Volume 45 - No. 20
May 14, 2015
by lyle e davis
Slowly but surely long hidden secrets from World War II have begun to filter out.
Most recently, an excellent article by Mark Wolverton, written for American Heritage Magazine, told a fascinating tale, little known until now:
The air at 20,000 feet above Schweinfurt, Germany, was icy cold, but the bombardier crouching in the nose of the B-17 hardly noticed. Sweat poured down his forehead as flak rocked the aircraft, periodically spattering his compartment's Plexiglas bubble with fragments. He focused intently on preparing for the final bombing run. He bent over the Norden bombsight, making adjustments with one gloved hand, his other hand grasping a dog-eared booklet filled with numbers—the precise settings he needed to punch into the bombsight to ensure that the B-17's load released at the exact moment necessary to hit its target.
Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Army assembled a group of talented female mathematicians, left, including Shirley B (circled in top row) and Marlyn Wescoff (front row), to work under top secret conditions at the University of Pennsylvania. The ~computers" of the Philadelphia Computing Center solved many thousands of complex mathematical formulas In a top-secret program, where these talented, young female mathematicians calculated the artillery and bomb trajectories that American GIs used to win World War II
On the ground, artillerymen firing a 105 mm M2A1 howitzer at Carentan, France, counted on the PCS's charts to account for the effects of range, elevation, muzzle velocity, weather, and other factors on the trajectory of their shells.
Ten thousand miles away, a Marine sergeant stood next to a 75-millimeter M1A1 pack howitzer on the beachhead of a tiny Pacific Island, surveying a battalion of American soldiers preparing to charge a Japanese hillside position. But before the Marines could advance, the heavily dug-in enemy artillery atop the hill had to be silenced. Ignoring the bullets peppering the sand around him, the sergeant read out a series of numbers from a small chart he held, sending his gun crew scrambling to zero in on the Japanese positions.
Both the bombardier and the artillery sergeant depended on the accuracy of the figures they fed into their weapon systems. If the sergeants had known where those numbers had originated, they probably would have been astonished. The data were the work of a group of remarkable women with a flair for mathematics who were employed by the Army: the Philadelphia Computing Section (PCS) at the University of Pennsylvania. The Paper - 760.747.7119
website:www.thecommunitypaper.com
email: thepaper@cox.net
Known as "computers" in an age when that term referred not to machines but to human beings, some of the women went on to help create the first electronic computer, ENIAC. Like the legendary Rosie the Riveters, who toiled in factories and war
plants, they were also vital to the war effort, but these computing Rosies worked in secrecy and anonymity, their contributions still largely unknown and unrecognized today. Firing table guide
TOP SECRET Rosies Continued on Page 2
The "computers" of the Philadelphia Computing Section solved many thousands of complex mathematical formulas to determine accurate artillery shell trajectories, information published in firing table guides, above, that were used by servicemen in combat.