Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos

by Halsall, Christine

  Shortly before the end of the war Flight Officer Mollie Thompson married a Canadian army PI whom she had met at Medmenham. In 2009 Mollie wrote:

  By VE Day, I think most of us, men and women, were a lot more tired – ‘burnt-out’ – than we realised. For myself, after six years of war (my time in London being quite dangerous), even though much of the work was exciting and important, the idea of married life in a foreign country with children and ‘housewifery’ seemed to me blissful!6

  Mollie was demobbed in September 1945 and left for Canada with her husband six months later. They lived in Toronto for many years and, although she did ‘children and housewifery’, she also worked as a volunteer for the YWCA, becoming Canadian national president:

  This I found very interesting as it enabled me to travel throughout Canada – from the Arctic to the Rockies and the Pacific coast through the Prairies; everywhere except Newfoundland – I tried three times but was prevented each time by either fog, snow and once a typhoon.

  Mollie transferred to the World YWCA and spent eight years as a delegate to the United Nations in New York, where she was locked in the UN building with everyone else over the Bay of Pigs episode and when Fidel Castro spoke to the General Assembly. She became vice-president of the World Executive of the YWCA before retiring in 1973.

  The American WACs left Medmenham to return to the USA in August 1945. In February 1945 First Lieutenant Lillian Kamphuis had been transferred from Medmenham to the Photographic Intelligence Branch, HQ US Strategic Air Force in Europe, based in St Germaine, near Paris. Her last duty was to travel with an Air Technical Intelligence team into Germany to pick up captured enemy photography.

  Another WAC, Captain Alice Davey, was also involved in the end-of-war search for the German photographic library. Alice had been art editor for the Chicago Sun when she joined up in 1942. A year later, when the WAC was absorbed into the army, she was commissioned and sent to the PI school at Harrisburg, then worked in the Pentagon. Alice was longing to get overseas, and to Medmenham in particular, and at last her posting notice came through – on VE Day. She went straight to Supreme Headquarters in France and worked with two other PI officers who were intent on finding out as much as possible about German wartime PI. At first they were unsuccessful in questioning prisoners about the subject, although Alice established, when interviewing the head of the German interpretation school, that their PIs were only trained to work on single prints instead of using stereoscopes, and they did not use comparative cover. When they got the news that a barn full of boxes of photographs taken over Britain had been discovered in Bad Reichenhall, near Berchtesgarten, they rushed there. The first sortie they inspected was of the port of Southampton. Although the Germans had excellent cameras and produced beautiful photographs, they had not exploited their imagery to its full extent as the Allies had done.7

  The staff of the Central Photographic Interpretation Command at Hyderabad Palace in Delhi, India, after VJ Day.

  Ursula Powys-Lybbe wrote on the German approach to PI:

  Their training, surprisingly, was much inferior to our own and they were not given officer rank, which meant that they held no authority, and if they made any errors, they might have found themselves in the equivalent of the ‘glass-house’ of the British Army. According to prisoner-of-war interrogations, Top German Brass after receiving an interpretation report would stare at the accompanying aerial photographs through antiquated magnifying glasses and pass judgement, thereby foolishly throwing away one of the most important weapons essential in winning wars.8

  As Alice Davey was waiting to come to Europe from the USA, Pat Peat was waiting to return there after several months in hospital:

  I got out of hospital on VE Day and I had to wait until my sister was ready to go so we were together on the ship – I think it was the Queen Elizabeth. We waited at Studley Priory (near Oxford) until there were enough people to send home to Canada and the USA. The ship docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia and we volunteers were put on trains going to various parts of Canada and the US. I was heading for New York City but they took me off the train in Maine and put me in jail, I don’t know why. [Possibly because she was not wearing US uniform.] So I said, ‘I demand a bath and I also want a glass of milk.’ The jail people went to a bar and got a glass of milk for me and I took a nice shower in the jail and stayed overnight. The next day they put me on a train going back to Halifax. I caught up with my sister again there and we bought a beautiful white sweater for her husband who was a Polish RAF fighter pilot. The Canadians put us with a very prominent person’s group, he had invented some kind of gun or bullet, something like that, and then we went down to New York City.9

  Pat continued her artwork and in August 2009 held an exhibition of enamels at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia. These were drawn from watercolour sketches that Pat had made of the English countryside and villages during her Second World War service and later converted into enamel paintings.

  Peggy Hyne from Second Phase volunteered to go to India in 1945 and was being interviewed in Air Ministry buildings near Victoria station when an alarm went off. So used were they to reacting to air-raid warnings that they all went to lie down in a corridor away from the windows. Instead of going to India, Peggy was posted to Washington and travelled out with the Australian WAAF Jean Youle and two RAF PIs on the Queen Elizabeth, enjoying good food as the ship had been provisioned in the USA. There were thousands of returning servicemen and women on board, mostly Americans and Canadians. Peggy and her colleagues worked in the Pentagon on Second-Phase work and also instructed Americans on PI. She found digs with an Australian couple in Cleveland Avenue, on the side of the Potomac near the cathedral, which had not yet been completed. The most noticeable difference between life in wartime UK and the USA was the abundance of everything, from food to consumer goods, and no blackout – everywhere was well lit. Peggy worked in the Pentagon for three more years before returning to the UK.

  In July 1945, twelve more WAAF officers, including Margaret Price and Helga O’Brien, crossed the Atlantic on the SS Orcades to Quebec, together with 3,000 Canadian troops returning home after the war. The WAAFs had been posted to the Pentagon to join American PIs working on photography of the Pacific War, but two weeks after they arrived, the atom bomb was dropped and the war against Japan ended. Eight of the WAAFs returned to England but others stayed in the USA and were demobbed there. Margaret married model maker Joe Hurley and they moved to California where he became a Hollywood screen director.

  Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith was posted on special assignment to the Pentagon, but the plans for her to give advice on imagery interpretation came to an abrupt end in August. She stayed on in the USA and in the autumn was feted by American newspapers as ‘The Girl who Saved New York’. This claim was put out initially by the British Information Services in Washington, an agency of the British government. It was based on the six-month delay in V-weapon development that followed the identification of the V-1 and the Peenemunde raid in 1943, together with the belief that the Germans had plans to launch V-1s on America. This publicity rankled with some PIs back at Medmenham, where interpretation was considered essentially a team activity that had been a major contributing factor in the success of Allied wartime interpretation. Constance never made this claim and always played down her section’s part in the V-weapon hunt, referring to it as ‘a small but fairly important contribution’.10

  In 1945, Constance was awarded the MBE and on 8 February 1946 in Washington she was presented with the USA Legion of Merit for her services to Allied Air Photographic Interpretation, the only British woman to have received this award. She left the WAAF shortly afterwards and stayed in America to work on Life magazine for the next five years as their aviation correspondent. In 1958 Constance published the first book about wartime photographic reconnaissance and interpretation, entitled Evidence in Camera: The Story of Photographic Intelligence in World War II, published in the USA as Air Spy. Her book told the
largely unknown story of the determination of the wartime PR pilots in getting their photographs and of the team of highly individualistic men and women PIs at Medmenham who contributed so much to the Allied success. Constance later wrote other books on aviation and several acclaimed biographies.

  In February 1946 Constance Babington Smith was presented with the USA Legion of Merit in Washington DC.

  Thousands of men and women who had joined the armed forces during the war were due to be demobilised; at RAF Medmenham the scheme went into action in May 1945. All married women and those personnel who had civilian posts waiting for them qualified for Class-A release, while subsequent ‘demob’ dates were arranged by age and length of service.

  Anne Whiteman returned to be a tutor in history at Oxford University in 1945 and pursued an academic life, becoming vice-principal of Lady Margaret Hall. Anne Jeffery also took up a post in Oxford and became a leading authority on archaic Greek inscriptions and epigrams. Towards the end of the war, Glyn Daniel had travelled from India to visit Medmenham and encountered his friend Dorothy Garrod. Wing Commander Daniel was smartly saluted by Section Officer (three ranks junior) Garrod:

  ‘Remember, Glyn,’ she said firmly and kindly, ‘that very soon our roles will be reversed and Assistant Lecturer Daniel will be saluting Professor Garrod!’11

  Dorothy returned to her work in Cambridge and over the years received many honours for her work on prehistoric archaeology. In 1965 the CBE was conferred on her and in April 1968 the Society of Antiquaries presented her with its gold medal, the first ever awarded to a woman. Dorothy’s successors to the Disney professorship were Grahame Clark and Glyn Daniel, both of whom had been wartime PIs at Medmenham.

  While waiting for her demobilisation at the end of 1945, Sarah Churchill accompanied her father on an election tour of the country and later, when he was voted out of office, went with him to Lake Como for a holiday designed to aid the recovery of his health and morale. In November she was released from the WAAF and on the bus taking her to the demobilisation centre:

  I felt my heart singing like a bird but then I looked across at some of the younger WAAFS, still ACW2s and saw tears in their eyes. Were they thinking of lost loved ones, or was it that they would have to hand in their uniforms, of which they were so justifiably proud, to have them replaced with the rather dull ‘civvies’? They would have to return to the more monotonous everyday life of kitchen sinks and bus queues. For some years of wartime everything had been done for them: they had been housed, warmed and fed, they had mingled happily and naturally with new companions from every walk of life and worked alongside them in a great joint effort. My elation dimmed. Perhaps it was not going to be easy for them.12

  Sarah returned to the world of theatre and films; she was an accomplished artist and published two books of poetry and a tribute to her father in addition to her autobiography.

  Many group photographs of sections were taken at the end of the war. Second Phase, the largest and most international section, posed for a photograph on the terrace and steps of Danesfield House in 1945.

  While awaiting their turn to leave the forces, personnel could choose to attend a range of educational and vocational courses set up at Medmenham and elsewhere, with the objective of getting a job back in ‘civvy street’. Some of the younger women filled in time by picking fruit and vegetables for local farmers and PIs at Pinetree worked on the captured German air photography, preparing it for cataloguing and storage. A programme of civic lectures was started, offering a wide variety of topics mostly presented by the resident personnel. Several women remember a particularly prophetic lecture about how the German ballistic rockets, the V-2s, had prepared the way for getting to the moon, which was predicted to happen in about fifteen years’ time.

  At the demobilisation depot, at RAF Wythall near Birmingham, uniforms were handed in and clothing vouchers were given out to WAAFs; most considered this preferable to the standard ‘demob’ suit issued to the men. Millicent Laws used her vouchers to get a cerise-coloured tweed suit, made by Hector Powell, which she liked and wore to work for a long time.

  With the defeat of Germany and the VE Day celebrations, the preparations for the invasion of Malaya and defeat of the Japanese continued. Six more WAAF officers arrived in Delhi from Medmenham. Elspeth Macalister wrote:

  And then in August, the atomic bomb descended on Hiroshima and Japan crumbled. Trader’s reports were used as the Allies took over Malaya and South East Asia, so we did celebrate VJ Day by having dinner at our favourite watering hole, the Imperial Hotel. But for the majority of the Indian population, another objective had to be won, the ending of the rule of the British Raj in India, achieved in 1947. Trader and I married that same year!13

  In Calcutta the three PI WAAFs Eve Holiday, Hester Bell and Margot Munn celebrated VJ Day together and Eve had dinner with Dirk Bogarde at the Saturday Club. With the end of the war there was no work to do in Calcutta or Delhi and all sorts of activities, such as lectures, plays and quizzes, were introduced to keep the staff there occupied. Elspeth spent time at the Museum of Asian Antiquity and worked on cataloguing and drawing many of the exhibits. ‘Trader’ soon departed for England and ‘demob’, but Elspeth was to spend several more months in Asia before travelling home. She was posted with a friend to the HQ South-East Asia Command at Kandy, in Ceylon. There was absolutely no work to do so they went sightseeing up into the hills to watch the elephants being bathed: ‘and took tea at the Queen’s Hotel. One day we even sat beside Peggy Ashcroft and Noel Coward!’ Then they were given the job of escorting fifteen WAAF to a naval base to fly to Singapore:

  We took a long train journey right across Ceylon and when we arrived we were given a meal and ferried out to a flying boat. It was a typical romantic scenario – great moon, dark blue velvet sky, coconut palms all bending slightly in the right direction and white, white sand. We boarded the sea plane and it took off with enthusiasm. This was short lived however, as one of the engines spluttered and then gave up. So back we were ferried – consternation – what was to be done with all these unexpected women? The girls were put up on the floor of the Mess. Rae and I were allocated a small hut in the jungle – and it really was jungle.

  Next morning Rae suddenly said that she had been bitten. I was really worried about her on the long flight in case I would find her dead beside me. It was a very long flight and no proper seats. We lay between the struts and as the dawn broke we looked down on miles of deep emerald green jungle. We re-fuelled at Penang and eventually touched down at Changi Airport. I had last seen Singapore, my birthplace, in 1926 from the rail of a P & O liner, which had taken us home to Europe.

  Singapore was rather different after three years of Japanese occupation, although Elspeth saw familiar landmarks. One day she went to the Supreme Court to hear one of the trials of the notorious prison guards who had inflicted such cruel tortures on their prisoners. She met English people who had been prisoners of the Japanese in Changi and saw Dutch women and children waiting to be repatriated:

  At last my demob number came up, and I embarked at the end of March 1946 on the Winchester Castle, a liner converted to a troop ship so there were six of us in a cabin designed for one. One girl had bought three fur coats in Kashmir and these monopolised our one cupboard – they nearly went overboard!! At Suez mail came on board, but there was nothing for me. Trader was always a slow letter writer, but I was a little sad.

  The first sight of home … Arriving in a troop ship is always exciting as all ships are dressed overall, and when we drew alongside the quay there were bands playing. I looked over the rail, and there at the foot of the gangway was my beloved Trader. I rushed to the purser’s office to get a pass and tore down the gangway. As I fell into his arms I knew everything was going to be all right.

  VJ Day at RAF Medmenham had been a quieter celebration than that for VE Day. Mary Harrison remembered that a bonfire had been made ready for VJ Day near their accommodation hut. She was leaving to go on duty when
they heard the news of the end of the Japanese war; the bonfire was lit prematurely while people danced around it in their pyjamas. The ancient station fire engine, which they had never seen in use before, had to come to put it out. Later that evening everyone at Medmenham celebrated the end of the war round a huge bonfire and watched the fireworks.

  By her own account, Jane Cameron took some time to come to terms with her wartime service, and finally took up a post in an engineering works where she met and fell in love with a Scottish engineer. They moved to Jamaica, where Jane recovered her desire to write and completed seven novels, all titled after friends, keeping them hidden in her linen cupboard. She sent the manuscripts to a publisher when her husband was very ill, and on his death she returned to Scotland. In 1959 Jane became a publishing sensation when Macmillan Publishers announced that they would be publishing seven of her books; the first one was My Friends the Miss Boyds under her nom de plume of Jane Duncan. She wrote many more novels, all based on her life and friends, and an autobiography. Jane’s books had a large readership, including many of her former colleagues at Medmenham.