Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (43 page)

After the war Dorothy Lygon, ‘Coote’, worked as a secretary to the British ambassador in Greece, and as a governess in Istanbul, followed by a spell as a farmer and then as archivist for Christie’s auction house in London. ‘One of her young colleagues there, Simon Dickinson, observed that this fastidious, clever and “very old-fashioned woman” set up a perfect cataloguing system “never bettered” and was adored by the young because of her forthrightness and sense of fun.’
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Perhaps ‘Coote’ had learnt something from the cataloguing system at Medmenham, where a sortie of photographs was retrievable in a matter of minutes from the millions held in the print library.

VE Day celebrations in India were more muted. In Delhi Elspeth Macalister wrote:

Naturally the news of the cessation on hostilities in Europe was received with great joy – no more bombing raids, no more terrible battles and from a more mundane point of view, no more blackout – so we did celebrate mildly. There was floodlighting of monuments such as George V on the Maidan, and there were fireworks. Trader would not even come out for a drink. His was the only light on in the unit – he was preparing reports on the Japanese Navy and the port installations of Malaya in preparation for Operation Zipper, the planned invasion of Malaya. Japan had still to be defeated.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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!’
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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.