[Ngo-lwg] Bomb database useful for past, present wars

[Chuck Searcy]

This will be of interest mainly to technical and policy people active in
the global effort to clean up contamination of cluster bombs, mines, and
other ordnance that remain long after a conflict ends.  The maps and other
bombing data provided by the Pentagon to Project RENEW, NPA, MAG, Peace
Trees and other organizations working in Quang Tri Province have been
extremely helpful in determining likely locations of deadly ordnance that
still litters the countryside of Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia.  Once Col.
Robertson's intensive data collection effort, described in this article by
Bryan Bender, is successfully completed, it may provide one more very
useful tool to help narrow the search for bombs and mines around the world,
some of it deployed as long ago as World War I.  CS



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opinions expressed.  If you do not wish to receive such items, let me know
and I will take you off  this list.  CS



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*​**CHUCK SEARCY*

*Hà Nội, Việt Nam*

*M    +8 490 342 0769*

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*Sk   chucksearcy*





*Boston Globe
<http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/07/29/century-data-and-destruction-chronicled-air-force-officer/5m2HK2CP9UcwwJzMhtdQOO/story.html?camp=pm>*JULY
30, 2012

Bomb database useful for past, present wars
[image: Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson’s project is aiding efforts to
spot unexploded bombs that still endanger civilians.]

Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson’s project is aiding efforts to
spot unexploded bombs that still endanger civilians. MEG MCKINNEY
FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
*By Bryan Bender* GLOBE STAFF

MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. — Six years ago it seemed a zany idea when
Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson, 45, a bespectacled Minnesota native
with an outsized gee-whiz quality even by military standards, began a
rather unusual hobby: documenting a century of US air power — bomb by bomb.

Robertson asked: “What if you had the detailed data on when and where every
bomb was dropped from an airplane in combat? What would you know?”

He worked nights and weekends finding out. Robertson unearthed 1,000
original World War I raid reports, and entered each entered each by hand.
For World War II, he scanned roughly 10,000 hand-written or typed pages.
More modern conflicts meant combing a hodgepodge of conflict-specific
databases.

The result: a compilation that, at the click of a mouse and a few
keystrokes, reveals for the first time the sheer magnitude of destruction
inflicted by the US and its allies from the air in the last century.

It has been assigned a military acronym befitting its epic goal: THOR,
Theater History of Operations Reports, and was previewed last month at the
Air Force Research Institute here. Government experts and private
researchers say the data could have far-reaching implications.

It is already aiding efforts to spot unexploded bombs that still endanger
civilians and to search for the missing aircraft and their crews of past
wars. City planners in countries such as Germany, where new construction
requires an assessment of the potential explosive hazards left over from
World War II, have also consulted it. As a research tool, the project may
even rewrite the history of some famous battles.

“It has proven useful in the real world, in real time,” said Robertson, a
space and missile officer by training who was used to crunching large
streams of data. He was recently assigned by the Air Force’s chief
historian to work full time on his pet project.

The database, he said, has recently been used to investigate civilian
deaths in Afghanistan and to judge claims by Iraqi villagers that bombs
containing depleted uranium contaminated their water supply.

When plotted on a satellite map, the bombs — from the biplanes of the
nascent US Air Service over France in World War I to pilotless drones
targeting suspected terrorists in the war in Afghanistan — blanket many
thousands of square miles from Europe to Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Even tiny Kiska, Alaska.

“You can pick any place you want and look at it in detail,” Robertson
explained, marking the first time the project has been publicly
demonstrated.

One particularly relevant example: From October 1965 to May 1975, at least
456,365 cluster bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia,
according to the records analyzed. Cluster munitions, designed to release
small bomblets, often did not explode on impact and still pose a hazard to
villagers.

This kind of information — including which of the 28 types of cluster bombs
were used and where — has grabbed the attention of the Department of
State’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, which has spent $2 billion
in the last two decades helping clean up unexploded bombs and land mines in
80 countries.

“This type of information is critical to our efforts,” said Major General
Walter D. Givhan, the deputy assistant secretary of state for
political-military affairs. “I was in Vietnam last week looking at old
sites and talking with Vietnamese officials on how we can expedite this
work. It will really help us to be able to refine what we know about where
the strikes were made, where we might find unexploded ordnance, so we can
focus our efforts there.”

Another agency taking advantage of the project is the military command
searching for clues to the remains of thousands of missing pilots and air
crews from past wars.

‘This is an extraordinary project. I have never heard of anything of this
magnitude.’

*[image: Quote Icon]*

“This collection contains a great trove of information that has greatly
accelerated our research,” said Chris McDermott, chief historian of the
Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command. “Many of the
cases where we have success are in far-flung locations with hazy loss
circumstances. Each clue that we can compile from the official records
could be the key that assists our team to locate a site.’’

For the Korean War Robertson found the detailed mission records for the
first 10 months of the three-year conflict but he is still trying to get
his hands on the rest. Vietnam bombing data was contained on more than one
million records, which he is still in the process of converting. He was
also able to get records from US allies, including — to his surprise —
strikes by the Chinese Air Force during World War II when it aided the
Allied effort.

Bombing reports from more modern conflicts — in the Balkans, Afghanistan,
and Iraq — were more readily available and in many cases already in digital
form and needed to be converted using special software.

Now all that information can be plotted using modern research and mapping
tools. The data, which are unclassified with the exceptions of Iraq and
Afghanistan operations, can also be depicted in motion, with particular
missions or battles plotted over space and time.

What Robertson didn’t anticipate was how much the database would provide
fresh historical perspective.

Unlike land battles, whose outcomes have been well understood by those who
were physically engaged with the enemy, the impact of air attacks has
historically been far more difficult to discern.
[image: “You can pick any place you want and look at it in detail,” said
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson.]

MEG MCKINNEY FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

“You can pick any place you want and look at it in detail,” said Air Force
Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson.

Initial analysis of THOR has raised at least one intriguing possibility in
that regard: airstrikes, not tanks, may have been most responsible for the
Allied breakthrough against the German Army at El Alemein in Egypt in the
fall of 1942, a major turning point in the war against Nazi Germany.

It was one reason the Air Force’s chief historian, Clarence R. “Dick”
Anderegg, requested last summer that Robertson should work on the database
full time.

“This is an extraordinary project,” said Robert F. Dorr, a historian on air
power whose latest book, “Mission to Berlin,’’ details the role of the US
Army Air Forces in the defeat of Germany in World War II. “I have never
heard of anything of this magnitude.”

“To have something like this available as a reference source when you are
trying to determine what happened in a certain country, in a certain era,
in the midst of a conflict could be extremely illuminating,” he added.

Robertson’s next objective is to improve the quality control process, both
the conversion of the data and each datum itself; some of the raw records,
for example, were subject to human error. One example he uncovered: The
original mission report for the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of
Nagasaki in World War II was off by 552 miles; the latitude had a 9 where a
zero should have been.
[image: Vietnam bombings research center.]

MEG MCKINNEY FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

“Error checking is one of the biggest problems,” said Robertson, who is
anxious to have outside historians and database experts independently
review THOR when it is complete.

But he has already found at least one novel way to spot check the data.

Using the information on World War II, he identified coordinates in the
Tunisian desert that were struck seven times between Feb. 4 and March 26,
1942, by 118 B-25s and B-26s carrying a total 235,840 pounds of bombs.

He then pulled up recent satellite images of the area. Fifty-one bomb
craters were still there.

*Bryan Bender can be reached at bender at globe.com <bender at globe.com>. Follow
him on Twitter @GlobeBender*
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