A Century of Data and Destruction Chronicled by Air Force Officer
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 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.
‘This is an extraordinary project. I have never heard of anything of this magnitude.’
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.