Diana Byron married Richard Cussons, a PR pilot from RAF Benson, who in 1942 was detached to RAF Wick, in north-east Scotland, to track and monitor the Tirpitz. He flew a Spitfire Mk IV PR, which operated at its extreme range when flying to Norway and back, despite its fuel tanks being filled to overflowing at Wick, then topped up at Sumburgh on the Shetland Islands, so that it was only just possible to get airborne again. The pilot then flew 400 miles or so over nothing but sea, navigating by dead reckoning, until he reached the Norwegian coast when a recognisable point on the map could be picked up. Richard described his PR missions to locate the Tirpitz in a book:
The general idea was to fly fast and high and nip in, take the photos and nip out again before the enemy realised what was happening. Our defence against enemy action depended mainly on ‘rubber necking’ – that is, keeping a very good look out in all directions!
The author added:
It took a special courage to fly at great altitude in freezing conditions for hours at a time over the featureless expanse of the North Sea. Spitfire flights to reconnoitre the ‘Tirpitz’ at this time lasted between four and five and a half hours. Not only had the pilot’s navigation to be accurate, but as he either had no radio, or had to maintain radio silence, he had no one with whom to share his lonely flight.4
Reconnaissance aircraft carried no weapons or ammunition, these having been stripped out to carry more fuel, and there was a danger of instruments freezing at high altitudes. The pilot’s defence, and his life, relied on height, speed, observation and first-class navigation. Having reached the target, which was frequently heavily defended with anti-aircraft guns and intercepting enemy aircraft, the pilot had to fly over it in a certain sequence, north to south photographing one strip, then south to north on a parallel strip. Maintenance of a steady and level course was essential to ensure the whole target was covered and that good quality photographs were taken. If his aircraft was damaged the PR pilot could not communicate with his base and when he failed to return from a sortie it was assumed he was dead – some crashed into the sea to prevent the enemy getting their film. It is small wonder then that all PIs felt a great responsibility for the PR pilots on their lonely, dangerous flights, and ensured that the greatest accuracy of information was provided for their pre-sortie briefings. When it was decided, after interpretation, that the target had not been sufficiently covered and its importance was such that more photographs were essential, the pilot had to re-fly the sortie, knowing that enemy defences would be ready and waiting for him.
The Coverage sub-section worked in watches all round the clock, examining incoming sorties to decide which jobs had been satisfactorily photographed and which must be flown again. A WAAF who worked in Coverage was Ann Sentence-Tapp, known as ‘The Polished Tap’ for, as Diana remembered, she was always a model of neatness and glamour. In the summer of 1944, members of the American WAC were posted into Medmenham to assist in dealing with the huge increase in photographs to be interpreted due to the Normandy invasions. Two pre-war photographers, Lieutenants Lois Willard and D.T. Cooke joined lieutenants Mabel Menders and P.L. Linder to work alongside their WAAF counterparts in Coverage. Several USAAF personnel were posted in too, one of whom recorded in an amazed tone: ‘My immediate boss was a WAAF!’ British female emancipation was perhaps some years ahead of America. Both male and female PIs who worked at Medmenham during the war agree that those employed in the unit carried out similar work. It was accepted that the person most capable of doing a job got that job, regardless of gender. As Mollie Thompson wrote, many years later: ‘I do not recall any “glass ceiling” at Medmenham.’
Pamela Dudding had been a secretary in the Foreign Office before joining the WAAF, and trained with Joan Bawden. Pamela met her future husband on the PI course and they married in November 1941, claiming to be the ‘First Medmenham Alliance’:
We lived out in Marlow and bought a Norton motorbike to get to and from Medmenham. Although we both worked on Second Phase, we were often on different shifts, so had to share the bike. It was very large and heavy and I had difficulty in moving it, but the guards on the gate used to get it started for me and see me on my way.
I worked all the time in Second Phase, primarily on ports, which I loved as I come from a naval family. If we were watching a particular port it could be for several weeks with new sorties coming in all the time and we had to pinpoint everything we could see coming and going. Shipping movements were very important so we watched all big ships like hawks to see if there was any hint of them preparing to leave and what was being loaded.
We also had to measure the heights of the balloon barrages, because they were always being changed and that was desperately important for the wretched pilots flying in low. I liked maths at school and was very good at trigonometry. We did not have any of these modern gadgets, like calculators, but I had a slide rule and my knowledge of trigonometry, and one job I liked doing very much was working on balloon heights. I asked for sorties to be flown in sunshine whenever possible as then there was a good shadow of the tethering line on the balloon and it was easier to calculate an exact height.5
Sarah Churchill worked in Second Phase after passing her PI course:
By eight o’clock in the evening, when we started our shift, the photographs and plotted positions would have to be at Medmenham for us. Within twelve hours – we worked until eight in the morning – the photographs had to be interpreted and a full report made, which was then rushed to the Air Ministry. Each area was allocated to a specific interpreter – one of mine was Kiel Harbour and I had to plot the movement of shipping estimating, for instance, when they were shifting smaller craft to make room for a battleship or destroyer. I still have the scraps of paper on which I wrote the measurements of enemy ships, the number of gun turrets and other features – the only means of identifying each ship from the air.6
Three American WAC officers, Lieutenants Mabel Menders (above), Lois Willard and P.L. Linder, all worked in the US Second-Phase Section at RAF Medmenham.
The de Havilland Mosquito, introduced in 1941, had a longer flying range than the Spitfire, and could reach the further reaches of the enemy empire, making it harder to hide secret establishments and industries on more distant border areas. Often photographs provided the only information available of such areas and gave the Allies the opportunity to be one step ahead of future enemy plans. The advances in optics and camera technology enabled photographs to be taken at heights previously thought impossible, using cameras with a greater focal length, which made objects on the ground more easily identifiable. By 1943, it could be claimed that anything that moved or was built in enemy or occupied territory was photographed by Allied PR aircraft.
One ‘Most Secret’ sub-section, set up in 1942, had the title ‘Topographical’ or GILO (Ground Intelligence Liaison Officer) and among the PIs working there were Ann Sentence-Tapp and Mary Grierson (always called ‘Mary’ to distinguish her from Mary ‘Bunny’ Grierson in First Phase). Mary had been a confectioner, decorating wedding cakes, before she joined the WAAF in 1941. After a month at RAF Bridgnorth, Shropshire, being ‘knocked into shape’, she was posted to ‘No. 6 BC’ and in her enthusiasm thought: ‘Oh good, Bomber Command.’ However, it turned out to be No. 6 Balloon Centre at RAF Withall, near Birmingham, where Mary worked as a plotter among the maps in the operations room. Her artistic talents were later recognised and she came to Medmenham to work as a PI in Second Phase.7
Ann Sentence-Tapp worked in the Coverage Section.
Mary Grierson (standing) and Elizabeth Dennis with an RAF PI in Second Phase, with various artwork behind them.
The work of the GILO PIs was to report on the selection and suitability of the landing and dropping sites in Europe for agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). At first the PIs involved were not allowed to know the purpose of their work, although it soon became obvious when they were asked to report in the greatest topographical detail on a specific site, then select and report on furth
er suitable sites within the same area. Their reports were used for the flights of Hudson or Lysander aircraft on a pinpoint bearing to either land or pick up SOE agents, VIPs or refugees in enemy-occupied territory. There were only six PIs in total working in this sub-section, under the leadership of Flight Lieutenant Clive Rouse, an expert on medieval wall paintings and the ideal person for this role, as the same methodical patience and painstaking attention to detail was required in both his civilian and wartime work.
Initially the PIs worked late into the night on the GILO jobs after their usual duty hours, but these were soon separated as a properly rested PI was essential when the lives of agents and infiltrators were at stake, and the interpretation had to be so minutely detailed that every ridge and furrow in the ground, each telephone line and tree, and any minor obstacle had to be highlighted. Flights to France took place almost every night, although the same landing point could never be used twice. An important function of photographic reconnaissance was in the selection of suitable landing sites, in conjunction with the underground groups who would act as reception committees for the landing aircraft. At the beginning of its existence, the GILO sub-section provided an average of five reports a week and this increased until, in one single week in 1945, twenty-one reports were completed; an indication of the extent of clandestine SOE operations in north-west Europe.8
The first American service personnel visited Medmenham during spring 1941, eight months before the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. The American naval attaché in London had been impressed by the number of enemy secrets revealed at Medmenham and, knowing that there were no trained photographic interpreters in the US navy, had asked for an officer to find out how a similar organisation could be set up in the USA. Section Officer Constance Babington Smith was responsible for the subsequent three-month visits made by US navy and USAAF officers. After these visits, American personnel started attending RAF PI courses and in 1942, PI schools were established at the US Navy Depot at Anacostia, Virginia, and the USAAF Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. By June 1942 all PI courses at RAF Nuneham Park included US personnel and, later on, the Americans set up their own PI school in Kensington, London. When the first trained American PIs were posted into Medmenham they were immediately put to work on the preparations for Operation Torch, the planned invasion of North Africa in November 1942 and the first Anglo-American operation of the war.
Although the first male American PIs arrived at Medmenham in 1942, their female counterparts were not posted there until 1944. One of the first American women to arrive was First Lieutenant Lillian Kamphuis, a WAC attached to the USAAF. She came from a farming family in Mobile, Alabama, graduated in 1934 aged 19 from Huntington College in Montgomery and took her first teaching job in a high school in Ozark, Alabama, which she soon left. Two things persuaded her never to teach again: the first was that many of the students were older and larger than she was, and the second was that the state’s depressed situation resulted in the faculty being paid with an IOU.9 Lillian joined the WAC following the Pearl Harbor attack and, after several assignments in the USA, was posted to the 325th Photographic Reconnaissance Wing at the 8th Air Force Headquarters at High Wycombe, England:
I had two major reasons for having joined up for the war effort. One was, of course, the patriotism, I wanted to help. But I also joined for adventure. It was a chance to leave home, see the world and meet people.
I flew into Scotland in July 1944 and took the train to London where I attended a short two week PI course. I was assigned to High Wycombe where the 325th was located in what had been The Abbey School, codenamed ‘Pinetree’. I was immediately detached to RAF Medmenham where I worked as a PI in Second Phase for seven months before being re-assigned to France.10
It seems that there were never more than fifteen or so WAC officers at Medmenham and they all worked either in ‘Z’ Coverage or ‘Z’ (USA) – a Second-Phase Section that was formed in September 1944 so that the American PIs would be ready to move to the Pacific as a trained group once the war in Europe was finished. The WACs in ‘Z’ (USA) included Lieutenants Mildred Wilson, M.C. Davidson, Doris Jacobsen and D.E. Forgue.11
An individual interpreter may have spent his or her 12-hour shift investigating a specific area or, like Peggy Hyne, analysing photographs of a variety of targets. Before going off duty, every PI added their own reports to the total collection, which would be typed up, assembled and despatched as separate daily reports for individual countries or part of a country. The daily reports contained all the information extracted from the photographs of relevant targets on that one day with comparisons made to earlier cover, if that was available. Also included could be reports on shipping movements, ports and cargoes being loaded, the aircraft on individual airfields, railway movements and marshalling yards, and anything to do with factories and industrial plants. A huge accessible store of knowledge was built up, detailing what the enemy was doing, and where and why he was doing it. This knowledge provided A1 intelligence, meaning it was from a reliable source and almost certainly correct. Future enemy plans could then be predicted with certainty, giving the Allies an important strategic advantage.
There were several artists in Second Phase and a number of PIs who enjoyed putting some aspects of their work into verse. Mary Greirson was one of these, and perhaps she penned the following lines, part of a longer poem, after a particularly frustrating day trying to locate German E-boats on the photographs. E-boats were small, fast, seaworthy motor torpedo boats used to intercept shipping heading to British ports through the North Sea and English Channel. During the Second World War, E-boats sank and damaged many naval and merchant vessels and posed a continuous threat to Allied shipping. Mary wrote:
The ‘E’ Boat is so very small
You cannot make it out at all
But many sanguine people hope
To see it through a stereoscope.
It hides behind enormous docks,
Conceals itself when on the stocks,
And in a hundred other ways
Defies the interpreter’s keen gaze …12
While part of Second Phase dealt with the identification and movements of enemy shipping, ‘A’, the Naval Section, a Third-Phase specialist section, worked on other marine concerns such as port facilities, minesweeping, wrecks, submarine shelters, shipbuilding and ship repairs. Of particular interest was the building of German U-boats or submarines, which were the cause of so many Allied ships being sunk or damaged with consequent terrible loss of life and essential cargoes. A young geographer, Flight Lieutenant David Brachi, had set up the U-boat Building Section at Wembley in early 1940 when, with ‘Bunny’ Grierson, the process of submarine building in enemy shipyards was monitored. The following year, ‘Bunny’ moved to RAF Benson and Section Officers Lavender Bruce and Betty Campbell joined Brachi to continue the work at Medmenham.
Betty Campbell, a WAAF who worked in the Naval Section.
Day by day, they used air photographs to follow the construction of each individually numbered U-boat, from the first stage of laying down its keel in the shipyard, through each successive procedure until it was completed and fitted out eleven months later, ready to join a U-boat pack. This monitoring was only achieved through the tenacity of the PR pilots who, despite the massive defences around enemy shipyards, repeatedly brought back the photographs. By skilful use of stereoscopy, the PIs saw through the elaborately camouflaged constructions to monitor building progress and accurately calculate when each U-boat would be operational. Forewarned is forearmed, and as with so much interpretation work at Medmenham, these reports provided the Admiralty with the authoritative intelligence needed to plan attacks at the optimum time, to cause maximum damage and disruption to the U-boat construction programme.
In 1944, the numbers of conventionally built U-boats suddenly dropped and PIs sought to find the reason. They found the answer when they spotted large sections of submarine hull being prefabricated at different locations a
nd then transported to shipyards for assembly, thereby cutting the overall building time by several months. In the same year, midget submarines were found at many seaplane bases. In both cases, identifying something different or unusual on new photography had triggered a comparison with previous photographic evidence of the area, which had helped to provide the answer.
Betty Campbell had grown up on Clydeside, near Glasgow, and learnt a lot about ships and shipping. She trained as a teacher, joined the WAAF and after PI training, worked in the Naval Section at RAF Medmenham monitoring enemy U-boat construction. Betty married Willem Skappel, a Norwegian who had escaped to England in spring 1940, following the Nazi occupation of his country. He had run an aerial survey and map-making business in Oslo, gaining an intimate knowledge of the Norwegian coastline. Willem and his brother were suspected of using their printing facilities to produce an underground newspaper and his brother was arrested and shipped to Germany. Willem kept his bicycle outside his office window, and when the expected knock on the door came, he leapt through the window on to the bike, and headed for the Swedish border. He was flown to the Shetland Isles and spent two weeks being debriefed in an internment camp before being cleared for PI work; he and Betty met on their training course at Nuneham Park. Willem was the only permanent Norwegian officer at Medmenham and worked in ‘Z1’, a specialist sub-section of Second Phase concerned with Norway and the Baltic, where his knowledge of Norwegian coastal waters was invaluable. He also trained his compatriots in PI before they went to work on operational airfields.13
Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos Page 9