Bombs Away : Steinbeck's paean to the Norden Bombsight

For all of us who know of William L Laurence's famous paean to the first atomic bombs (Dawn over Zero), how many of us also know of Nobel winner John Steinbeck and his similar paean to the Norden Bombsight (Bombs Away) ?

None ? 

It was never supposed to be that way.

1945's atomic bomb was classically a weapon of total imprecision .

Drop it somewhere over a city (anywhere) and it can be guaranteed to destroy all the city's war factories, whether they were targeted or not on that raid, along with a few hundred thousand people.

But at the celebratory and futuristic 1940 New York World's Fair, there was seemed to be no need for such a terribly crude weapon; one so certain to unnecessarily kill and destroy much else beyond a few deliberately targeted war factories.

Instead what was called for were daylight raids by small teams of high level B-17 bombers, equipped with the top secret Norden Bombsight, raids which would see them drop their bombs right on target : 'into a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet'.

America's war future was in precision aerial bombing that would win the war quickly, cleanly and cheaply -- and with the minimum of civilian casualties.

Air Force boss Hap Arnold picked famous novelist Steinbeck to pen his praise to precision bombing in light of these expectations.

But when precision bombing proved an abject failure by late 1942, the atomic meatgrinder simply moved up in priorities as Plan B and another book was prepared for the postwar presses.

Why not, because as long as there was a war on, the military totally controlled access and information and also had plenty of money to ease the work of any favoured author, editor and publisher.

Spin, spin, spin.

One way or the other, the post 1945 'war of words' would be won by Washington's military and scientific bureaucrats - regardless of the sorry realities on the ground overseas...

Specialist - in depth - beat reporters - or just cheerleaders, captured by their sources ?

In August 1941, Howard Florey published a gripping human interest drama in the pages of the world's leading medical journal, THE LANCET, complete with dramatic before and after photos of little kiddies rescued from certain death.

Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !

Why not ?

I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.

Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.

But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.

These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.

 (Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)

During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.

A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.

For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !

I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .

They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?

William L Laurence - the New York Times  science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.

But surely , he can't be the only one....

* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.