"Pickle-barrel" bombing - where does this name come from?

[Lagarto]

Help me please as I'm not a native speaker and cannot comprehend the idea behind this name.
The "pickle-barrel" bombing was (I'm quoting from WWII Ace Stories site):

"Pickle Barrel Bombing was a spin-off from a new radar system, touted to be accurate within fifty feet from a distance of fifty miles. They thought the idea was simple. Send a bunch of P-47s out over solid cloud cover at 10,000 ft. and 250 mph. in tight formation. Guide them to the target with the new radar, and tell them exactly when to drop their bombs".

I know what a "pickle" is, and I imagine you can store them in a "barrel", but how it relates to a radar-control bombing is beyond my imagination Tx in advance

[Kutscha]

Lagarto, I think you will find that the 'pickel barrel' expression came from the use of the Norden sight. The cystal clear skies of the SW USA allowed for quite accurate (practice) bombing.

Think of the 'pickel barrel' as the opposite to the expresion 'could not hit the broad side of a barn door if you were standing right beside it'. (as in throwing something at the barn door)

[Dick Powers]

In pre-WWII days, pickles did, indeed, come from barrels in neighborhood grocery stores.

I believe the term originated before radar-assisited bombing, and was the US Air Corp's claim that with the Norden bombsight (developed for the US Navy, interestingly) they could but a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. Therefore, precision bombing was possible.

The claim, of course, was not true.

[Tony Williams]

I've always assumed that a pickle barrel was quite small in comparison with other barrels, thereby further emphasising its claimed accuracy.

Of course, the average miss distance in high-altitude visual bombing, even with a Nordern bombsight in clear visibility, was of the order of hundreds of metres.

Even a modern laser-guided bomb is not accurate enough to guarantee a hit on a small barrel!

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion forum

[Lagarto]

Thank you guys very much, I got the idea!
More about "pickle-barrel bombing" and other Jug stories in my T-Bolt monograph vol. II and III. Stay tuned!

[Dick Powers]

Roger Freeman's new "Wolfpack Warriors" includes descriptions of the 56th FG's experiments with P-47 group bombing. They tried it under direction of an accompanying B-24 and with droop snoot P-38s. Both were unsuccessful.