning it couldn't but it digo very far.ery long
They didn't have in-air refueling back then, and they
didn't have very good external
So what would happen is that the fuel tanks.
England, get over to about B-17s would take off from
turn around and have to go back France theto England.orts would
And right about then the
is a quote from him, Germans, and Jack Miller, this
the rest of the way to the The Germans would escort them
back to France, until the P-47 target, and the rest of the way
Kind of a little bit of morbid could pick up the escort then.
it was. humAs you can see, a lot ofway
technology, engineering, went into this, but perhaps it didn't
work too well.
did then see the need during the Again, American ingenuity, we
hey this isn't working out too early parts of the war,
better escort. well, we're going to need a
that then? Anybody know what morphed into
The P-51 Mustang! Awesome airplane.
I really wish I could fly one.
I'll have enough money Maybe someday at an air show
But yes, very good airplane and, to go up in one.
P-51s could take off with the B-17s, and along with theire
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.
that's in a B-17, and you can Atell this is a pretty newy
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
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
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
was the latest date that I read. literally used up until 1967,
it, they actually were out at, So, during the development of
or Nevada out in the desert out ththere, they were actuallytah
getting bombs from high altitude, over 20,000 feet,
consistently within what's
probable, of 75 feet. calWow, that's awesome.ror
That's actually pretty decent even today.
Believe it or not.
unguided bomb. Especially with a dumb bomb, an
I don't know if any of you are Well, I've dealt with engineers,
how that goes. engineers, but I kind of know
we got this awesome bombsight. Here's the military going whoo,
This is awesome. We can get bomb within 75 feet.
stop us. Nobody's going to be able to
precision daylight bombing So you can see how we got this
Well, the winds are probably theory from the tests.
desert there, humidity, yeah not always the same out in the
forever so we know the so much, and we've been there
elevation, we know everything. conditions, we know the
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,
We've got the Flying Fortress, Bam!
Nobody's going to hit us. Daylight precision bombing.
We're going to be able to go
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
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
end their precision was about as different targets, and in the
But we had a lot more B-17s. good as ours.
successful as we thought, and I'll show you some pictures
later.
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.
would take off from England, What would happen is the pilots
bombardier, you can see right you'd fly a here. over and the
There's a little rubber eye piece, there's a saying, you
could always tell a bombardier
He kind of looked like a racoon, by the ring around his eye.
off onto their eye. So the navigator and the pilot
worked together, to get to
point, and an IP is usually something very identifiable, a
big lake, a big bridge, a very
across a river, something easily significant bridge that's going
Then the pilot would put it on identifiable.
would actually start flying the autopilot aplane. bombardier
You'd know before the attack, they do their study with the
intelligence officers and stuff,
pictures, and this is the theading, airspeed and altitude
that you're going to fly from that IP to the target.
They'd have a time and
They'd know exactly, even if you everything.
could actually get close if you were going to drop the bombs.
Actually everything went over to
little joystick that he could that bomfly the plane.e had a
Now he's looking down and he, the bombardier, is flying the
plane.
theoretically, when he found Again, supposedly,
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.
that well. Like I said, it didn't work all
outside of a thousand feet of where they were supposed to go.
So that 75 feet?
Actually, they came up with some It wasn't working so well.
They'd go up and get they best new tactics over there.
fly in the lead aircraft in that bombardiers and navigators and
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
all drop their bombs on that fly over the target they would
Everybody's dropping on that lead guy.
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
down and odds are that mass formation of bombs coming
thing, right? somSo, that's what they did.darn
Finally, we got better results. Using the bombsights, still, but
just with pure American attrition and fire power
overwhelmed the enemy.
All right, so let's get back to this daylight precision bombing.
I kind of already told you the
Norden bombsight and the plane actual procedures of using the
I already talked a little bit about how we would almost
overwhelm them with our defenses.
But they had fighters that would
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.
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
them, I'm probably going to hit of birds, you one., if I'm above
I'll get lucky, right?
A lot of the gunners, the tailgunners especially
fell prey to this.
They'd get killed because it One of his did.
A lot of times, it would bring would blow up the tail.
instance, it just killed his the whole plane down, but in his
But you know, when you're sitting or standing off that
far, the 50 cals were just not
They also added that chin turret effective at all.
Originally, you didn't have that I shothat.ou before.
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
power. relatively safe in with 50 cal
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
cals don't do anything against, broughtthan the fighters.hich 50
That may be a little bit--
if you don't know. I'll tell you what flak is,
So, the Germans were on the Iground with big, huge guns..
Ba-boom, ba-boom. You see them in the movies.
It's the black puffs of smoke.
are exploding, and now you get It's just shells that
the place. shrapnel that goes all over
is not necessarily shoot a plane What the Germans would try to do
hope to at least shoot out an down with thengine., but they'd
Because if they got one engine
do? It could not stay in formation,
because it's got three engines
all four. nowSo, that plane is losing of
air speed.
It might be still flyable, just fine, but it's losing air speed.
It can't keep up with the rest
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.
The fighters would take them So flak would injure the plane.
Very scary. down thVery scary.he way.
So, fighters, flak, failure.
And it was. Our commanders eventually
admitted it.
technology. It just wasn't quite there yet.e
It made sense before the war. It seemed like it was
unstoppable.
Tremendous losses during the It just wasn't quite there yet.
I put this picture up here. This is actually a German B-2
rocket site.
usually drop about eight bombs. You can imagine how many B-17s
it took.
that's pretty precise. You start looking, and gee,
over the place. They really smacked that target.
Well, I'm not so sure.
They're out. I mean, look at most of them.
All right, good. They've killed some corn cobs.
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.
shot down, or killed trying to Who knows how many crews got
It was really maybe out for, attack this target.
but not very long. like I said, and I'm guessing,
something different. So we definitely needed
Again, very cool. Jack Miller, 18 years ago, I was
just a young kid myself.
I did. I didn't really appreciate it.
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
know, a little tape recorder. wife,He showed me pictures. you
When he was flying, he had a
He'd be flying, you know, on his camera.
randmomly snap pictures. bomb runs, and he'd just
Incredible pictures. He had them in this book.
Historical Society here. They really should be in the
You could see the flak and Really cool stuff.
And these are pictures that he German fighters.
He told me stories, really cool. took.
I came back here Kind of a side note.
I was unpacking all my stuff, a year aright?alf ago.
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
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.
Then with some help from So I tried and I failed.
lot, and my admin assistant MichBarbara, and my wife, Iebt a
eventually tracked him down again.
Unfortunately, he did die four
But his wife is still alive, and years ago.
her. I ended up getting a hold of
This is about not quite a year, Me amaybe ten months ago.here.
We went back out there, the same
She remembered me. house, and met his wife again.
to see all the same stuff again, I sat in the same chair, and got
It was so cool. and shSo cool.wife.
But he is a true Madison war
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
He was on the first and second at 41 years old.
ever heard of those. Schweinfurt missions, if you've
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.
and we tried to use German So we again used our ingenuity,
a split campaign from the first technology agaone. them by doing
We took off with 146 planes,
the German radar would see them, B-17s initially, and they knew
come up. right, and that the fires would
right? It was kind of a normal raid,
were going to take off right Then, the second wave of 230
out of gas. aThen 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,
The bad thing was, anybody ever ifbeen to England?e.
The weather sucks over there, right?
So, the first group takes off,
different part of England, and and the second group is in a
They can't take off. they were fogged in.
get formed up, and they start So we fitrundling over. and they
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
lost over Schweinfurt. over Regansburg, 36 out of 230
each of those aircraft, so Remember, there's ten men in
each one of those airplanes that you've got to add a zero onto
Very sad. Very frightening.
You know, they had to do 25 missions.
You do 25 missions, now you do
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 the war there, The first part of this is 1943,
escorts and stuff. when they didn't have the
missions were just so low, and The odds of you getting to 25
So sure enough, they didn't do so scary.
so they decided to do another very good on one.first attack,
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.
25 missions. Finally, Jack did complete his
there, that his bomb group, You cthe 95th bomb groupthese
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 to my cadets and other history major and in teaching
You read a lot that the bombing campaign, and I kind of put a
little bit of a negative spin on
it's not how I feel. it, but to be honest with you,
I asked Jack this question. I said, hey, I've been reading a
lot, a lot of things say that,
actually increased throughout you know, Gethe war. production
In spite of all our bombing,
So a lot of people think the their productivity increased.
and utter failure. bombing campaign was a complete
He disagreed. The amount of energy and you
know parts of the German war
to shoot these B-17s down was machine ttremendous.ent trying
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.
I've got an expert there that Agbacked me up on that one.but
All right, I believe this was the first Schweinfurt mission
here. Again, you can see a lot of
craters here, but again,
Here's some craters over here. corn cobs.
Those are around some buildings and stuff, but wow.
Now go back to those losses of
There's some way up here. aIs that worth it?.
Is that precision?
expecially in that black, it's Yeah, that corner's black,
Can you see it now? not [inaudible]good.
Okay, well, I'm not supposed to move, but it's hard to see the
craters.
at all, which is depressing. They didn't do much damage
it? So, did wI think so.thing from
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
ensure that it was destroyed. aBut now, I flew the B-2 here,ly
and we talked about, hey, I've got one B-2, how many
targets can I hit.
You'll see that here No kidding.
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,
are being killed there? how maA lot.ilians
So, definitely not very precise.
Again, showing the lack of precision, or even the care
for precision.
Tokyo. This was the fire raids over
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
thousands of incendiary bombs. altitude and dropped hundreds of
than the atomic bombs by doing We actually killed more people
So, that was precision then. these tactics.
precision now. This is going to be some
a Bagdad Regime Command Control This is facility.in Iraq,
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,
was supposed to go. I mean, it might be a couple
feet off to the right there, but
The way we fuse our weapons, still, that's pretty precise.
The dome, who cares about we don'tthe dome?to blow--
We care about what's underneath it, right?
So we fuse our weapons to go off
blow up inside the building. after it initially hits, and
You saw the before picture and Same thing here.
and it did. wThere's the little hole, right
there, a little bit of charring there.
Well, what happened?
because our satellites and We were almost too precise,
dropped on night one here and said, well, you guys didn't hit
this target.
Well, it's fine. Oh, yeah, we did.
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,
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
just demolished, everything blue dome frinside.de, and it is
I mean, nothing.
too precise there, right? SoWe had to go back and hit itst
again, even though it was fine
job the first time. the fAll right, here's some our
leadership headquarters, before and after.
Again, you can see a little hole
This one, it did cave in the there.
Is that precision. whole roof.
Those are two bombs. One plane did that, all right.
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.
Post-strike. Here's pre-strike.
is totally collapsed. ThereThat one's collapsed.lding
These are partially.
Here's another one before This oand after.psed.
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.
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.
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
Here again, here today, facilgone tomorrow.ine.
Here today, gone tomorrow.
I'm going to go through these fairly quickly, but they're
kind of cool pictures.
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.
buildings. You don't have to even hit
No. So even if they have fighters,
or whatever, they're not going
There's another one, to use them.
So, precision, before and after.
I think we've come a long way. yesterday and today.
That's all I have. We've learned from our failures.
[applause]