[FirstClassSkeptic]

The claim that Ferebee was able to drop Little Boy just 800 feet from where he aimed is a fantastic claim. With the technology of 1945, he had about a fifty/fifty change of hitting Hiroshima.

This is a typical account of Ferebee dropping the bomb on Hiroshima:

When the eye-stabbing flash penetrated the goggles intended to shield him, the tail gunner thought he had been blinded. At the signal nearly two minutes earlier, Technical Sergeant George Robert Caron had lowered the dense Polaroids over his eyes and tested them. The bright morning sun had been reduced to an odd, faint purple blob. Nothing more.

Major Tom Ferebee spotted his aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, pressed the trigger on his Norden bomb sight and calmly, but deliberately, announced 'bomb away."

At that moment "Little Boy" tumbled from the belly of the Enola Gay on its six-mile plummet earthward. Isolated by the blackness of his goggles, Caron counted the seconds after the bomb bay doors burst open.

https://tailgunner.homestead.com/b29.html
FIRE OF A THOUSAND SUNS The Tail Gunner's Story

For A-bomb Crewman, It Was `Part Of The Job`August 06, 1985|By Katie Springer, Staff Writer SunSentinel.com

Bombardier Ferebee: just doing his job

Thomas Ferebee remembers that the flight to Hiroshima began in pitch dark at 2 a.m. Bombadier Ferebee was perched in "the glasshouse," the bubble in the nose of the B-29. Clouds were building in the distance by the time the Enola Gay reached Hiroshima. Ferebee centered the crosshairs of his bombsight on the bridge that marked ground zero and squeezed the release trigger.

"I'm not proud of killing a lot of people," says Ferebee today, "but I think we saved many by what we did. I was hoping, with everybody, it would get things over with. If people had seen how the Japs had things set up for our invasion, they wouldn't feel bad at all."

https://www.people.com/people/archive/ar ... 37,00.html
August 11, 1975 Vol. 4 No. 6
Memories of Hiroshima, 1945, from Men Who Were There

The problem with these accounts is that there was no button, lever, trigger, or whatever on a Norden bombsight, that was pressed, pushed, or pulled to release the bombs. The Norden bombsight was an analog computer that calculated when the bombs were to be released, and an internal switch connected at the calculated moment to release the bomb.

I was talking to a high school pal today and I happened to remember this question. He was bombardier so I asked him.

For each mission the bombardier entered a bunch constants into the bomb sight. Such things as altitude, airspeed, type of bomb, etc. The type of bomb was important because the lag, or trail, of the bomb behind the dropping aircraft was different for different bombs.

The bomb sight then computed how much the lag would be as a function of the altitude and type of bomb.

The sight also compensated for head-tail wind and cross wind at the bomber's altitude. The optics of the sight were driven in a direction opposite the planes direction at an adjustable rate. You put the range cross hair on the target and then adjusted the rate until the cross hair tracked the target. At the same time the azimuth cross hair was lined up with the target and when it drifted off the bombsight was swiveled until the target tracked right down the crosshair. Swiveling the sight turned the plane via the autopilot so that by the time of release the bomsight had computed the correct release point for the wind, altitude and bomb aerodynamics.

All of this was done within 60-90 seconds.

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=438659

More than a dozen schools were set up solely to teach bombardiers. Young men by the tens of thousands mastered the skill.

Missions settled into a familiar routine. Half an hour from target, the bombardier would switch on his sight and the formation would turn toward the target. Bomb bays opened, and the bombardier fixed his cross hairs on the target. If they drifted to the right or left, he brought them back into line with one knob and turned another until they held steady. With another set of knobs, he synchronized the sight's tracking speed with the ground speed of the plane. Near the target, corrections became minute, almost undetectable. The plane held course, then gave a gentle lurch as the bombs fell away. The bomb bay doors closed, and the plane swung away from the target for the long flight home.

https://www.airforce-magazine.com/Magazi ... rdier.aspx
December 1990 Bombardier By Bruce D. Callander airforce-magazine.com

Once the bombsight was readied and the aircraft was on final approach, the bombardier selected the primary target in the sight, turned on the system, and took control of the aircraft's autopilot. From that point on, the bombsight actually flew the aircraft, attempting to keep it on the chosen path and correcting for any last-minute adjustments provided by the bombardier. At the proper moment it automatically dropped the bombs; the aircraft was moving over 350 feet per second (110 m/s), so even minor interruptions in timing could dramatically affect aim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bomb_sight

The point is, Ferebee had no special ability that 'tens of thousands' of other bombardiers didn't have. There's nothing he could have done to improve the accuracy of the Norden bombsight over what bombardiers were achieving. The Norden bombsight was an analog computer that automatically dropped the bomb.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

Despite the claim that Ferebee was 'magic' with that Norden bombsight, he actually had poor performance in practice:

At 8:15:17 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, Colonel Ferebee, then a 26-year-old major, pushed a lever in his B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, making sure an automatic system he had activated seconds earlier had functioned. He watched as a single, 9,000-pound bomb turned nose-down and fell toward its target, Aioi Bridge, which he had personally selected from aerial photographs.

The bombardier napped on the way back to the air base in the Mariana Islands, just as he had on the flight to the target. He had been asleep two hours earlier when the pilot, Col. Paul W. Tibbets, who had named the Enola Gay after his mother, first told the crew they were carrying an atomic bomb.

Upon returning to the base, the two officers and the 10 other members of the crew were greeted by numerous generals and admirals, and immediately presented with military decorations.

Max Morgan Witts and Gordon Thomas, in their book "Enola Gay" (Stein & Day, 1966), described the then-Major Ferebee as "rakishly elegant." He was 5 feet 11 inches tall, sported a mustache that made him seem older than his 26 years, and was a crack poker player.

He and a friend from flight school, Theodore van Kirk, a navigator, were assigned to the same bomber crew in England. Colonel Tibbetts, then a captain, was the pilot. They flew together on the first American bombing mission over Europe; successfully attacked the German-held oil fields of Ploesti, Romania, and led the first bombing runs over North Africa.

Eventually, they were selected by Captain Tibbetts for the secret project to drop what they were told would be a devastating bomb on Japan.

Captain Tibbetts, by then a colonel, called Major Ferebee "the best bombardier who ever looked through the eyepiece of a Norden bombsight."

As head of the 509th Composite Group, Colonel Tibbets, who eventually retired as a brigadier general, commanded 1,800 men who practiced B-29 runs under extraordinary secrecy in a variety of places. A problem emerged during bombing practice at the Salton Sea testing range in Southern California: Major Ferebee kept missing his target.

The reason was that at the critical moment when the bomb was released, Major Ferebee lifted himself off the seat to bring his eyes to the sight.

But the greater height needed to drop the atomic bomb without also blowing up the plane meant the chance of error was magnified.

Colonel Tibbets' solution was to fit a padded headrest to the bombsight. Major Ferebee's head was forced into exactly the same position each time. From then on, he bombed with accuracy.

https://www.mishalov.com/Ferebee.html

By Douglas Martin,The New York Times, March 18, 2000

The reason was that at the critical moment when the bomb was released, Major Ferebee lifted himself off the seat to bring his eyes to the sight.
There is a problem with this: Since the Norden bombsight calculated the time to release the bomb, and released it automatically, Ferebee wouldn't know the 'moment' when the bomb was going to release. The bombardier could have his eyes shut when the bomb was released, and it wouldn't make any difference.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

Ferebee was not on the practice dropping of Little Boy:

The aircraft was accepted by the USAAF on 18 May 1945, and assigned to Crew B-9 (Captain Robert A. Lewis, aircraft commander), who flew the bomber from Omaha to the 509th's base at Wendover Army Air Field, Utah on 14 June 1945. Thirteen days later, the aircraft left Wendover for Guam, where it received a bomb bay modification, and flew to Tinian on 6 July. It was originally given the victor number "12," but on 1 August was given the circle R tail markings of the 6th Bomb Group as a security measure and had its victor changed to "82" to avoid misidentification with actual 6th BG aircraft.

During July of that year, after the bomber flew eight training missions and two combat missions to drop pumpkin bombs on industrial targets at Kobe and Nagoya, Enola Gay was used on 31 July on a rehearsal flight for the actual mission. A "dummy" Little Boy assembly was dropped off Tinian.

On 5 August 1945, during preparation for the first atomic mission, pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets who assumed command of the aircraft, renamed the B-29 after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets (1893–1983), who, coincidentally, had been named for the heroine of a novel. According to Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, regularly assigned aircraft commander Robert Lewis was unhappy to be displaced by Tibbets for this important mission, and became furious when he arrived at the aircraft on the morning of 6 August to see it painted with the now-famous nose art. Tibbets himself, interviewed on Tinian later that day by war correspondents, confessed that he was a bit embarrassed at having attached his mother's name to such a fateful mission.

https://www.aviationexplorer.com/B-29_En ... omber.html
BOEING B-29 ENOLA GAY SUPERFORTRESS BOMBER
AIRCRAFT HISTORY, FACTS AND PICTURES
(THE AIRCRAFT THAT DROPPED THE FIRST NUKE ON JAPAN)

There was only one practice dropping of the 'dummy' Little Boy, and it was done by Lewis, and his crew, not by Tibbets and his selected crew.

Also, when was the Norden bombsight calibrated for the aerodynamics of Little Boy?

An additional factor was that the shape and even the paint of the bomb mantle greatly changed the aerodynamic properties of the weapon; and, at that time, nobody knew how to calculate the trajectory of bombs that reached supersonic speeds during their fall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bomb_sight

For each mission the bombardier entered a bunch constants into the bomb sight. Such things as altitude, airspeed, type of bomb, etc. The type of bomb was important because the lag, or trail, of the bomb behind the dropping aircraft was different for different bombs.

The bomb sight then computed how much the lag would be as a function of the altitude and type of bomb.

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=438659
(Quoted earlier)

When were the aerodynamics of Little Boy determined? How could it be done with just two bombs, one (assumed) 'real' and one 'dummy'?

The U.S. military dropped other bombs by the thousands and thus had opportunity to make corrections for the characteristics of different bombs. With Little Boy they only had one chance.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

Exactly how accurate was the Norden bombsight? Not nearly as accurate as claimed. Plus, there was an added difficulty over Japan as compared to Europe: There was a jet stream about 25,000 feet above Japan, blowing about 100 to 300 miles per hour, which was constantly and unpredictably changing speed and direction.

Many factors have been put forth to explain the Norden's poor performance. Over Europe, the cloud cover was a common explanation, although performance did not improve even in favorable conditions. Accuracy did improve with the introduction of the "master bomber" concept, under which only a single aircraft would actually use the Norden while the rest simply dropped on their command (see Pathfinder). This suggests that much of the problem is attributable to the bombardier. Over Japan, bomber crews soon discovered strong winds at high altitudes, the so-called jet streams, but the Norden bombsight worked only for wind speeds with minimal wind shear. Additionally, the bombing altitude over Japan reached up to 30,000 feet (9,100 m), but most of the testing had been done well below 20,000 ft (6,100 m). An additional factor was that the shape and even the paint of the bomb mantle greatly changed the aerodynamic properties of the weapon; and, at that time, nobody knew how to calculate the trajectory of bombs that reached supersonic speeds during their fall.[5]

In both theaters of war, one vulnerability was that when the bombardier auto-piloted the aircraft using the bombsight, the aircraft was more susceptible to anti-aircraft fire and collisions with other allied aircraft.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bomb_sight

The accuracy achieved at Dahlgren was never duplicated in combat. The Navy specification was for 2.5 mils (or 2.5 feet mean miss for every 1000 feet of altitude). The inherent accuracy of the 1944 Norden sights was 14 mils. By some reports, the accuracy achieved in combat was more than 50 mils.

https://www.twinbeech.com/Norden-gatesArticle.htm

For the first missions that we flew, beginning in February, 1945, they were all high altitude missions around 5 30,000 ft. Not only us but all the other groups were having poor bombing results. The Norden Bomb Sight could not handle the fierce, newly found, winds called the Jet Stream -- unknown till then. From the high altitude formation bombing we were ordered to the low altitude (below 10,000 ft) bombing. These were to be night incendiary bombing raids by individual planes. Everyone thought they were trying to make suicide kamikaze pilots out of us.

https://www.wingsoverkansas.com/profiles ... .asp?id=71
Aviation Pioneers
Some WWII Blurps and Bloops
By Charles G. Chauncey

[rerevisionist]

A model of brilliant research, FirstClassSkeptic!

[May I just add, on the subject of the 'jet stream', that I heard an account of a plane in the middle east, which had ascended to the jet stream layer before this had been identified and categorised. The plane moved so fast, that the crew refused to believe the airport they could see was their destination. So the plane continued, and was eventually lost in the desert.]

[Ranb]

Is it impossible that they got lucky with Little Boy? They nearly missed with Fat Man over Nagasaki. It detonated near a valley which contributed to the lower casualties even though it was the more powerful of the two bombs.

Ranb

[rerevisionist]

Well. OK. You spend a few billion on a new weapon. This weapon is to be used to end the biggest war in human history. It's been shipped out before it was even tested. And we can't deliver it accurately. But hey let's take a chance!

[Ranb]

What kind of accuracy do you need? How is required when dropping a bomb with a yield in excess of 10 kilotons of TNT on a large city?

Ranb

[rerevisionist]

You haven't read any of the preceding material. However, the most significant part is that Hiroshima was not bombed with a nuclear device. Check it out.

[Ranb]

I see nothing convincing that an atomic bomb was not used. Why do you belive this?

Ranb

[rerevisionist]

Please read the evidence on this site. You might start with the guide tour/overview piece in the forum on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Ranb]

I read a portion of it already and found nothing even remotely convincing. Perhaps you can pick out one item we can discuss? Thanks.

Ranb