Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (24 page)

When her group of WAAFs were despatched to Morecombe for basic training, she teamed up with a girl called Doris who had fainting fits but, like Pamela, had been rated medically A1. Their first parade was held on a very hot July day and Pamela had to keep rescuing Doris when she fainted, which brought on her own asthma. They were both brought before a medical board who discharged Doris as medically unfit but decided that Pamela could stay in the WAAF, although with a downgraded medical status of C3, which meant that she could not be posted abroad.

Pamela liked the drilling but hated physical training, which she considered to be degrading as it was held in a big bus garage open for all to see, and the WAAFs had to strip down to shirt and knickers. She learnt how to salute:

Longest way up, shortest way down. Right arm up and extended out to the side, then bent at the elbow and the top of the index and middle fingers to touch the right temple, fingers rigid, palm facing forwards, then curl the fingers forward and down, turn the whole wrist now like a fist down in a straight line to your side, to the count of up 2,3, down 2,3. We were told we were not saluting the individual but the King’s uniform.

An aerial view of RAF Medmenham provides a good example of a vertical photograph.

She worked as a clerk at three different RAF stations, continually putting in requests to be trained for a trade, and was at last posted on to a three-month photography course at RAF Farnborough. It was a comprehensive mix of theoretical lectures on light and optics, and practical work on the pinhole camera, types of lenses, light and chemical changes, followed by developing and filters. The WAAFs learnt how to load film into an aerial camera and practised installing and retrieving it from an aircraft:

We were taught about processing, camera maintenance and how to load film in the dark. I passed the first photographic test with good marks of 50 out of 60.

Later on they absorbed information on air pressure and electrical circuits. Other subjects were about night photography, mechanical faults and stereoscopic harmonisation, which ensured the correct overlapping of photographs to produce stereo pairs. They also learnt about all the chemicals used and how to title each negative to show when and where it was taken.

Having passed their final exam, ACW1 Pamela Howie and her friend Nell were posted to RAF Benson, the very busy PR station close to Medmenham. There was the constant noise of reconnaissance aircraft, Spitfires and Mosquitoes, revving up and taking off. Pamela wrote:

We were kept busy developing, printing and titling the films ready to go to the interpretation office for inspection. Recently a fantastic aerial shot of our airfield had been taken. I would have dearly loved a print to take home and show Mum, but I realised that had I been searched on one of the railway stations by M.Ps (military police), they may have thought I was a spy, it just was not worth the risk, pity though.

Instead Pamela wrote and described RAF Benson to her mother:

The main gate which leads out to Wallingford and Oxford is near the guard room and where the Alsatian dogs are kept. The other two normally unmanned gates are at either end of the camp, the first one after coming in the main gate leads to Mrs Crane’s café, back inside that gate and to the right is the sick bay, (trust me to know that), somewhere nearby are the officer’s quarters and a lone Spitfire aircraft on display, which when they decided to move it, a wheel ran over one of the aircraft hand’s toes. I happened to be nearby and heard his blood curdling screams. Nearby is the parade ground and further on the cookhouse, NAAFI and YMCA … Station Head Quarters, clothing store etc. Further over still are the hangars for the planes and the aircraft runway … on the further side of our billets the roadway continues to the other gate leading to our photographic section and the village, Henley and eventually Reading.

The summer of 1943 was exceptionally hot:

It was such a shame to be working most of our time in dark rooms, when it had been such a brilliant hot summer. Outside our section was a septic tank and that plus the chemical smells of hypo etc were sometimes overpowering. I’d noticed a rash appearing on my hands, so reported sick, and was told, ‘You have metol poisoning’. We’d been warned of this on the course, but nobody was over worried as they claimed that only one in a hundred got it, of course the odd one out just had to be me. I was given a special cream and gloves to wear at night, and my job now could not have anything to do with chemicals, so I was moved to the titling section with Grace.

We all worked shifts, the worst one being 4 o’clock in the afternoon until 8 o’clock the next morning. Then we went for breakfast and often felt too tired to sleep. The other shift was easy by comparison. I actually preferred the night shift for if flying was cancelled due to bad weather we were allowed off early, and got a really good breakfast in the cookhouse, generally of bacon and egg. But we got crafty and said we were from MT (motor transport), as the cooks didn’t like us, they considered photographers snobs for some reason.

Pamela describes how important accuracy was:

Aerial films were very large and had to be wound by means of handles across a long bench. Our job was to put on each negative frame all the relevant data, but most important of all was to title the first piece of blank film ‘START’ and then when we came to the end we put ‘END’. The data included the number of the unit, the sortie number (the single operational flight of the aircraft), negative and serial number, date and subject.

Our work was tiring and exacting and you could not afford to make a mistake as Grace did one day. To explain – when you were on the 4 pm to 8 am shift, by about 2.30 in the early hours you were working like an automaton. Later around 4.30 am you were wide awake again, but between those times you were at your most vulnerable. On this particular night Grace had put ‘END’ on both ends of this aerial film by mistake due to being so tired. It had been spotted once it reached the interpretation office, whose job it was to assess from our photographs what areas had to be bombed again and what damage had been done to targets already bombed. The punishment – poor Grace was put on a charge. I could have wept, she was my best friend.

It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 that convinced Pat Peat, a US citizen, to join the WAAF, and later on she worked in the Photographic Section at RAF Medmenham. Pat had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 1940, with a Merit Award of $500 and a determination to follow her younger sister Betty, who had already joined the WAAF. Their father was a Canadian veteran and their mother came from Northern Ireland and both were peace campaigners following the First World War. Pat and Betty never went to school, being taught instead by their parents as they travelled to lectures and meetings across America. In 1937 their father, Mr Harold Peat, who owned a leading lecture agency in New York City, was engaged as Winston Churchill’s agent for a planned lecture tour across America in the autumn of the following year. Subsequently, due to the political outlook in Europe in 1938, Churchill had to cancel this tour.
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When President Roosevelt declared war on Germany and Japan in December 1941, a friend of the Peat family wanted Pat to join the US Women’s Army Corps to recruit volunteers, as she had presence and speaking experience. Not wanting any person to plan her life for her, Pat immediately went to the British Consulate in New York City and enrolled as volunteer 301 in the WAAF, and soon followed her sister to England. In 2009 she said their mother and father were ‘devastated’ that both daughters had decided to serve in the WAAF:

I was born in Chicago Lying-In Hospital and I’m a US citizen. I didn’t go over to Britain on a passport – nobody even asked about them back then. There wasn’t any ferolderol – I just signed up. I went over to England on a Swedish tugboat with an American Army Medical Unit whom we seldom saw. We were in convoy to Liverpool and I think it took a week and a half.
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Pat joined an all-female group of trainee photographers at the RAF School of Photography in Blackpool and considered that they received excellent tuition. Each day started with a march from their billets to the sea front, usually whistling the popular tune
Pedro the Fisherman
, where they drilled and Pat could see her favourite donkeys on the beach. They learnt how to install and quickly retrieve the cameras from aircraft, how to develop the film and carry out some initial examination then print the photographs. They were also taught how to process film in the field using two buckets, with developing fluid in one and water in the other, in the event of a conventional processing unit not being available. Once they had passed the course they were sent to a bomber airbase for practical experience. Pat remembers how young the pilots were – just 18 or 19:

The planes were the size of a Boeing on the airfield I was sent to. To be alone on an airfield but ‘in charge’ of the processing and having to look for signs of Fire, Track or Combustion (FTC) on the photographs, which were the accuracy indicators of the bombing raid, was a responsible job. The FTC showed whether the pilot would be credited with the flight or not. Bernard Babington Smith came to explain why this initial analysis at the airfield was important to night photography. Oh yes, I learned one more thing at this bomber base and that was how to make the tea with milk. And later on I learned how to tell fortunes from the tea leaves!

WAAFs in the Photographic Section using pantographs to reduce plots to the required scale, watched by Margaret Hockenhull.

Pat was then posted to work at RAF Medmenham, which she loved:

Danesfield House had beautiful gardens. It was hard work there but intelligent humanity. All my free time was spent visiting relatives and sketching – I filled up four sketchbooks while I was there.

The Photographic Section had started life in the old stables of Danesfield House, moving later to Nissen huts, which provided the necessary space to house the machinery and deal with an ever-increasing workload. Film from aerial cameras was processed into negative form at PR bases, such as RAF Benson, and then brought to Medmenham for the production and duplication of positive images for the Second- and Third-Phase sections on site. The section had the most up-to-date machinery to work with, much of it non-standard RAF equipment, and included continuous processing machines and the latest type of duplicators and multiprinters with an automatic exposure control. There were rectifying enlargers for producing a run of photographs called a mosaic; machines that could handle the extra-large prints, called photographic skins, needed in model making; and Rotaprint machines that produced target maps. The Photographic Section became the equivalent of a large and efficient commercial photographic organisation operating on a 24-hour basis with three shifts. By the end of the war the Photographic Section had produced over 19 million photographic prints and Rotaprints, and duplicated thousands of sorties. Pat remembers: