Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (33 page)

Two WAAFs model a town area using plaster of Paris for the buildings.

In fact there were many messages of appreciation from troops of all three services who had benefited from having had a detailed preview of their target. Nothing else at that time could give troops and air crew such accurate visual information on the terrain of an area, or particular features they would encounter when attacking an enemy-held position.

Geoffrey Price in the Naval Section wrote:

The use of scale models enabled us to plot raids by my section on cargo vessels in the Norwegian fjords. These ships made their runs only by night and during daylight hours anchored up under the cliffs in the fjords where the water is deep. This made it difficult for the rocket firing Beaufighters and Mosquitoes to attack at low level and pull away due to the steep mountains. Models were therefore made of these anchorages so that the pilots could have a good view of the position of the valleys in the hills and plan their approaches and escape routes.
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Mary’s brushes with authority continued:

A party of us went to the Hare and Hounds to celebrate Bessie’s birthday. Coming back we were caught cycling more than two abreast by Flight Lieutenant Deeley and the five of us have got to report to his office tomorrow.
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The next day: ‘Deeley was a pig and put the five of us on three hours gardening.’

The gardening turned out to be digging an uncultivated plot of garden. Mary shared a hut with eight other modellers and a few photographers; Nancy Hayes was their WAAF corporal. A few months later, for a crime unspecified, Mary was put on a week’s fatigues, which entailed her getting up at 6.30 a.m. to sweep the hut, scrub the lavatories and swill the floor before going on duty. Although a modeller friend helped out, by the middle of the week Mary was certain she was getting housemaid’s knee and resorted to locking herself in the lavatories to get a smoke in peace: ‘More ruddy fatigues. How I hate it. A wretched officer gave me some advice today – I suppose the old fool thought I was a regular ACW.’ The last day of fatigues arrived: ‘Celebrated by cycling into Marlow and saw “Spider Woman”.’

However much Mary enjoyed working in the Model-Making Section, she was very aware, in a similar way to the PIs who worked to improve the accuracy of bombing raids, of her personal contribution to every operation carried out. Mary wrote this poem after being shown post-raid air images of a German city and remembering those air photographs from which she had worked when building the model:

My Hands

Do you know what it is like to have death in your hands

       when you haven’t a murderer’s mind?

Do you know how it feels that you could be the cause

       of a child being blind?

How many people have died through me

From the skill at my finger tips?

For I fashion the clay and portray the landscape

As the fliers are briefed for their trips.

Do these young men in blue feel as I do

The destruction

The pain.

Let me cover my eyes as you cover the skies

Let me pray it can’t happen again.

Don’t show me the pictures you take as you fly,

They’re ruins and scape – little more.

Is all this part

Of the madness we choose to call War?

If there is a God up above who listens to all

Does he know why this has to be.

Did he give me my hands just to fashion the plans

That my own land may always be free?
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Model makers and PIs needed exact measurements for their detailed reports and accurate models. ‘Almost’ or ‘nearly’ were not words used in ‘W’, the initial letter chosen to designate the Photogrammetric Section, quite appropriately as the Swiss-built Wild plotting and measuring machines were at its centre. For the first eighteen months of the war the only operable Wild A-5 stereo-comparator in the country had been the sole means by which small-scale photography could be examined; this machine was moved from Wembley to be installed at Medmenham in 1941. The need to acquire another A-5 became critical as the only similar machine in UK was owned by Ordnance Survey and had been so badly damaged in bombing raids on Southampton in 1940 that it was unusable. Such was the importance placed on its repair that a Cabinet-level decision was taken to smuggle the machine back through enemy territory to the Wild factory in Switzerland and to set up a clandestine operation to return it repaired to Britain. This was the machine used in ‘W’ Section at RAF Nuneham Park. The two machines were used throughout the war in every type of reporting that required high levels of accuracy in measurement, three-dimensional calculations and volumetric assessments. High-quality optics and transparent imagery allowed the operator to see landscape and objects in three dimensions and greatly magnified. Detailed measurements could be obtained, and by the use of complex mechanical linkages and a plotting table, highly accurate plans could be drawn.

In the spring of 1942, Sophie Wilson, Lucia Windsor and Ena Thomas were coming to the end of their geography and surveying degree course at Cambridge University, which had included use of a Wild A-6 comparator. The department was visited by the head of ‘W’, on a recruiting mission for trained surveyors to work at RAF Medmenham, but found that the Royal Engineers had already signed up all the male students. It was pointed out to him that the three women had completed exactly the same course, and they were instructed to join the WAAF on deferred service until their degrees were finished. In August 1942 they duly reported for duty at Medmenham where it was found that although their degree studies had made them highly competent in operating the Wild machines, they had not attended an official PI course. They were, incidentally, the three new officers whom plotter ACW2 Elspeth Macalister, very recently a fellow Cambridge student, reluctantly saluted. Sophie takes up the story:

When we arrived there was a panic on in ‘W’ Section and it was decided that the work required for the North African landings was more important than doing the PI course first. I cannot tell you how much aggro this set up amongst the Waafs who were there already! So, Lucia, Ena and I went straight into the Section and I spent from August to early November making contoured maps of parts of North Africa from which the Model Section cut their basic contours. However, once that was all over we were sent off one by one to do the course and I went off to Nuneham Park in March 1943.
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The ‘W’ Section PIs converted small-scale reconnaissance photography into information, plans and maps, referred to as ‘mathematical intelligence’, and used by all other sections when the maximum precision of measurement in all three dimensions was required. By the time Sophie, Lucia and Ena joined the Section, the extent of photographic coverage over occupied or enemy territory was so great that it could be claimed that anything that moved, that was built or attacked in Europe had already been photographed by Spitfire or Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft. The photographic intelligence provided on enemy intentions helped to turn the tide of war in the Allies’ favour and enabled them to take the initiative against the Germans.

One of Sophie’s first jobs was in preparation for the famous Ruhr Dams Raid in May 1943, for which she calculated the depth, volume and level of water in the German dams as well as for those in the practice areas. These had to be taken at different times of day and month in order to determine the optimum date and time for the raid to take place. Strict security ensured that she was not told the location of the photographs she was making her calculations on. However, her memories of the Lake District, where she had been brought up, caused her to think frequently how similar the photographs were to Derwent Water, which was subsequently revealed as one of the sites used for the air crews’ practice raids.

Although others disliked the long hours of duty Sophie soon got used to the 12-hour shift pattern that meant getting up four times in three days. She lived in one of the accommodation huts in the woods and her workplace was one corner of the cellars beneath Danesfield House which she described as:

A bit like the Ladies Lavatory at Waterloo Station – all white tiles. It was reached by a narrow, twisting staircase from one of the courtyards. One day I was rushing down to go on duty and collided with a bearded man with red staff tabs on his uniform coming up – I nearly knocked him over. In the tight confines of the staircase I somehow managed a salute and found out later he was Field Marshal Smuts.

Sophie contoured many target areas to provide accurate heights, sometimes calculating the declination and altitude of the sun to show how it would fall on a particular target area as the pilots were on their approach flight. Her contouring work was also used to ensure that heights were correct on models being built for the briefing of pilots. Nowhere would accurate measurements be more vital to a pilot than in the life or death situation of attacking a pinpoint target of a single building located in a busy city centre in well-defended enemy territory. Sophie remembered one particular job where she calculated the height of all low-flying obstructions within a mile of Gestapo headquarters in The Hague in Holland. Her work was in preparation for one of the most remarkable low-level precision raids carried out in an enemy-occupied country in Europe.

The Dutch underground organisation had contacted London to ask that the five-storey high Gestapo building in The Hague be destroyed. The reason for this request was that the records of all Dutch civilian identity cards issued were kept in the building and from these the Gestapo could identify members of the Dutch Resistance. The building was in the centre of The Hague, and the number of obstacles and constrictions to the aircraft’s approach along a busy city street were many. One can imagine how closely the air crews scrutinised the model, the pinpoint maps and the recognition charts. On 11 April 1944 six Mosquito aircraft took off from Hampshire and flew, at a height of just 50ft to avoid detection by enemy radar, to The Hague. They circled the city then banked and flew straight along the Scheveningsche Weg to drop their bombs, then climbed steeply to exit the target site. One of the Mosquitoes was equipped with cameras and the photographs showed a spectacular success: two of the bombs had gone through the front door of the building and two more through the windows on either side:

So accurate was the bombing that it is reputed that a number of civilians waiting in line for bread across the street were left unharmed. Indeed, no Dutchman outside of the building itself was killed.
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The building and most of the records were destroyed and Dutch officials were able to fake the remaining ones thus saving the lives of many brave resistance workers. Sophie summed up the work she did: ‘You had to get it right; lives depended on what you did.’

Sophie’s friends Lucia and Ena moved over to the map-making part of ‘W’ Section, which was based at RAF Nuneham Park. After they had finished the maps for North Africa, they did the same thing for the Sicily and Italian invasions. Soon they were preparing up-to-date maps and plans of many French, Belgian, Dutch and German towns as part of the build-up for the Normandy invasions. They also created detailed maps of Germany that were then printed on to silk scarves and supplied as escape maps to air crews in the event of them being shot down.

All sections at Medmenham dealt with secret material: for strategic planning, for shorter-term tactical information or for gathering material on the enemy’s capabilities. Sophie described the security at Medmenham as ‘not obtrusive’ but any lax security or ‘careless talk’ would have been disastrous. Pat Peat recalled that the photographers, if questioned about their job, had been instructed to reply that they worked in the cookhouse. Clerks who typed up the secret reports were instructed to answer similar queries by claiming that they worked in ‘Maintenance Command’. The head of the Model-Making Section reported being approached one day in a hotel bar in Marlow by a civilian stranger asking questions about ‘the photographic establishment up the hill towards Henley’. He claimed to have seen WAAFs on a bus with chemical stains on their fingers and had noticed a Kodak yellow van making deliveries. Was it an enemy agent or a check by British security?
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