Miraculous Mickey

Allied air communiques have talked guardedly for months of an amazing new instrument which has enabled U.S. and British planes to drop their bombs accurately on invisible targets. Last week this instrument was given a name and brief public description. It is a form of radar which lets airmen see landmarks clearly through the thickest smoke or overcast.

Airmen call it "Mickey." U.S. air officers in Italy last week let New York Times Correspondent Milton Bracker cable the first account of how Mickey works. Flying at 10,000 feet above a thick cloud blanket, Bracker looked through the instrument and saw plainly the outline of the Italian coast below. Mickey is best at showing the line between land and water (and is, therefore, presumably most useful over large cities, which usually have river or coastal frontages). But a trained operator, reading Mickey's cabalistic signals, can also identify many other ground marks, sometimes even a specific target, such as an industrial area or building. After identifying a locality, the operator focuses Mickey on a smaller & smaller area, gets an increasingly sharper picture.

Mickey was a British invention, freely given to the U.S.* U.S. scientists later developed an improved model. It was first used by U.S. bombers just over a year ago; today every fleet of heavy bombers over Europe presumably is or will be equipped with it, on day and night raids. At first so crude that it was useful only for wide-area bombing by large formations, it is now so efficient that it makes near-pin-point bombing possible. On D-day in Normandy, Mickey not only enabled bombers to find their targets on the beaches through an overcast, but also located landing places for airborne troops in the darkness.

Mickey's importance to the Allied air offensive in Europe this winter may be measured by the fact that between October and February there are normally only about five days of clear weather over Germany in a month.

* Which has not been equally generous with the Norden bombsight.

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