Retrotechtacular: The TV Bombs Of WWII

Anyone who was around for the various wars and conflicts of the early 2000s probably recalls the video clips showing guided bombs finding their targets. The black-and-white clips came from TV cameras mounted in the nose of the bomb, and were used by bombardiers to visually guide the warhead to the target — often providing for a level of precision amounting to a choice of “this window or that window?” It was scary stuff, especially when you thought about what was on the other side of the window.

Surprisingly, television-guide munitions aren’t exactly new, as this video on TV-guided glide bombs in WWII indicates. According to [WWII US Bombers], research on TV guidance by the US Army Air Force started in 1943, and consisted of a plywood airframe built around a standard 2000-pound class gravity bomb. The airframe had stubby wings for lift and steerable rudders and elevators for pitch and yaw control. Underneath the warhead was a boxy fairing containing a television camera based on an iconoscope or image orthicon, while all the radio gear rode behind the warhead in the empennage. A B-17 bomber could carry two GB-4s on external hardpoints, with a bulky TV receiver provided for the bombardier to watch the bomb’s terminal glide and make fine adjustments with a joystick.

In testing, the GB-4 performed remarkably well. In an era when a good bombardier was expected to drop a bomb in a circle with a radius of about 1,200′ (365 meters) from the aim point, GB-4 operators were hitting within 200′ (60 meters). With results like that, the USAAF had high hopes for the GB-4, and ordered it into production. Sadly, though, the testing results were not replicated in combat. The USAAF’s 388th Bomber Group dropped a total of six GB-4s against four targets in the European Theater in 1944 with terrible results. The main problem reported was not being able to see the target due to reception problems, leaving the bombardiers to fly blind. In other cases, the bomb’s camera returned a picture but the contrast in the picture was so poor that steering the weapon to the target was impossible. On one unfortunate attack on a steel factory in Duren, Germany, the only building with enough contrast to serve as an aiming point was a church six miles from the target.

The GB-4’s battlefield service was short and inglorious, with most of the 1,200 packages delivered never being used. TV-guided bombs would have to wait for another war, and ironically it would be the postwar boom in consumer electronics and the explosion of TV into popular culture would move the technology along enough to make it possible.

40 thoughts on “Retrotechtacular: The TV Bombs Of WWII

  1. “. The black-and-white clips came from TV cameras mounted in the nose of the bomb, and were used by bombardiers to visually guide the warhead to the target — often providing for a level of precision amounting to a choice of “this window or that window?” It was scary stuff, especially when you thought about what was on the other side of the window.”

    Did they even care? I thought first thing military trains their soldiers is to give up on humanitarian behavior. They teach to kill and hate the »enemy«.
    It doesn’t matter if the enemy is an innocent person that never had done anything to the other person.
    It doesn’t matter, if it’s a child or a woman. It’s the »enemy«, simply because the superiors say so.

      1. Good point! In reverse that reminds me of “our” V1 drones sent to England back then.
        The robotic drones didn’t even try to spare civilians, I must shamefully admit.
        They were the the embodiement of the insanity of that war is. 😞
        And war itself is a sign of failure. There’s nothing heroic about it.

        1. That’s a matter of philosophy, I think. Plenty of people still find heroism in war, I don’t think I can say they are right or wrong… But yes the conceit that anybody tried to avoid civilian deaths is almost absurd. Every single faction attacked the populace of their enemies directly. The term “genocide” didn’t yet exist, and these were wars in which older concepts about fighting clashed with industrial scale. I think it’s likely that most people still had ideas of Napoleonic campaigns floating about in their heads, thinking that any commander with enough swagger and willpower could do as he did, and seek to become the next Alexander.

          At any point in the past thousand years and more, a knight on horseback might have his way killing people in a village for sport, and this certainly isn’t pleasant to think of… but when his sword is magnified ten million times by technology it becomes a fundamentally different thing.

          1. Sherman’s march to the sea made him the guy that started off this trend, they figured out that if you go after the people producing the weapons and materiel, it’s a lot more effective than just going after the people pointing their guns at you.

            Not saying any of it is right either.

          2. There’s one thing that comes to mind, though.
            Back in WW1, there was still this Prussian attitude of sparing civilists.
            For example, in the Prussian navy. They had warned and evacuted the civilians on the enemy boat (say freighter) before sinking it.
            Or so I saw in the documentaries. Anyway, it makes WW2 even more tragic in retrospect. There you had this German soldiers in WW1 who still had a basic set of humanism and then you had basically slaughtering on battlefield in WW2 and everything was so much more radical than it already was.

          3. “Sherman’s march to the sea made him the guy that started off this trend”

            I think the mass killing of civilians via military action started long before him.

          4. “That’s a matter of philosophy, I think. ”

            I’m not sure about this.
            There are people who say that “bad times create strong men”, but is this really the case?
            Or how do these bad times create men who’re mentally worn out, broken? Who’re a wreckage?
            What I know about WW2/WK2 is that a lot of German soldiers had been traumatized when they came home.
            Their children and grandchildren wanted to hear their stories and the men were willing to talk about it, but more than often the wifes didn’t allow it.
            It were the wifes who didn’t want to face reality, who didn’t want to hear that their men were guilty and involved in war crimes.
            They wanted to forget about the horrors of war, they wanted to wipe “things under carpet”.
            Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of men were broken after war. They had done and seen horrible things and had no one to talk about.
            I can’t speak for allied soldiers, of course, but I assume they had suffered similarily.

      2. In Dresden allies literally flattened the city just to empty their stock of bombs because it would have been a costly logistic burden to bring that back. The war was already won, sparing Dresden would not have changed the outcome at all. They sacrificed just the city.

        1. Sorties after sorties of bombers flying to Dresden enduring flak just to throw away the bombs? That makes no sense. Sinking barges full of bombs in the North Sea was the gold standard for cheaply disposing of munitions. Whatever the (possibly criminal, even then) motivation for erasing Dresden was, it was not to get rid of the bombs.

        2. Dresden was bombed because it was hoped it would send waves of hungry and desperate refugees north towards Berlin where they’d wreak havoc with the last remains of the German Wehrmacht and complicate any attempt at reorganizing any remaining forces into some sort of defense of Berlin.

          It had nothing to do “emptying a stock of bombs”. The US and UK would not have wasted bomber crews on such an attack just for that. Plenty of better and easier ways to dispose of munitions

    1. in the total war of ww2 precision weapons made little sense and the tech wasn’t really all the way there yet. in the post war era there is a lot of proxy wars and later counter insurgency warfare. in both cases, especially the latter, much effort is expended to decapitate enemy leadership with as little collateral damage as possible to make the local population more amenable to “liberation”. i think (as well as perhaps mutually assured destruction that keeps the superpowers out of direct conflict) this has reduced the scale and frequency of war. of course that’s no comfort to those little guys who get crushed under the wheels of our military industrial complexes and their machinations.

      humanity has a short memory. between periods of utter destruction and the subsequent rebuilding of society, people forget what a suckfest war is for everyone involved. then go about finding new ways of and reasons for blowing stuff up and killing people. why the general population doesn’t get gud at identifying and then tar and feathering war mongers is beyond me.

      1. What often makes me wonder is why longer times of peace aren’t being celebrated and remembered equally as much.
        There are so many fascinating discoveries and inventions being made not related to war.
        Discovery of Penicillin, invention of fire trucks, air ships etc.

        When I’m sometimes watching all these various WW2 documentaries on the news channel in the evening or at night,
        I often sit there and wonder how the world would look like if the millions of lifes in WK2 hadn’t been lost.
        I sit there and wonder why people do such horrible things to each other and on how many songs, paintings and thoughts never came to be because these lifes had been lost.
        More than often, it makes me feel humble and sad.

        1. I’m not sure if you could thoroughly claim that penicillin wasn’t related to war. During its development, bacterial infections were certainly on the forefront of everyone’s mind primarily because of the world wars and the huge number of sepsis cases coming from the front lines. The war production board was involved in its development and especially in the scaling up of production and immediately shipping it to the European theater.

          The world wars killed one in two members of the English nobility, and probably similar fractions of every other European country’s warfighting aristocracy. Really a great shame and loss. These were some of the brightest people in history.

          1. Penicillin absolutely was developed as a strategic and secret war tool, the obvious hope being fewer of our soldiers would die from infection as compared to the enemy. I watched a docudrama about it some years ago.

          2. Good point. Though I was thinking about the discovery of the medical effect of Penicillium moulds, rather than the industrial production of synthesised antibiotics.
            When my grand grandparents were young, the doctors still used the real Penicillin to cure patients.
            That was in a time when things like calf compresses were still in common use, too.

      2. If I tar and feather or even point out the warmongers of this current moment right now, most people here would accuse me of being a monster or some variety of traitor. This is unfortunately standard. Most people bought the rationale for invading Iraq in the 2000s, and later pretended they always saw through it. They’re lying. They saw the vial of white powder held up by Colin Powell, and they trusted the experts. And they went to war with a totally unrelated country that had nothing to do with recent events, and destabilized the entire region, providing warmongers with material to work with for generations to come.

        And nobody, NOBODY I ever meet now even knows the name Victoria Nuland. I tell them to look it up and they blanche and reject all new information, accuse me of being deeply wrong. Warmongers always have a reputational shield in the moment when they are active.

        1. “warmongers of this current moment”

          Unfortunately, the world has always been a group of oligarchies battling for greater control. It’s human nature that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. That’s why I had a chuckle when so many were crowing “The cold war is over!” and even “The end of history!” when the USSR fell. LOL, how’s that going now?

          Second Thoughts on James Burnham
          by George Orwell (1946)

          http://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/ShootingElephant/jamesburnham.html

          Excerpt:

          What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Burnham does not deny that “good” motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia…are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power…in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude.

    2. “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
      – G. K. Chesterton; Illustrated London News, Jan. 14, 1911

      1. There’s also an old saying that comes to my mind, not sure if it’s related to forms of propaganda or not.
        It essentially translates to “imagine it is war, and nobody goes to it”.
        According to the web the original line apparently was “Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came”.

        I think that raises the question about how much each of us is responsible in the greater picture.
        We all think we’re not making a difference. But what if all the people would have a feeling of universal togetherness and empathy and would stick together, on both sides – and would refuse to obey their superiors ?

        As a modern day German, I often wonder about this.
        What if people, if citizens, hadn’t fallen for the promises of Hitler and his propaganda?
        What if the majority had been educated enough or wise enough not to obey to what obviously did contradict to anyones instict about right and wrong?

        Or was it because these generations were being raised with authorian concepts, raised to obey authority?
        Because of the monarchy that did still exist in the years before Weimar?
        Or was it just fear? Fear about upcoming punishment, being worried about what happens to family members if they don’t obey?
        But if they had felt fear from the start or knew about the dangers, then why did citizen give power to Hitler and his henchmen in first place?
        Didn’t they see through, at all? Questions over questions.

        But despite this considerations isn’t there another way out, still?
        Historically, for example, the French people used to able to stand up against their own goverment whenever they were unhappy about decisions they wouldn’t agree with.

        1. My grandparents (both sets) wouldn’t have ever met if not for Hitler, although that’s probably not the worst thing he did.

          I guess people when stressed flock towards people who give them clear answers, promise to make their lives better, and identify someone to blame.

          If the Treaty of Versailles hadn’t been quite so punitive, ‘Dolf’s message might have had less traction, so there is something to be said for being magnanimous in victory… a lesson I thought we were supposed to have learnt by now.

          1. ” so there is something to be said for being magnanimous in victory”

            I think General MacArthur did well in not further punishing Japan after their surrender.

        2. “Stell dir vor es ist Krieg, und keiner geht hin”, but on this site one would better say
          “Stell dir vor es geht, und keiner kriegts hin” (imagine it is possible, but no one can do it)

          sad answer is: “if you don’t go, war comes to you”, and so today the worst killing sprees are welcomed by free-choice-fighters telling the people that it is not killing, because the life of the killed person hasn’t started yet (which is not true, and a lot of people secretly know that, but don’t dare to say it)

  2. The article is IMHO missing information that other systems were more successful. German Fritz-X was fielded in 1943 and is credited with severely damaging some allied ships and sinking Italian battleship Roma. It’s also interesting because its efficiency plummeted after Allies managed to deploy electronic countermeasures.

          1. I know about that experiment and how hilariously got confirmed, but all the bats in the world with their tiny incendiary bomblets won’t sunk a ship.
            But if you put Batman to fly the Ohka it may be a success story, albeit a short one. But how and from where do we get more Batmans?
            Until the end of WW2 only one Batman movie/series was out. So you have one test flight with Robin and one real mission with Lewis Wilson. And even if he jumps out of Ohka at the last moment and survives (he is Batman), how long it takes to swim back to base for the next attack? Unpractical my dear.

  3. Wars are real-world testbeds for new military technology, cf. the two Gulf wars, the current Ukraine war, Bosnia, H&N, today’s POW sodomy technology…

    Robert Goddard lent his expertise to German engineers before the war. And if you hope to make General in the U.S. you really need to hang out in a “combat zone” for 30 days to get that CIB. Bowing to the Hackaday style manual I’m not spelling out what CIB is.

    1. Wars are also good for profits, apparently. I don’t want to know how much WW2 had spurred the US economy back then.
      From a financial point of view it must have been sort of a golden time.
      New jobs, good living standards etc. All thanks to war making.
      I know this sounds a bit unfair, because the US didn’t start this war and wasn’t responsible.

      But still, how much did the country benefit from it?
      Especially after the collapse of world economy that happened years before (Black Thursday, Great Depression).
      WW2 must have been great for heavy industry, for example.
      And for the US military, who could finally expand and upgrade on large scale.

      Btw, I’m not excluding ourselves here.
      To my understanding, steel industry and companies such as H+K do produce for exports, too.
      Germany usually doesn’t participate wars these days anymore, but our tech companies do sell weapons to various war parties.
      That’s ethical questionable, I think and ashames me as a German.
      I wished we would be out of war business altogether by now.

  4. I sometimes wonder how history would have changed if functional guided bombs had been available to the US navy in early 1942. How would Japan have reacted if the bombers stationed on Midway had sunk every IJN carrier in the first couple hours of the attempt to seize it?

    1. They would have needed to know the Japanese ships were located in order to guide bombs to them.

      If the old movie “Midway” is reasonably accurate, it was dumb luck that finally located the IJN carriers.

      1. This is why both sides had spotter planes (US had Catalina flying boat).
        The last wave of dive bombers couldn’t find the IJN carriers because of the clouds, but their luck was that earlier an US sub that was shadowing the carriers was attacked by a japanese destroyer, and this destroyer was steaming full speed towards the carriers when it was spotted by the dive bombers, so they find the way to the carriers.
        Do I have ro remind you that this last wave of dive bombers was the only wave that hit and sunk three carriers? The fourth was sunk as the battle was lost and IJN was retreating.
        As a conclusion, this battle follows the pattern of catastrophes, great achivements and unbelievable happenings: a chain of unique, perhaps accidental, events, situations, equipment failures or successes (like US carriers having superior firefighing equipment, training and build caracteristics – so Yorktown rised back from the dead to take another blow and thus saved Enterprise), one or more changes of fate and universe knows what other hidden variables are around deciding outcomes, that we all call the History.

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