The story of the photographic intelligence work undertaken from a
country house at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, is one of the great
lost stories of the Second World War . At its peak in 1944, almost
2,000 British and American men and women worked at the top-secret
Danesfield House, interpreting photographs - the majority
stereoscopic so they could be viewed in 3D - to unlock secrets of
German military activity and weapons development. Millions of
aerial photographs were taken by Allied pilots, flying unarmed
modified Spitfires and Mosquitos on missions over Nazi Europe. it
was said that an aircraft could land, the photographs be developed
and initial interpretation completed within two hours - marking the
culmination of years of experiments in aerial intelligence
techniques. Their finest hour began in 1943, during the planning
stages of the Allied invasion of Europe, when Douglas Kendall, who
masterminded the interpretation work at Medmenham, led the hunt for
Hitler's secret weapons. Operation Crossbow would grow from a
handful of photographic interpreters to the creation of a
hand-picked team, and came to involve interpreters from across the
Medmenham spectrum, including the team of aircraft specialists led
by the redoubtable Constance Babington Smith. In November that
year, whilst analysing photographs of Peenemunde in northern
Germany, they spotted a small stunted aircraft on a ramp. This
intelligence breakthrough linked the Nazi research station with a
growing network of sites in northern France, where ramps were being
constructed aligned not only with London, but targets throughout
southern Britain. Through the combined skill and dedication of the
Crossbow team and the heroism of the Allied pilots, throughout late
1943 and 1944 V-weapon launch sites were located and through
countermeasures destroyed, saving hundreds of thousands of lives,
and changing the course of the war. Operation Crossbow is a
wonderful story of human endeavour and derring-do, told for the
first time.
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