URL for "The Wench Bench"

The TV-guided glidebombs of World War 2 were too far ahead of their time - lens technology just was not able keep up. As the bombs reached their target, there was no way to effectively zoom the image for finer guidance during the most critical part of the run. Things went out of focus, and the image turned into mush. So much for guidance. They never did work well, and only a few really hit their targets effectively (one being the example given). The German glide bomb sets were better than the US sets. The US sets (SCR-549 and SCR-550, ARE/ATE, AN/AXT-series) suffered from extereme microphonics (virbrations that direct effect the performance of tubes), and were quite useless in aircraft. If anyone needs original 1944 AN/AXT-2 Operators Manuals, please contact me off list. There were many interesting developements in World War 2, mostly from the Germans and the US, that really were bleeding edge (mostly secret). Some of it is quite legendary - the so called "Wizard War" of radar countermeasures, jet engines, the code breaking - but much of it really has not been researched much (either because so much of the original records are lost or recently declassified). Examples of the latter are heat-seeking missles (US and German), digital encryption (SIGSALY), passive search radar (Klein-Heidlburg), variously-controlled glide bombs, magnetic anomaly detection, and so on. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org