Reflecting on the Past to Understand the Future

Even before they worked well, drones changed the course of American history. On the evening of August 12, 1944, Colonel Elliot Roosevelt, FDR’s son, was flying high above the English countryside, just south of Halesworth, a few miles from the coast where Suffolk meets the North Sea. Roosevelt was part of a large delegation of high-ranking officers, including General Jimmy Doolittle, the commander of the 8th Air Force, who had come to watch the first mission of Operation Anvil, a US Navy effort to use drones to attack German targets that had proven tough to destroy by dropping bombs.

Anvil relied on B-24 Liberator bombers that had been converted to fly by remote control. Although the planes could be flown remotely, the Anvil drones needed pilots to get them off the ground. Joseph Kennedy Jr., brother to the future president, had just taken off and was sitting in the cockpit at the pilot’s controls of the first Anvil drone. A related Army Air Force program called Aphrodite used converted B-17s. Aphrodite’s first three missions, which had taken place over the previous week, had not gone well. But the Navy had a more sophisticated control system than the Army – an early version of the television camera in the B-24 drone sent pictures to the mother ship control planes, which could be as far as fifty miles away.