TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 387 porations, based on company documents, interviews, secondary sources, and Pugh’s long personal experience with the firm. It dis cusses key inventions and patents in satisfying detail, yet technical dis cussions rarely derail the admirably balanced narrative. BuildingIBM is certain tobecome an essential reference in the history ofcomputers. Paul N. Edwards Dr. Edwards is author of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics ofDiscourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). He teaches the history of computers and the politics of technical decisions at Stanford University. America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910-1945. By Stephen L. McFarland. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+312; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibli ography, index. $29.95. This is a first-rate book that could have been a whole lot better. First, the good stuff. At its core, this monograph is a meticulously researched, nicely written “biography” of the widely renowned, but in fact little-known, Norden bombsight and its curious relationship to American strategic bombing doctrine and practice. It is a bizarre and ironic story. The Norden bombsight was America’s first “secret weapon,” ultimately the best optical bombsight produced anywhere, and America’s most expensive “black” program prior to the Man hattan Project. Its development was supported, not by the Army Air Corps, but by the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance, for nearly twenty years in absolute secrecy, and in clear contravention of military pro curement policies and statute law. Carl Norden, its brilliant and ec centric inventor, was a Dutch national who never became an Ameri can citizen, who took precious little interest in the day-to-day operations of the firm that bore his name, and who did the bulk of his design work at his mother’s home in Switzerland, even in 193940 : by special arrangement between the navy and the Department of State, his designs were sent back to the United States via sealed diplomatic pouch. The U.S. Army Air Corps, meanwhile, earnestly developed a largely homegrown doctrine of strategic air warfare—to be directed exclusively against an opponent’s industrial “choke points”—even though it had neither airplanes nor bombsights capable ofexecuting such a strategy. Air corps thinkers reacted to the same anomaly— the catastrophe of World War I’s trenches—that produced in other minds responses as diverse as the Maginot Line and blitzkrieg. But the air corps’ ideological response was (and remains) distinctively American: use machines to make war on machines, not civilians. World War II only multiplied the ironies. The navy discovered that level bombing, even with the Norden bombsight, was largely ineffec 388 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tive against maneuvering ships: dive bombing, together with aerial torpedo attacks, quickly became the method of choice. The air corps, unable to develop its own bombsight but resplendent with the world’s finest four-engined bombers (B-17s and B-24s, soon sup plemented with B-29s), had to go hat in hand to the navy to beg for Norden bombsight allocations: the navy, ever the team player, continued to hoard three-quarters of Norden’s output into 1943, despite having virtually no use for it. Mass production of what had been a handcrafted masterpiece produced sights that rarely met specifications. Worse, air corps experience over Europe revealed that the exigencies of combat and tíre vicissitudes of weather largely nullified whatever accuracy mass-produced sights and hastily trained bombardiers might have mustered under better conditions. Only Curtis LeMay’s brilliant tactical innovations—higher alti tudes, mass, rigid, defensive box formations, and “salvo” bombing “on the leader”—saved the daylight strategic campaign over Ger many. In “salvo” bombing, individual bombardiers in the formation did not aim their own bombs: they simply dropped when their leader did, or on command, thus laying down a dense pattern of bombs, hopefully in reasonable proximity to the target. This innovation had the happy side effect of turning a shortage of Norden sights into a surplus. Over Japan, higher altitudes, jet-stream-force winds, ob scured visibility, and the higher speeds of the B-29s rendered “preci sion” bombing all but impossible. LeMay’s Shermanesque...