Air Force officer creates database of every U.S. bomb dropped since World War I

[UnrepentantLiberal]

Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson’s project is aiding efforts to spot unexploded bombs that still endanger civilians.



By Bryan Bender
The Boston Globe
July 30, 2012

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 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.

More: http://bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2012/07/29/century-data-and-destruction-chronicled-air-force-officer/5m2HK2CP9UcwwJzMhtdQOO/story.html