Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (14 page)

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.
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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 further 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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.