Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered" channel.

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  40.  @allangibson8494  The SABS was generally a more accurate bombsight, but only when the aircraft was flying straight and level. Since it had no connection the aircraft's autopilot, it quickly lost accuracy if the plane had to take any evasive maneuvers or was thrown off course by wind buffeting. The biggest problem was they were all built by hand and required considerable adjustments after they were built. As a result, less than 1,000 were available by the end of the war. In contrast, somewhere around 80,000 Norden units were built. The right thing to have happen was the British and Americans would both use the same bombsight. The British tried for over three years to get a license for the Norden but the US stupidly wouldn't do it, mostly because of the Navy, which owned the license. As you say, the Norden was only a secret in the minds of the Navy, which had an unreasonable fear that one would be recovered by the Germans from a crashed British bomber. What they didn't know was German espionage agents had already stolen a complete Norden in 1939 and were busily working on a reverse engineered bombsight of their own. They also never were able to figure out how to hook it into the bombers autopilot or initially how to mass produce the sight. Consequently, they were also built by hand until they could go into mass production by late 1944, when it really didn't matter much. There were at least a thousand unused Lotfe 7's in the Carl Zeiss factory by the Russians. They also had very little success trying to reverse engineer the bombsight. If the British and Americans both were using the Norden, it would have been improved more rapidly, and crews from both air forces could have been cross trained. A good example of foolish US isolationism, and something Roosevelt should have stepped in to solve.
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  45. To her credit, the Willie D had one of the highest aircraft kill totals of any destroyer arriving in the South Pacific after the actual invasion of Leyte. She shot down somewhere between ten and fourteen aircraft, depending on which count is to be believed. She had one other unlucky incident while serving in the Aleutians before being deployed to the South Pacific. On June 13, 1944, while assigned to shore bombardment duty against Matsuwa Island in the Kuriles, her radar picked up what the operators identified as an enemy PT boat closing at 55 knots. No visual identification was possible in the early morning gloom and fog, but Willie D opened up radar directed fire with every gun on the ship that could be brought to bear. After about five minutes of firing, the target disappeared from radar, and the crew believed they had sunk the enemy ship. Postwar records show no PT type craft were ever in the Kuriles, and there were no Japanese ships of any kind within 300 miles of the Willie D on June 13. It appears she was a victim of the "Battle of the Pips", something that plagued a whole task force a year earlier in the Aleutians. Radar was still rather primitive, and about all it could do was show reflections from anything on or over the ocean. There's a bird in the Aleutians called the dusky shearwater, a type of albatross, and a large bird at that. They would appear in large flocks when huge schools of anchovy would appear near the surface. Their hunting pattern as they flew a foot or two above the water in unison would show up on radar with the same kind of return as a warship zigzagging to evade incoming fire. When the anchovy school went deeper to escape the birds, the flock would break up and start searching for fish on their own, and the supposed ship would seem to have disappeared from radar, just as if it had been sunk. It looks like the Willie D was shooting at birds, just another unlucky incident in the history of an unlucky ship.
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