The most important fact about Carl Norden, the godfather of precision bombing, is not that he was a brilliant engineer or a hopeless eccentric. It’s that he was a devoted Christian. As historian Stephen McFarland puts it, You might wonder, if he thought he was being in service to humanity, why he would develop sights to help people drop bombs. And the reason was because he was a true believer that by making bombing accuracy better, he could save lives. He truly believed what the Army and Navy were telling him. And that is that we’re going to destroy machines of war, not the people of war.
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