[nopelynopington]

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

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

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

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

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

[jordanb]

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

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

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

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

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