RAF Medmenham was one of the first genuinely joint service units to be established in the Second World War, and certainly one of the most cosmopolitan. It accommodated men and women of the army, navy and air forces from Allied nations and the occupied European countries. They were a diverse mix of people, temporarily in uniform, drawn from scientific and artistic backgrounds, and who applied their specialist knowledge, skills and eccentricities to military intelligence use. With such an eclectic mix, Medmenham could have been fraught with rivalries or ill will that would have greatly diminished the achievements of the unit. The fact that it was not so was due in large measure to Douglas Kendall. Sarah Churchill wrote:
It would not be possible to speak of all the inhabitants of Medmenham – or the ‘Mad Men of Ham’ as we were known locally – without mentioning our commanding officer, Wing Commander Douglas Kendall. He was brilliant, a wonderful co-ordinator with the Americans, kind, slightly shy, but he held his medley of personalities together. Many fascinating people passed through the station from all the services and all our allies.1
A mathematician and surveyor, Kendall was just 25 years old when he was appointed to head the ACIU in April 1941 and his pleasant character became a key feature in its smooth running. The senior officers, regardless of nationality, who were responsible for the actual interpretation, got on well with him and a flexible outlook made the acceptance of direct or unusual requests a simple matter.
Kendall also had the unenviable job of dealing with the Air Ministry, government officials and high-ranking officers of different nationalities who would all have liked to run the ACIU to their own advantage and prestige; he resisted them all and fought numerous battles on behalf of the PIs who he referred to as ‘our team of individualists’. With a natural ability for deductive reasoning and a capacity for unending work, he frequently dropped in on one of the sections, day or night, to encourage all personnel coping with the huge amount of incoming photography, or pulled his stereoscope from his pocket to give an opinion to a young PI puzzling over a photograph. Thanks to him a pleasant and supportive atmosphere prevailed at Medmenham, described by Hazel Furney:
There were so many interesting people there, of many nationalities. Everyone got on well together – there was no nastiness. It was all very friendly – and a lot of fun.2
Wing Commander Douglas Kendall, the Technical Control Officer and in charge of all PI at RAF Medmenham.
A sortie of low, oblique photographs providing a panoramic view of an area could also reveal to the PIs at Medmenham some intriguing glimpses of everyday life in enemy and occupied Europe. While checking for signs of change in an area of interest they might see a football match in progress, hay-making in the fields or a fair in full swing in the marketplace of a small town. One day, while examining a batch of photographs of the transport systems in a particular part of Germany, Section Officer Dorothy Garrod found herself looking at a travelling circus. She was particularly intrigued by the elephants and followed their slow journey from town to town as subsequent sorties came in. A few weeks later there was a squeak of surprise from Dorothy’s desk as, clearly visible in stereo on a photograph, a new addition to the circus could be seen in the form of a baby elephant.
Dorothy was working in the Third-Phase Communications Section, ‘F’, collecting information about the internal road, water and railway networks on the continent of Europe. Reports were issued on traffic concentrations and movements, as these were often the first signs of a planned enemy deployment, and if the nature of the troops and their equipment could be deduced, then the purpose of the deployment was established. Railway construction and the different types of rolling stock used for carrying chemicals or guns, for instance, all provided clues to enemy intent. The section also provided information on the location, layout and vulnerability of marshalling yards, depots, bridges and locks for targeting purposes. Assessments were made of the traffic interruption that followed Allied bombing attacks and the speed with which the facilities were restored to use.
Dorothy Garrod, Cambridge professor of archaeology, worked in the Communications Section.
Having spent several interwar years leading archaeological expeditions to the Middle East, in 1933 Dorothy Garrod had taken up the post of director of studies in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge University. In 1939 she was persuaded to stand for election to the prestigious Disney Chair of Archaeology, at a time when women were still not awarded degrees and could not participate in university government at Cambridge. She explained her reason for standing to her fellow archaeologist and supporter, Glyn Daniel: ‘I shan’t get it but I thought I’d give the electors a run for their money.’3
She did get it, and so became the first woman to become a professor in any field at either Oxford or Cambridge universities, although it was seven years before her inaugural lecture could be given, due to the intervention of the war. She continued teaching at an increasingly empty Cambridge, all the while trying to enrol into the Air Intelligence branch of the RAF, but was consistently refused entry on the grounds of her age. She enlisted the help of two friends, Glyn Daniel and Hugh Hamshaw Thomas, both Cambridge academics and PIs at Medmenham, who knew that her archaeological background and knowledge of air photography made her an eminently suitable candidate for interpretation work. At last, under pressure, the Air Ministry discovered a rule that only applied to people who had served between 1914–18 and exempted them from the age restriction clause. On 5 May 1942, her fiftieth birthday, Dorothy Garrod reported for duty at RAF Medmenham.
Working alongside her in ‘F’ Section were Sarah Churchill and Robin Orr, who was the pre-war organist at St John’s College, Cambridge. Two young Intelligence Corps warrant officers, Geoffrey Stone and Fred Mason, a Royal Navy lieutenant and a US army captain completed the team under the head of section, Captain Moody. Geoffrey recorded in a letter home:
I heard today about Sarah’s experiences when she first joined the WAAF. Apparently there were three others with red hair in her group and they were often mistaken for her; in fact she claims to have had ‘Sarah’ pointed out to her on a number of occasions and says she always showed great interest in her ‘other self’. However, she added that no one would treat her normally and used to push her to the back of queues just to show they weren’t impressed. In fact, she says that she wasn’t treated as an ordinary human being until she came to Medmenham.4
The YWCA hut near the hutted accommodation provided a welcoming and comfortable environment for men and women when they were off duty. The gramophone record recitals were always popular, with the music often being selected and introduced by Fred Mason, himself an accomplished pianist. Regular lectures, on a variety of subjects, could be attended by anyone at Medmenham and as the lecturer was invariably talking about his or her specialised interest, the quality was very high. With the numbers of archaeologists and explorers on the staff there must have been some exciting tales to listen to about ‘digs’ and the polar regions. At the beginning of 1944, Geoffrey recorded that Dorothy Garrod gave a ‘lantern lecture’ on the Lascaux Paleolithic cave paintings, which had been discovered by accident in the Dordogne region in 1940 after the German occupation of France. The details of the paintings had apparently only recently been smuggled out to England.
Another PI had an encounter with an elephant. Hazel Furney worked in another Third-Phase Section, ‘L’, Aircraft and Aircraft Industry:
I was cycling to Medmenham to go on shift one morning, turned a corner and came face to face with an elephant, part of a small travelling circus. I pedalled on to work thinking how I would surprise the other members of my section with my story of meeting an elephant. So when I went into our room I said, ‘Guess what I’ve just seen on the way to work?’ And another Waaf said, ‘Oh, did you see that tiger too?’5
The head of the Aircraft Section was Constance Babington Smith. During the 1930s she had led a busy social life in London and trained as a milliner. It was when she went to live with her mother ne
ar Brooklands motor-racing circuit and flying club in Surrey – where, incidentally, Hilda Hewlett had flown her biplane in 1911 to become the first woman in Britain to gain a pilot’s licence – that Constance was bitten by the aviation bug. While not wanting to be a pilot herself, she wrote verses about flying for publication in the magazine The Aeroplane, whose editor nicknamed her ‘Babs’. Under that name she started writing articles on flying and visiting air shows, becoming intensely interested in all aeronautical matters. Constance was commissioned as an assistant section officer in the WAAF in 1940 and, having trained as a PI, worked alongside Jean Starling at Wembley, where she took particular interest in examining airfields and reporting any changes she observed:
I was rather taken aback, however, to find that the aircraft themselves were normally reported rather as an afterthought, at the end of the statement on the airfield itself. Surely this was putting the cart before the horse – or rather the stage before the play that was being acted? But it was hardly for a WAAF who had been an officer only a few weeks to say so.
During the times when reconnaissance was held up by weather I used every spare moment to add to my knowledge of aircraft. I thought that before long I might be asked to interpret Italian aircraft, and I knew practically nothing about them. So I spent hours with Jane’s ‘All the World’s Aircraft’, and set down the main things I thought important. One of the civilian interpreters, Ray Herschel, was interested in aircraft too; and I picked up from him how to link the facts in Jane’s with the tiny shapes on the photographs.6
At that time, Italy was poised to join Germany in the war against Britain, and as a result of her report on their aircraft, Constance was instructed to set up and head an Aircraft Interpretation Section. With the move from Wembley to Medmenham, ‘L’ Section came into being, initially as one desk in the corner of the big room occupied by Second Phase. After several moves, the Section found its final home in one of the towers of Danesfield House, occupying a spacious bedroom with adjoining palatial marble bathroom, large enough for three PIs and a clerk to work in, and overlooking the garden. Dorothy Colles was an early member of the Section before being posted overseas, Ursula Kay became a long-standing senior PI and from 1942 American interpreters joined the aircraft team. Charles Sims, who had been chief photographer on The Aeroplane before the war, became responsible for examining aircraft production in factories. When Hazel Furney joined the Section in 1942 she worked on identifying the many different German and Italian aircraft, searching for new types or modifications, complete with design characteristics such as their dimensions and function, and reporting when and where they were first seen.
Ursula Kay was a senior PI working in the Aircraft Section.
With this information the Section built up a comprehensive dossier, constantly updated, on the state of the German aircraft industry, with the location of their factories and the types and numbers of aircraft built. This became particularly important from mid-1943, when it was realised that enemy aircraft factories were being dispersed to the eastern regions of Germany where they were at the extreme range of Allied bombers and, it was hoped, subject to fewer attacks. It also meant that new aircraft developments were more easily concealed from reconnaissance aircraft. An added twist to this dispersal programme was that the enemy left the original factories empty but intact, with the appearance of production going on, hoping that Allied bombs would be wasted on attacking them.
High priority was given to attacks on German aircraft assembly factories, where newly completed fighters could be destroyed before they became operational. In 1943, Constance became involved in behind-the-scenes work in the preparations for daylight bombing operations by Flying Fortress aircraft of the US 8th Air Force. She wrote:
The work on aircraft factories that I shared with Charles Sims was at once injected with a sense of urgent responsibility. Those scraps of evidence that we pieced together like a jig-saw puzzle – a glimpse of a fuselage outside an assembly shop, the coming and going of lorries at loading bays, the floor areas of the workshops, the positions of the aircraft (which we found usually meant much more than mere numbers) – the meaning we found in all these things was going to be weighed against the lives of the Fortress crews.
It took months of patiently re-checking photographs of the German eastern borders that had been taken in previous years, and comparison with more recent sorties, before the Aircraft Section was able to provide the vital information on a new Focke-Wulf assembly factory constructed at Marienburg in East Prussia. On 9 October 1943, in a daylight precision raid, the USAAF successfully attacked the factory and put it out of action. By the spring of 1944 the enemy’s aircraft production was seriously affected and Allied air supremacy over Germany was established for the first time.
Constance and her team were also responsible for identifying two revolutionary German-designed aircraft. Speed and the attainment of height and manoeuvrability in fighter and reconnaissance aircraft remained the essential qualities that enabled the Allied pilots to ‘nip in and nip out’ and retain the edge over their opponents. For some time the Spitfire could out-perform any other aircraft but by the end of 1943 the updated German Focke-Wulf fighter, the Fw 190, the prototype of which had been spotted by the Aircraft Section two years earlier, was challenging this claim. Fortunately a new, faster PR Spitfire was by then ready to go into service, and Allied superiority was retained.
In the summer of 1943, the Aircraft Section was instructed to watch for ‘anything queer’ on the photographs they examined of the experimental testing site at Peenemunde on the German Baltic coast, where secret weapons were being developed. Photographs taken in June in bright, clear weather helped to confirm the nature of these secret weapons, but Constance was far more interested in something else she had spotted on those same photographs: four little tail-less aeroplanes, which she considered ‘queer enough to satisfy anybody’. These were measured and later identified as Me 163 rocket fighters, the only liquid-fuel rocket aircraft ever to fly operationally. They had a performance far exceeding that of contemporary piston-engine fighter aircraft, such as the Spitfire, taking off at a speed of 200mph and accelerating to pull up into a near-vertical climb to reach altitudes of 39,000ft in 3 minutes. When it began active combat in May 1944, it was a threat to all Allied operations, including the forthcoming Normandy invasion. Pictures of Constance at work show that she kept a wooden model of the Me 163 on her desk.
The early identification of the aircraft gave time for Allied air crews to be briefed on its attacking tactics and to prepare defensive measures. It was the Me 163’s own impressive performance that limited its effective use as, having reached its slower-moving targets in a matter of seconds, it was then going too fast to fire at them accurately. It also needed a far bigger turning circle than any other fighter aircraft in order to return to the fray or return to base for refuelling, giving time for slower but more manoeuvrable aircraft to escape or vanish into a cloud.
Constance Babington Smith, head of the Aircraft Section, with a model of the Me 163 rocket fighter on her desk.
At take-off, jet-propelled aircraft left pairs of fan-shaped scorch marks or long dark streaks on the ground and this distinctive clue enabled the Aircraft Section to locate other sites where similar marks were present. This led to their identification of the Me 262, a twin-engine jet-powered fighter considered to be the most advanced German aviation design in use during the Second World War. It could fly for 60–90 minutes with a cruising speed of up to 50mph faster than piston-engine fighters, including the Spitfire, and posed a very real threat to Allied operations in the last months of the war. At the same time Constance’s team confirmed that Me 262s were being built in underground factories at Kahla. Fortunately only 200 Me 262s made it into combat due to fuel shortages. The Allies dealt with their threat by ground attacks and precision-bombing raids on the synthetic oil plants, which by then were the only means of German fuel production.
The long hours of all-absorbing scrutiny thr
ough a stereoscope were relieved by breaks in which the PIs could walk in the garden, gaze at the river or relax with a chat and a cigarette. One day of the week, though, was special at Medmenham because Wednesday was doughnut day! Suzie Morgan remembered:
Every Wednesday the Americans used to get quite excited and form a long queue at the Red Cross kiosk where they could buy real doughnuts, made fresh on the spot, served with coffee. We Brits used to laugh that it meant so much to them but I suppose it reminded them of home.7
The Americans introduced many people to new foods and new ways of eating it. Myra Murden said:
They were a lovely crowd. It seemed to us that they mixed all their food together but as they said, ‘It all goes down the same way’. I remember how they toasted marshmallows on the fire which were really delicious.8
‘Panda’ Carter recalled that:
The Americans introduced us to raspberry jam with bacon, and peanut butter with blackcurrant jam.9
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Page 13
