Women of Intelligence: Winning the Second World War with Air Photos (30 page)

Another WAAF remembers that in 1942 they prepared target maps for the beginning of the 1,000-bomber raids, which led to the loss of many lives and devastation: ‘It contrasted with the tranquil setting of Hillside.’ Only one bomb fell near Hillside, destroying the Disraeli window in Hughenden church.
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ATS women Joan Bohey and Barbara Chandler assisted the WAAFs at Hillside in 1945 by working on target maps at Medmenham. Joan explained:

The maps covered an area of 15 miles around the target and were painted as a picture the pilot would see in moonlight as he approached. Trees and woods were painted black, bushes were stippled grey, roads, hard surfaces and still water (canals) were painted white and moving water stippled white. The target was painted orange.
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When the target maps were completed they were delivered to Bomber Command and then sent on to the relevant RAF bomber stations for briefing purposes and included in the target folder for each aircraft flying in the raid.

Kathlyn Williams recorded that:

At the end of the war we were invited on a trip in a Halifax bomber to see the results of our work. We all piled into a lorry and were driven to RAF Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire where we were given fish and chips for lunch. We were briefed and given enormous parachute packs, then staggered out with them with bandy legs to the plane, but we were not told how to use them. We were told however that sick-bags should only be emptied over water. Another WAAF and I found ourselves in the nose of the Halifax lying among the wires. The weather forecast was good and as we flew we saw fluffy clouds and got glimpses of chateaux and gardens down below. First we were taken to the Moehne Dam to see where it had been breached, then to Cologne where the roof of the cathedral was intact but chaos all around. Then we turned for Holland where whole farms and villages were submerged and at Dunkirk we could still see the bomb craters in the sand. It was uncanny and we returned to Waterbeach with mixed feelings.
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What were the thoughts of the different groups of women who worked every day on material designed to ensure greater accuracy of bombing the enemy, who prepared the maps the bomber pilots would use on attacks, or who saw through a stereoscope the effects of a 1,000-bomber raid on a city? Pat Donald, while working in the Damage Assessment Section, remembers seeing the photographs taken after the breaching of the Ruhr dams in May 1943 when millions of tons of water poured through the holes blown in the Moehne and Eder dams. While realising the necessity of the raid in disrupting the enemy output of materials for the manufacture of armaments, she and Stella Ogle voiced their misgivings to each other about the loss of so many civilian lives in the valley below. The head of the Model Section recalled the sadness felt by model makers at the loss of women and children in the farmsteads that they had recently fashioned. Personnel from all sections at Medmenham were instructed to visit ‘K’ Section to view the spectacular dams photographs. This seems to have been the only occasion when PIs viewed photographs in a section other than their own. Elspeth Macalister, a plotter, remembered:

One of the most exciting nights of my life was after the bombing of the Moehne and Eder Dams by Guy Gibson and his Dambusters. I was on duty when the photos came in that night and we had all the top brass standing round our tables and pinching the photos we were trying to plot.
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A WAAF map clerk issues target maps and material to air crew (plus a dog) before the Dambusters Raid on 16 May 1943.

Sarah Churchill worked in the Damage Assessment Section for some months in 1943 prior to accompanying her father to Teheran for the conference between himself, President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin. Throughout the negotiations, Stalin pushed hard for the USA and Britain to open a second front in Western Europe to relieve the pressure on Russia. The western nations were intent on pursuing their strategic-bombing operations to weaken German industrial output before embarking on an invasion. Sarah’s time in ‘K’ Section undoubtedly affected her thoughts, for it was she who wrote the poem at the beginning of this chapter. Churchill himself visited Medmenham informally on many occasions to enquire about specific cover and got to know a lot about interpretation. On an official visit in 1943, accompanied by Mrs Churchill, PIs in each section were surprised to hear him clearly explain to her what could be seen on the photographs, showing a detailed knowledge of their subject and an appreciation of PI techniques.

When hostilities ended, several other women PIs were taken on flights over what had so recently been enemy territory. Susan Bendon wrote:

The day after VE Day, on 9th May 1945, Squadron Leader Morris, who had been in charge of PI at Bomber Command throughout my time there, drove us to Elsham Wolds airfield in Lincolnshire where we were taken up in a Lancaster bomber. We were flown to the Ruhr so that we could actually view the territory we knew so well from photographs, exactly as experienced by the bomber crews.

My years at Bomber Command were dramatic and hugely rewarding. We participated in momentous events including the bombing in May 1943 of the German Moehne and Eder Dams, when for days on end everyone was on duty, taking an occasional nap at the desk. The ‘Dambusting’ operation was made possible by the invention by Barnes Wallis of the bouncing bomb – he often came to our PI unit. The raid was led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson from RAF 5 Group and was an amazing success, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley. I prepared an album of the entire sequence of the raids for King George VI and was Mentioned in Despatches. And finally, there was the invasion of Europe and the subsequent vast battles, in every one of which the bombers played a vital part.
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A photograph taken by a reconnaissance aircraft the day following the Dams Raid, showing the breach in the Moehne Dam with water flooding into the valley below.

Kathlyn Williams, the WAAF from Hillside who had worked to produce accurate maps for bomber air crew, voiced her thoughts following her flight over Europe at the end of the war:

With our paintbrushes we had helped to kill people we did not know. At one point I had considered becoming a conscientious objector. With every target, in my mind I had put my hands together and prayed that no children would be killed. In a discussion with a major from Sandhurst Military Academy, a kind and humane man, I was told that, ‘You have to protect the things you believe in’. So I continued to paint. As a result I now have two medals and know there are facts of life I shall never understand.
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A model maker, Mary Harrison, was also troubled by her role in the bombing campaign and wrote a poem that is reproduced in the next chapter. Jane Cameron, the quiet, introspective Scot, wrote:

I have come to understand, I think, why the war years meant so little to me. I did not live those six years. They lived me.

We have the evidence of the pyramids, the works of Michelangelo, the music of Beethoven and many other things to prove that man is a constructive, creative animal and the creative instinct is the dominant one in any artist, however minor. Except for a few months, my war years were spent in the main Photographic Intelligence Unit. The earliest of these years were spent in gathering from aerial photographs information about every kind of enemy activity on the continent of Europe. Every shipyard, wireless station, railway yard, airfield, every installation of every kind was closely examined and recorded in minute detail with one end in view, their future total destruction. This work ran counter to my deepest instinct and instinctively, I think, I developed a resistance to it, a resistance of non-thought, a mental opting-out. I turned into a pair of keen-sighted eyes peering through a stereoscope at enemy-occupied territory and a hand holding a pen that recorded what the eyes saw.

When the war entered the phase of Allied attack, the protection afforded by non-thought became even more necessary, for we at the Unit were among the first to see on photographs the destruction of the Ruhr Valley by the floods of the broken Moehne and Eder dams, the ruins of Dresden and the liberated victims of Belsen, human beings reduced by beasts to bestiality.

When I was demobilised in the autumn of 1945, I went home to ‘The Colony’ for a short holiday and among the trees of the moor I faced the fact that I, in my small way, had been as bestial as the beasts of Belsen. I had been caught by the weather of the world and had let myself ‘obey orders’, just as the guards of the concentration camps had done. It was a sickening wounding experience in self-discovery and there was no comfort in the excuse that the Nazi will to destroy all that stood in its path could be overcome only by the destruction of Nazism. The fact remained that I had behaved counter to my deepest, and I think, my best instincts.

At that time in 1945, I could have put none of this into words. It seems to me now that I was in a state of shock for my only conscious need was to get away from my family, from everybody I knew and do something, anything that would occupy my mind in a constructive way. The desire to write had left me. This was my invisible war wound and it took a long time to heal.
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Many years after the war, Elizabeth Johnston-Smith and Pat Donald, the two youngest members of ‘N’ and ‘K’ Sections, considered that they ‘just got on with the job in hand’. The Allied strategic urban bombing campaign and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris will continue to be controversial subjects for many years to come and historical hindsight will attempt to provide acceptable alternatives. However, if Germany was to be defeated, it was considered necessary not only to destroy their industrial and armament capabilities, but civilian morale also. For the last nine months of the war enemy missiles were fired indiscriminately at the civilian population of Britain for that very reason. The air crews of Bomber Command, of whom nearly 55,000 were killed in action or died while prisoners of war, had done what was asked of them and had also ‘just got on with the job’.

Notes

  
1
. Churchill, Sarah,
The Empty Spaces
(Leslie Frewin, 1966), use of ‘The Bombers’ here by permission of Lady Mary Soames.

  
2
. Jones, Idris, ‘Royal Air Force Days 1939–1945’,
unpublished diary (Medmenham Collection).

  
3
. Palmer (
née
Ogle), Stella, in Ursula Powys-Lybbe,
The
Eye of Intelligence
,
p. 26–7.

  
4
. Muszynski (
née
Donald), Pat, conversation.

  
5
. Babington Smith, Constance,
Evidence in Camera
, pp.101, 106.

  
6
. Kendall, Wing Commander Douglas, ‘A War of Intelligence’,
unpublished account of wartime photographic intelligence (Medmenham Collection).

  
7
. Hick (
née
Johnston-Smith), Elizabeth, audio recording.

  
8
. Benjamin (
née
Bendon), Susan, memoirs.