Y'All,
I fought the celestial vs electronics battle through most of WWII.
I was with the B-29s initially in India as radar bombardment mechanic. I
had learned LORAN at Boca Raton, FL and it
became my duty to try to keep the APN-4 in my group (468th)
operational. The set was in two units each the size of a 19" TV.
40 vacumn tubes made it operate until higher altitudes caused electrical
malfunctions. Only good for 600 miles at night in the
best of conditions. Reliability always in doubt due to tube failure,
vibration of connections, corrosion and operator skills..

By ship to Tinian in the Pacific. Assigned to 58th Wing Training center to
teach LORAN. New B-29s coming over with APN-9
which was only the size of one 19' TV. New planes were taken over by senior
officers and older planes assigned to new arrivals.
Result was that I was given the job of training old navigators on
the -9 and the new on the -4. As a Corporal instructor I ranked
my students none of whom wanted to learn about something they had previously
learned not to trust. Tough teaching assignment but
made me want to become a teacher.

Skilled operator could get fix in less than 3 minutes. This involved
matching the counting of signal time differences in microseconds from the
master/slave pair and finding the line on a LORAN chart.
Do the same thing with another pair and you had your fix with built in
travel-time error..

Much of the 2800 mile flight to Japan was at lower levels with stations on
islands like Ulithi. Good LORAN range and accuracy. Flights required
passage through weather fronts that reduced use of
celestial navigation and increased reliance on electronic. We even
had first inertial systems which read out longitude and latitude as
an odometer in the newer planes.. My plane has a hard-wired LORAN the size
of cigar box. Last military LORANs were in the APN-30s.

Still celestial ruled with electronics a step-child category. The rule of
primacy still reigned and LORAN was just a back-up. Experience in India had
made navigators unwilling to trust both RADAR and LORAN navigation when
celestial was possible..

At the end of the war I was seeing the birth of DME as the slant range to a
bomb release point. RNAV as used to put bearing and distance to radar
visible target to hit non-radar target. Even the first German radio
controlled bomb was instrumental in sending me to India as a replacement. At
war's end I was operator/mechanic of a
supersonic bombardment simulator that had the Nagasaki chart installed for
practice bombing runs in the immediate vicinity of Nagasaki. Device used
tank of water with underwater maps made
of sand and beads to give radar-scope pictures of Japan by using a vibrating
underwater crystal to send to scale transmissions and echos back to the
scope.

Greatest change in all of this WWII technollogy has been in reduction of
size, speed of presentation and availability
Gene Whitt