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.5
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.6
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.7
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.
Cloud is the enemy of the reconnaissance pilot and the photographic interpreter. Surprisingly, the average annual number of absolutely clear days across the whole of Europe is just thirty. Elizabeth described another innovation:
There was often ten tenths cloud over the target making it impossible to distinguish if the bombing was accurate. Bernard worked out a way of plotting on cloud patterns so that with just the smallest glimpse of ground detail below it was possible
to fix the location. It all related to how quickly the clouds were moving and the speed of the aircraft and proved successful.
Susan Bendon carried out First-Phase interpretation:
I was posted to the Photographic Intelligence (PI) unit at Bomber Command Headquarters, a vast underground garrison hidden in the beech woods at Speen, near High Wycombe. Our small PI area was adjacent to the much larger intelligence area where numerous personnel were always on duty. We were visited by many of the grandees of the day, among them famous scientists and inventors. Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, came one day soon after I arrived there, was interested in my work and took time to tell me about his. At the end of our talk I gave him my considered opinion, which was that I doubted whether a jet engine would ever be realised!
Our work was to report on the results of bombing raids on Germany. There were cameras installed in bomber aircraft which, visibility allowing, photographed the ground far beneath as each bomb was released. The results of the early bombing raids on Germany up to 1941 had been disastrous, targets rarely being hit and the loss of aircraft was huge. A Pathfinder Force (PFF) was formed to overcome these catastrophes. Equipped with highly sophisticated electronic equipment, by flying in advance of the bombers and planting brilliant flares right on the target, their purpose was to enable the bombers to drop their bombs spot on, regardless of poor weather conditions. In February 1943 H2S Radar, a means of ‘seeing’ through blackness, became available and this further improved the success of PFF’s operations.
Pam Mitchell, Elizabeth Johnston-Smith and Loyalty Howard worked in the Night Photography Section.
From May to August 1942 there were frequent 1,000-bomber raids mainly to the industrial area of the Ruhr, our principal target area, where the majority of Germany’s ammunitions were produced, principally at the vast Krupps factories.
PFF was led by a dashing Australian, Group Captain Donald Bennett, later promoted to Air Vice Marshal. Although acknowledged within the RAF as a spectacular advance in tactics, many at Bomber Command were wary of Bennett’s boasts after almost every sortie, that his squadron’s flares had been dropped bang on target. Reports from underground intelligence forces operating in Germany, sent to headquarters by devious, secret means, usually came through about a week or ten days after a raid and occasionally cast doubts on Bennett’s claims.
In PI over the years of reviewing aerial photographs of German territory, one became totally conversant with its ‘design’ – from a height of around 30,000 feet, looking down, the ground resembles a patchwork quilt, every field being a specific stripe or rectangle and it seemed that through sheer familiarity I was able to recognise the patterns of the vast Ruhr area like the back of my hand.
There were usually only two or three of us on duty in PI and every morning after a raid, at around 5 am, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, would phone in for a report on the night’s results, as by then the bombers would have returned and both their and the PFF photographs would have been rushed by motor bike to us, the latter from their base in RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire. There was always tremendous haste to view them under the stereoscopes we used to give a three-dimensional view of the ground.
One night, in spite of the weather men telling everyone that conditions over the Ruhr were ‘ten-tenths cloud’ a 1,000-bomber raid on Essen went ahead, relying on the Pathfinder’s skills to achieve the desired results. As usual we received the photographs in the early hours – there used to be hundreds of them – and they were all completely black, just solid midnight cloud. Towards the end, having all but given up, in the corner of one I spotted some miniscule stripes, all together far less than a quarter of an inch across. Something made me pause and enlarge them – they could easily have been scratches on the photographic paper but somehow they rang a chord. In those days I did have a so-called ‘photographic memory’ and there was a hint of familiarity about them. Frantically I started to go through the hundreds of reference photos that formed our ‘maps’ of the Ruhr and eventually, Eureka! – I matched them to an area just outside a tiny village, 15 miles east of Essen. When ‘Bomber’ Harris phoned I told him exactly that. Simultaneously, Bennett’s report came through that his flares had been ‘bang on target’. Then all hell broke loose.
One must remember that this was a frenetic, desperate time for everyone involved in the war – the crews were used to so many of their comrades being shot down over enemy territory night after night and almost every one of them left letters for their nearest and dearest, to be sent in the event of their non-return. Bennett went berserk when he got wind of my report and although he had been on duty throughout the night, he instantly rushed from his base at Wyton to Command HQ to seek out the idiot who had reported such nonsense to Harris.
Susan Bendon worked in the underground headquarters of Bomber Command near High Wycombe.
He came into our sub-basement unit where he found me and would have torn me limb from limb – his six-foot-plus towered over me, he beat the air (would have done so to me had I not by that point been surrounded by several officers from Intelligence), screamed at me and reduced me to floods of tears – I too had been on duty for about 20 hours which was normal for that time – it was dreadful, but one did feel a little for him in his anguish.
About ten days later, underground intelligence reports filtered through and confirmed that on the night in question, 1,000 bombers had dropped their entire bomb loads in the middle of fields, 15 miles east of Essen.
Bomber Harris was an exceptionally powerful man – his ruthless wartime tactics, the devastation they caused in Germany – Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and so on and the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in those raids – are criticised to this day. He did not like Bennett anyway, thought him too pleased with himself, and he would not tolerate a member of his staff being humiliated by such a vain bully. And so the very last thing in the world I would ever have wished for occurred.
Harris summoned Bennett to the Intelligence department and, in front of the entire department plus many others who sensed there was some sport brewing, made him unreservedly make a deep, supposedly humble apology to me. It was excruciating to observe the ridiculous ‘theatre’ being performed, to see Bennett being humiliated in that way and I simply did not know where to look or what to do. But that was Harris’s way of ‘encouraging the others’, making sure that no-one messed with his inner team.8
In October 1941, about 100 RAF, WAAF and civilian personnel with their commanding officer, Major Quaife of the Royal Engineers, moved into another requisitioned red-brick Victorian mansion sited on the brow of a hill overlooking the beautiful Chiltern countryside. This was Hughenden Manor, the country home of the nineteenth-century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and its wartime purpose was to provide a secret, secluded unit for the production of targeting maps, graphics and other briefing materials for bomber air crews carrying out raids over enemy and occupied Europe. The unit was code-named Hillside, and it was conveniently situated about 10 miles from Medmenham, from where it received air photographs; 4 miles from Bomber Command at High Wycombe where the completed maps were sent to; and equally close to HQ 8th USAAF at Wycombe Abbey.
Precise navigation was essential to ensure the effective bombing of a target. The target folders and briefings handed out to bomber air crews before each mission started contained all navigational information available to reach the target area, the identification of the actual target and the return flight. Maps and photographic illustrations were of great importance to this process. Reconnaissance sorties would have been flown by aircraft from RAF Benson and other PRUs to photograph the route to the target, the approach to the area and the target itself. Interpretation reports from Medmenham could include input from several sections to ensure the most up-to-date information was provided for air crews, for instance if new enemy defensive flak positions had recently been identified on the bombers’ route in and out. Mosaics (photographic maps) were produced and deta
ils of any decoy site designed to lead the attacking force astray from the target were included. All available recognition data on the target and a target map showing the bomb-aiming points were included in the target folders.
WAAF and civilian draughtswomen produced target maps for Bomber Command at nearby Hughenden Manor. Kathlyn Williams is second from right.
The RAF and WAAF personnel at Hillside produced these target maps for Bomber Command. Most of the men and women had drawing, art or design in common. Kathlyn Williams was one of those who, having joined the WAAF in her home town of Gloucester, was sent to the Royal Engineers unit at Ruabon in North Wales to train as a cartographical draughtswoman. She joined the half dozen or so map-making WAAFs at Hillside and described how they worked:
We came in past the police post in the Entrance Hall – they knew all of us but we still had to show our passes. Then to our own workroom (originally this had been the drawing room) where we worked in silence, painting on ‘Kodafoil’ with a brush and a large jar of water to hand. We had to get it right – we were told to be accurate to ‘within a hair’s breadth’. We painted using ox-blood and had to remember to cover it over when we went to lunch otherwise it would be smothered in flies when we returned.9
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Page 18
