Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (28 page)

The Damage Assessment Section took over a large first-floor room in one of the towers of Danesfield House; two large bay windows gave them plentiful light and provided splendid views of the gardens and river. American PIs joined the Section in 1942, giving a welcome boost to numbers as the bombing campaign intensified.

A post-attack photograph of a raid on Cologne, 28 October 1944, shows smoke from areas still burning and the extent of the burnt-out buildings.

Allied bombing was used as a strategic weapon aimed at the total destruction of the enemy’s means of production on the one hand, and of their cities and population morale on the other. By the spring of 1942, the British build-up of large numbers of bombers and the development of longer-range aircraft marked the start of increased-scale raids over specific industrial targets, especially in the Ruhr and in major strategic cities. From August 1942, when the American heavy bombers joined the bombing campaign, the US 8th Air Force attacked by day and the RAF raids continued at night. New navigational electronic guidance devices began to help in attaining greater accuracy in reaching and destroying targets.

PI played a significant part in each phase of an operation. In the planning phase all sources of intelligence would be used, including air photography from an increased number of reconnaissance flights. The interpretation of these photographs could result in reports from several different PI sections at Medmenham, all providing intelligence for effective planning. Air photographs were also used in the targeting material essential for exact navigation by bomber air crews. Photography taken during and after the attack would show if the navigation was accurate, if the bombing objective had been achieved and would show the extent of the disruption caused.

In May 1944 the Damage Assessment Section moved to High Wycombe Air Station, code-named Pinetree, to join the HQ USAAF 8th Bomber Command. This relocation provided greater space, availability of photographic materials and numbers of personnel. Pinetree was based in Wycombe Abbey, which had been a private girls’ school until it was commandeered in 1942. The premises reputedly caused some hilarity among the incoming US personnel who found various instructions, designed for the recently evacuated girl pupils, still stuck to the dormitory walls, one of which stated: ‘Ring if mistress required.’ The British PIs at Pinetree became part of a US unit under the command of an American officer, with the same friendly co-operation prevailing between the different nationalities working together as there was at Medmenham. While the US personnel at Medmenham had to endure British food rationing, the British PIs benefited perhaps from getting American-style rations. Pat recalled:

I was amazed at the amount of food available at ‘Pinetree’ and resented any complaints of British food by US personnel. There was always chicken and ice cream served on Sundays. I remember that the Carol Gibbons Orchestra and the Glenn Miller Band came to play.

From the beginning of the British bombing campaign in 1940, cameras were installed in aircraft on daylight raids in order to bring back a record of where their bombs had fallen. Constance Babington Smith wrote of the long-standing attitude towards photography in Bomber Command:

Photographs were considered as a useful adjunct to bombing, but not a vital necessity. The camera was regarded somewhat as a motorist regards his mileage gauge. It’s nice to know how far you’ve been, and sometimes very useful too. But you certainly do not expect your mileage gauge to turn round and accuse you of having lost your way almost every time you’ve been out. When the photographs began to do precisely this, it was very natural that many of those whose work it affected jumped to the comforting conclusion that something must have been wrong with the camera or the photographs or the man who wrote the report.
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When the RAF switched to night-bombing, a new technique was needed to obtain a similar record of where bombs had been dropped in the darkness; one of the leading pioneers in this field was Constance’s brother, Bernard Babington Smith. For many months he worked on the principles of this new branch of interpretation. Constance wrote:

He used to explain to me that any lights which showed in the darkness below the camera while the shutter was open appear on the photographs as streaks, because the exposure was often as long as five seconds. And unless the aircraft were flying straight and level the streaks would naturally undulate according to its movement – in other words they were an exact record of all the manoeuvres it had made. They were also, of course, a record of the many different kinds of light that go with an air attack: the fires and the bomb flames: and also the tracer, the heavy flak and the searchlights of the defences. But Bernard did not confine his analysis to individual photographs: he soon became interested in working out the relationship between photographs taken by several bombers on the same raid, allowing for the different headings and evasive actions of each, so as to calculate the progress of the fires on the ground.

Early in 1942, the Night Photography Section, ‘N’, was formed at Medmenham, with Bernard as head of section, to carry out the detailed interpretation of the photographs taken by the night bombers themselves. It was housed in one of the recently erected huts and one of the first PIs to join the Section in February 1942 was Assistant Section Officer Lady Dorothy Lygon. Always known as ‘Coote’, she was described as forthright, with a quick intelligence and sense of fun. She was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh, the author, and devoted companion of Dorothy’s beautiful sister Mary, who had been photographed by Ursula Powys-Lybbe before the war. ‘Coote’ herself was plain and wore thick-lensed glasses, having been very short-sighted from childhood. This raises the interesting question of how someone with such seemingly poor eyesight qualified for a job that entailed spending a 12-hour shift looking at minute objects through a stereoscope. Douglas Kendall, in charge of all PIs at Medmenham, wrote:

One of the prime requirements of a PI was excellent eyesight and we kept a well known eye surgeon at Medmenham to deal with the eye strain associated with the job. Curiously enough, although the interpreters spent many hours per day with their eyes glued to stereoscopes, their eyesight, far from deteriorating, improved.
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The muscles of the eye become more efficient with regular exercise, and this was provided by daily use of a stereoscope. Several other wartime PIs found that they could throw away their spectacles and photographs of ‘Coote’ later in the war show her without glasses.

Elizabeth Johnston-Smith worked in the Camouflage Section for some months and heard that there was a section concerned with night photography. She was interested and approached Bernard Babington Smith and soon joined ‘N’:

This was in 1943 and by that time all the night bombers were equipped with cameras on board which worked on an open shutter principle. Earlier on, not all aircraft had cameras – only the most efficient crews carried them and there were large discrepancies between the films and the claims made by the aircrews. Bomber Command was concerned and Winston Churchill tasked Professor Lindeman (the Prime Minister’s Chief Scientific Adviser) to look at the problem and new navigational aids such as Gee, Oboe and H2S were introduced. The creation of the Pathfinder Force (PFF) was very valuable as they used target indicators to guide the bomber force to the target.

At Medmenham we got all the films of the raids from Bomber Command – they came to us in metal canisters. Bernard allocated a raid to each one of us to work through and from that we could work out how the operation had progressed. You saw on the films the run-in, and on the first frame you could see the marker flares that were dropped, then on the next frame, which was a bombing frame, you got the photo flash which was supposed to coincide with the bomb drop. This didn’t always happen because the bombs dropped later than the photo flash went off, but in many cases from the photo flash and the bomb flame you could pick up ground detail and this was very valuable because you could then start to plot where that particular aircraft had been.

From the films from other aircraft in the raid you could link up a whole pattern of the incendiary drop and the subsequent fire patterns and how the high explosives went. Then from the ground detail you could work out how the whole raid progressed. The frame that followed on from the bombing sequence was useful because apart from the evasive action which the aircraft took, that picked up search lights, flak, tracer, decoys, smoke screens and high explosive bombs – not particularly of that aircraft but maybe of others. So, as you gained more information from the films, you had a whole big trace and you could work out exactly where each aircraft had been. These were sent to Group HQ and then to Bomber Command.
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A night photograph of Hamburg taken during a raid on 31 January 1943. The different markings of light denote fires, flares, searchlights and anti-aircraft fire from which the overall progress and accuracy of the raid could be determined. A Lancaster bomber flies below the aircraft taking the photograph.

Elizabeth mentions the new electronic navigational aids devised and the Pathfinder Force formed to fly over the target and drop brightly coloured indicators to guide the following bomber aircraft to the correct position for bombing. By using colour film in conjunction with black and white when filming the raid, PIs were able to differentiate between normal and incendiary fires and detect decoy fires.

Decoys, often large and ingenious, were used to deflect navigators in the bombers from the correct route to their target. Navigators relied on visual landmarks that marked a particular point on their maps, and water was the most effective because it reflected light in total darkness. Flight Officer Loyalty Howard had noticed that bombs destined for the Krupps Works at Essen in the Ruhr were consistently dropping 6 miles from the target. She studied many comparative sorties and found that a whole lake had been drained by the enemy and instead of using this as a visual landmark for Essen, the navigators had been duped into using a bend in the river which was 6 miles away and this was the reason for missing the target.

Jean Fotheringham and Loyalty Howard organise the cans containing the film from one night-bombing raid for interpretation.

Loyalty Howard was a geographer and a WAAF operations room plotter through the Battle of Britain before coming as a PI to Medmenham. In a unit where women did exactly the same job as the men, Loyalty was a respected second-in-command of ‘N’ Section. An RAF colleague in ‘N’ recalls that of all the many high-level military officers who visited the Section for information, only one, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, the Prime Minister of South Africa, spoke patronisingly to her.