Operation Crossbow

The Spitfire is a great British icon.

It helped win the Battle of Britain and defeat Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

This beautiful bird was a bird of destruction to the Germans, which is why we won the war.

But the Spitfire was more than just a fighter plane.

It was Britain's eyes in the sky.

Painted blue and armed with cameras rather than guns and bombs,

spy planes took tens of millions of aerial photographs.

The story of air intelligence

was one of the most important stories of the war.

A crack team of sleuths at RAF Medmenham

pieced together a vast jigsaw of clues from these photos.

But what the Germans didn't realise

was that they weren't just working in two dimensions.

The photo detective's secret weapon was a simple stereoscope,

which brought to life every contour of the enemy landscape in perfect 3D.

In 3D, the first thing you can get - height.

And at the same time you can measure very effectively, the width.

Battlefield Europe was recreated on the viewing tables of RAF Medmenham,

probing every hillside, railway line, ship,

building and most importantly, every unidentified new structure.

Modern computer graphics,

based on the original World War II photographs,

show just how the Nazi world was analysed in 3D.

You had to have a real terrier-like approach to sort of,

"We'll find out what this is, come hell or high water."

RAF Medmenham's finest hour would come into with Operation Crossbow

when it hunted down and identified Hitler's mysterious and deadly new V weapons -

rockets and pilotless drones unprecedented,

baffling and potentially capable of swinging the war.

In today's terminology, the V weapons were the first weapons of mass destruction.

Had he been able to deploy as many as he originally intended,

it would have almost certainly have destroyed London.

Working night and day, they saved thousands and thousands of lives.

'Attention, attention. Squadron XZ. Scramble.'

The heroic tales of World War II are legend.

Tales of Battle of Britain fighter aces,

or the brilliant boffins of Bletchley Park.

But there is another story.

A little-known story, which deserves to join this hall of fame.

Danesfield House,

60 kilometres west of London, was home to RAF Medmenham.

Here, a highly skilled group of photo interpreters, or PIs,

played a vital role in tracking,

exposing and crushing the German war machine.

It was an A1 source of information.

The photo interpreters were not only providing up to date information,

but accurate information.

The work that was done

was absolutely vital, as vital as Bletchley.

80% of British intelligence

came from photo reconnaissance and photo interpretation.

I think it was a German general who said

a country with the best intelligence will win,

and we provided intelligence.

Ten million of these wartime photographs survive, many in 3D,

and are today kept in Edinburgh.

Researcher Allan Williams is helping Wing Commander Mike Mockford

and Major Chris Halsall, who worked as photo interpreters after the war,

trace the photos which helped defeat the Nazis.

Nothing moved in Europe which we did not photograph

and it was absolutely critical

to the Allied success of the Second World War.

Without air reconnaissance, it is difficult to imagine

how we could have possibly achieved the results we did.

Air reconnaissance took a great leap forward in 1940

with the creation of a specialist wing of the RAF,

the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit.

The secret of its success was transforming the star fighter,

the Spitfire, into the best spy plane in the world.

Jimmy Taylor flew reconnaissance missions

in a Spitfire like this one.

'It was a superb aeroplane. Absolutely wonderful.'

We were very privileged.

We were flying the fastest aeroplane, the most beautiful aeroplane.

No guns sticking out spoiling the outline.

You could say it was like a butterfly.

We had the best job in the Air Force, in my opinion.

It was an exceptional piece of equipment.

It could reach Berlin...

..it filmed the entire Ruhr in one mission.

Photo reconnaissance helped forge the special relationship

in intelligence gathering between Britain and America.

It meant US Air Force pilot John S Blyth

could achieve his boyhood dream of flying a Spitfire.

His war was documented in this rare colour footage

shot at Mount Farm airfield.

My job was as a photo reconnaissance pilot.

I loved the Spitfire and basically all round,

it was a wonderful aeroplane to fly.

It had a good rate of climb, good manoeuvrability.

I loved it.

It had cameras, no guns.

The planes had no guns,

but this lack of fire power didn't bother the pilots.

It was quite all right, actually,

because cruising speed of 360 mph and there weren't any aeroplanes

in 1944 which could do that until the German jets came.

It's painted blue, this rather lightish grey-blue,

in order to camouflage it against the blue sky

when it's flying 30,000 feet,

which was the optimum height for taking our photographs.

The biggest enemy we had was we might make a contrail

and it betrayed our position,

and flak could come up and equally the fighters.

The pilots were quite astonishing, out of this world.

They had to navigate their way to the target on their own,

looking out for interception, sometimes in difficult conditions.

The whole thing was a heart-stopping exercise, quite frankly.

I think they were marvellous!

But the great thing was when they found their target,

they had to fly a level course because

if they weren't flying straight and level it distorted the pictures.

They were the cream of the air crew.

You had to find your target, photograph it underneath you when you couldn't see it.

You'd have to get right over the target practically

and roll over and see the target and bring the aeroplane around

and level out and then fly straight

and level while the cameras were turning.

It had five cameras.

One was fitted under each wing here, and two in the fuselage.

And the camera's here -

as you can see, it's a pretty big one

and that would have to be put through this hatch here

and point down through one of these two port holes in the bottom of the fuselage.

At 30,000 feet you could take pictures of a man on a bicycle.

Interestingly, the first thing in the Spitfire

that they heated was the camera because they wanted good photographs.

The pilot froze, basically.

If you're gone for five hours, you might be at minus 50 degrees

and it was so cold sometimes your knees,

you could hardly bend them or anything.

A fat lot of good having done it all

unless they got the pictures back to us

and they did it, day after day, in very difficult conditions.

John S Blyth, like all reconnaissance pilots,

diced with death many times.

Once when his landing gear jammed, a moment that was caught on camera.

I felt kind of a thud

and I came in to land at Mount Farm and I dropped the gear

and the handle wouldn't move.

I was sweating like everything

and I thought, "I'm not going to get out of this one alive."

Finally, after about an hour I came in

and touched down and the wooden prop

which I've got a piece of here, flew all to pieces.

There's no point in asking a man to risk his life

and then not getting every bit of information that the film contains.

The photos were analysed with scientific precision in three phases.

The first, as soon as the plane had landed at the airfield.

They would look at the photographs

and if something needed immediate action within 24 hours or so,

where the army had to shell or the air force bomb some target,

a bridge in Germany where troops were crossing,

that would be a very important target straightaway.

The photographs were then printed on an industrial scale.

An astonishing 36 million prints were made in the war.

They'd send the more important photographs to Medmenham to the interpreters there,

who would then identify whether there was something that could be bombed

or attacked in the next week or so, which was phase two,

or whether it was a long-term thing

about the German war effort and they contributed to phase three.

Medmenham was so many sided, so many different things were going on.

It's quite unbelievable.

Most of us in our own little sections only knew what we were doing,

but we were impressed by the other things going on that we knew nothing about.

Well, I was in N Section, which was the night photograph section.

Flak and tracer and searchlights

were all recorded on the run in to the target,

and it was just like an incredible mass of lines

and waves and bursts of fire.

They recruited a lot of academics and particularly academics

who were accustomed to being precise and punctilious.

A lot of them were recruited from Oxford and Cambridge,

mathematicians, geologists, archaeologists.

Interpreting photographs was not just an academic skill.

It demanded creative minds and lateral thinking

to find the devil in the detail.

One of Medmenham's most inspired moves

was to recruit its talent from the Hollywood studios.

Disney legend, X Atencio, who later wrote Pirates Of The Caribbean,

was part of a large American contingent at Medmenham.

We had quite a few artists in our unit

because we had an eye for detail.

I was assigned to airfields

and that's how I became an expert on airfields.

We had Dirk Bogart as an actor.

He was in the army section.

I thought he was a bit of a poseur and dilettante.

But I think he was quite a reasonable PI.

Something new had happened too. They began to hire women.

And at one time, they had about 150 women working as photo interpreters.

Generally, the women didn't fly.

A lot of them were very hand picked, yes.

I wasn't, but a lot of them were.

The reconnaissance pilots and photo interpreters made a brilliant team.

As the bombing offensive against German cities intensified,

they played a vital role, not just in identifying targets,

but also assessing the damage inflicted on the enemy.

There's an incredible amount of smoke rising

and some clear fires burning in the city.

It was very necessary after every raid to analyse the damage.

In simple terms, did you need to go back again?

When you are at war, destroying the infrastructure is very important.

But what the PIs saw was not always to the liking of the bomber crews,

as Dino Brugioni found

when he returned from apparently successful missions.

You would brag about it. "We put our bombs right on the target area."

Well, what happened was a photo interpreter

would look at it and they'd say, "You missed the target."

First of all they'd deny it, then they'd get mad,

then they want to blame Intel like it was their fault,

but the imagery is truth.

Churchill asked to see the photographs and he sided with the photo interpreters.

In May 1942, the landmark Thousand Bomber Raid

was carried out against the German city of Cologne.

The scrambler rang, the secret phone,

and a voice said, "Is Cologne still there?"

And I said, "Yes, sir, there's quite a lot of it left."

He said, "Send the photographs immediately to the cabinet war room."

That was the great man himself.

Air reconnaissance was one thing,

but what was so revolutionary was how Medmenham

took an ordinary stereoscope,

the equivalent of the 3D glasses used in modern-day cinemas,

and turned it into an intelligence weapon which helped win the war.

The viewers they used were probably Victorian in origin,

part of a party game almost in the 19th century.

So stereo is as old as the hills.

For it to work, pilots like Jimmy Taylor

had to take the photos in a series of perfectly overlapping sequences.

These are the plots they made of my photographs.

I'm amazed that these have been recovered.

I haven't seen them myself.

We had to make sure when they were viewed by the photo interpreters,

each of these pictures overlapped the other by 60%

because everything on the photograph would then stand up in three dimensions.

The Medmenham PIs became experts at interpreting this 3rd dimension.

3D was as valuable a weapon as the bouncing bomb

during the legendary Dambusters raid against three dams in Germany.

By applying modern computer graphics to the original photo from May 1943,

you can see how a PI would have viewed it in 3D through a stereoscope.

We'd taken a photograph in 2D, it wouldn't show a thing.

That was the advantage of the 3D photography.

You got the detail and looked into it.

You get a wonderful impression of height.

It's not just dead flat.

You can see the contours of the land.

People would say it's obvious you've got a photograph,

you can see things and indeed you can,

but things aren't always what they appear to be.

3D allowed the PIs to see through a crafty German ploy

to conceal one of their cruisers in this fjord.

Going offshore there's this decoy and boom combined,

where they've lashed together tyres in the water,

joined them all up together

and made them look like a ship floating in the water.

3D aerial photography had come of age.

It was just as well because Medmenham

was about to be called upon to deliver its greatest victory in Operation Crossbow.

The story begins in May 1942, when a British reconnaissance Spitfire

took off from Benson air base and crisscrossed northern Germany.

While flying over a remote island off the Baltic coast,

something below caught the pilot's eye.

It was an obscure place called Peenemunde.

And that's how they found Peenemunde,

strictly by accident because he saw they were making an airfield.

Well, nothing attracts aerial intelligence like an airfield.

And the only thing there that attracted anybody's attention

were the three big concrete and earth circles.

Here we have the very first photograph of Peenemunde.

I think there was all sorts of conjecture as to what the three circles were.

As a PI looking at those in isolation

my immediate reaction would probably be to think that

they might be something to do with sewage actually.

So given the pressing nature of other things that they were doing

at the time, the photo interpreters shelved those photos in 1942.

This could have been one of the greatest mistakes

of World War 2 because, while the Allies had been honing

their aerial reconnaissance skills, the Germans were busy too,

building a new generation of weapons of terrifying sophistication.

The epicentre of their ominous weapons research

was a purpose built industrial complex at Peenemunde.

The rockets and missiles they were developing there,

were the fore-runners of the weapons that dominate our world today.

The Nazis spent a lot of money in Peenemunde.

This was the biggest research centre in the world between 1936 and 1945.

I think the Germans were far,

far ahead of us in terms of missile technology.

They had some brilliant men.

Men like scientist Werner von Braun were working on weapons that

were so advanced that they were a complete mystery to the Allies.

By 1942, their efforts were beginning to bear fruit.

First, a V1 cruise missile was successfully launched.

And then on the October 3rd, the Germans made one of the great

breakthroughs in the history of science and of warfare

when a V2 rocket soared into the stratosphere at supersonic speed.

Vergeltungswaffen, the revenge weapons,

Hitler hoped this big collection of new weapons

that he was developing would be in place

in time somehow to turn the tide.

The Nazis once again got hope, hope to win the war.

And the Allies knew nothing about their plans.

Until a key breakthrough came at Trent Park military prison

in March 1943 when British intelligence managed to bug

a conversation between two German generals.

The British overheard two German generals

captured in North Africa talking about this rocket.

This future weapon that would soon be raining down on the British

and might change the course of the war.

RAF Medmenham could be forgiven for overlooking

the significance of the earlier photographs of Peenemunde.

Now they had a second chance and at last something to go on.

The spy planes were scrambled to scour Germany

and northern France for any evidence they could get in camera.

Thousands of photos were rushed back

and the interpreters were asked to find clues of long range missiles

that could be fired at Britain from France.

They were told to look for something queer,

a tube out of which could be squirted a missile.

To ask a photo interpreter to do an analysis of a missile site

that has never seen one before was asking a lot.

You were trained to know what would be normal to look at

so you had to have a sense of anomalies.

And there's a certain amount of detective work in looking at clues.

I always felt it was like doing a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

And with the help of 3D, a PI managed to spot a tube

on its side in one of the mysterious circles at Peenemunde.

All that seen was a tube. To see the initial image was one thing.

To work out what it was and what it could do was a very different one.

I think there was a great fear about these things.

Where were they aimed at, what shape would they take,

how would they attack us?

Now the real detective work began.

In Edinburgh the team is going back over the original photos that

helped change the course of the war.

This is absolutely great. We've got here a photograph which shows two rockets.

It's a significant moment in history without question

when they saw this for the first time.

People having looked at these, they said how do they launch them

and it was then that they started looking back over imagery and

they eventually discovered the first one that was actually sticking up vertically

and looked like a sort of pole really sticking up in the air.

-We've marked up where that first one is.

-Really hard to see...

You can see the shadow of it there.

Sometimes you can learn more from the shadows than you can from the

object because you'll see the shadow on the ground and you can measure it.

So the PIs were able to work out that the V2 rocket was

an imposing 14 metres high.

But there was a problem...

Churchill's chief scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell,

refused to believe the Germans had the technology to build rockets.

It was all too new, like something from science fiction.

Now RAF Medmenham needed something more than stereoscopes to make sense of the threat.

It needed a step change in technology.

The answer was the Wild...

a state-of-the-art photogrammetric machine used for land surveys.

It alone could deliver the level of detail

and precision needed to convince the doubters.

But there was a shortage of Wild machines in Britain.

The only place to get them was Switzerland,

but that was a neutral country.

So one of the most daring missions of the war,

led by Squadron Leader Ramsay Matthews was launched to

bring not one but two new Wild machines to Medmenham.

He managed to persuade a Swedish intermediary to buy two

Wild A6s, and arranged for them to be shipped through Germany,

and moved them up to Sweden.

They then had the problem of how to bring them back to the UK.

Squadron leader Ramsay was flown out to Sweden,

acquired these two machines, stripped them down.

They were then put on board Mosquitoes.

Of course the Mosquito isn't a big aircraft

and he had to be strapped in the bomb bay with one of the Wilds.

They took off, and they got bounced by a German night fighter.

The pilot wanted to slow up in a hurry, so opened up everything

to slow it down suddenly, which included opening the bomb bay doors.

In the excitement of getting away from the German night fighter,

he then forgot to close the bomb bay doors.

And flying right across the North Sea,

our Squadron leader was sitting in there nearly frozen to death.

The whole episode showed how important these Wilds were considered.

The Wild could now be used to get a greater understanding of Peenemunde.

In the machine, built into the optics is a floating dot.

The floating dot enables you to trace a contour or to measure

precisely an object, in length, width and the height of an object.

In the V weapons saga, this particular machine was used

to measure the buildings and the rocket test sites

so that the models that were so vital in convincing the senior scientists

that there were indeed rocket development sites.

The precise measurements provided by the Wild enabled

the model makers to bring Peenemunde to life for the uninitiated.

The model they made in 1943 is now locked away in the store rooms

at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.

Ah! Right, so this is the one original

surviving model of Peenemunde then.

Yep. It's in very good condition.

This is the first ballistic missile test site ever in the world.

It's perfect in almost every detail.

A modern fly through of the model gives some idea

of the sort of impression it would have made on Churchill

and his War Cabinet back in 1943.

They could come and study this and it would have been accurate

in every detail of measurement so they would have been able to size

the missile against the construction building and the engine test site.

I don't think the scientists at that time had any idea

and there was a lot of scepticism about what it was.

And that, of course, was one of the arguments that Cherwell used

that we'd never produced one, so how could the Germans?

This is the classic we can't do it, they can't do it and that is

one of the greatest intelligence mistakes anyone ever makes.

As the politicians bickered, spy planes monitoring

northern France came back with more alarming photographs.

Just a short hop across the Channel.

They find bunkers, large bunkers.

The bunkers didn't have any particular unique shape

that you could determine what was in them.

They were huge... monstrous concrete structures.

Obviously to start with, nobody knew what they were.

They were so strange.

These mysterious bunkers became known to the PIs as the heavy sites.

The heaviest of all was built in a quarry in a village called

Wizernes just 40 kilometres from the English Channel.

Not all photographs were taken from the safety of 9,000 metres.

Medmenham also needed heroic daredevils who would

risk their lives by flying at just 30 metres to capture amazingly

detailed close-up images like these.

This photograph...the most daring photograph of World War Two.

Here you can see the dome.

To fly into a quarry and pull up and get a photograph is just amazing.

I made about two runs over it and then they opened up on me

and the flak was so damn thick that I was diving,

doing all sharp turns and everything and I went out the Channel

and settled down because I was a little shaken.

There you go. Not quite the same angle

but it's pretty much the view the Spitfire got

-when he flew his very low level recce.

-A true dicing sortie.

Here you are you've got the entire early structural stages here

with all the scaffolding, a lot of work going into the laying of the concrete etc.

Just a huge effort going into building something on the French coast

which was in reasonable shot of London.

Everybody agreed this is way too much effort

to be anything but nefarious.

And it's too far back from the coast to be

part of the defence works.

The PIs at Medmenham suspected these bunkers were potential

rocket launch sites and they would later be proved to be right.

Major firms in Germany were building them and they would manufacture the missile.

And not only that, then they would have rails outside,

places where they could fire the missile.

Adding it to the other heavy sites

and adding it to Peenemunde put it all together and say, well,

safest thing is to bomb this lot into extinction, if possible.

On the 17th and 18th August 1943,

more than 500 bombers set off from the UK with one aim...

the complete destruction of Peenemunde

and the elimination of the German rocket threat.

They launched the first night precision bombardment

raid against Peenemunde.

The air crews were told, if you don't get this,

you're going back again and that's kind of chilling.

It certainly underlines the importance of it.

The British were developing a fairly effective bomber force

that could in fact hit targets at night with pretty good effect.

John Bell was a bomb aimer on a Lancaster bomber.

The whole of the front of the aircraft was my office.

You'd line up with the target and look out for the spot flares

that you'd been told to aim at and carry out the procedure for

bombing which was fairly automatic once you'd lined up the bomb sight.

Even though there was heavy flak, even though the Luftwaffe did

respond with a certain number of aircraft the British were able

to get into the target and they were able to do very severe damage.

There was terrible devastation and awful loss of life

but we were fighting for our life!

The British bombing raid had in fact thrown the V2 programme

back eight weeks, maybe more like 12 weeks, but more importantly had

killed several of the most important scientists and put the Germans

very firmly on notice that the British knew what they were up to.

Of course as soon as Peenemunde had been bombed, they had to think about

the heavy sites in the Pas de Calais of which this was one, wasn't it?

So it was decided to bomb all those as well.

We're standing in this area, I think.

And on this photograph you can still see some

remnants of the construction programme actually

but the dome is complete and hugely thick and effectively bomb-proof.

This photo shows a German bunker at Watten after conventional

saturation bombing by the US Air Force.

Amazingly, the building emerged almost unscathed.

The conventional bombs were just bouncing off

and you look at the photography and the ground around the bunkers

are all chewed up, meaning the bombs hit the bunkers but did no damage.

They soon found out the bunkers, the only bomb did any significant damage was the Tallboy.

The 12,000-pound Tallboy, and its heavier brother, the Grand Slam,

was designed by bouncing bomb legend, Barnes Wallis.

John Bell dropped one on the bunker at Wizernes.

The Tallboy worked very well.

It was a very accurate weapon, quite a pleasure to drop really.

When we were aiming at Wizernes, all we had to see was a dome

sitting on the top of a hillside and that's really what we aimed at.

Fortunately the one I dropped was instrumental in making

the dome tilt to one side. It was perhaps fortunate that it did not

hit it, because otherwise the bomb might well have bounced off.

The near misses did the damage actually because they were earthquake effect

and they caused the whole site to sort of tilt a little bit.

We attacked it on several occasions and managed to put it out of action.

RAF Medmenham had dealt a major blow to the German war effort

and provided the Nazis with sobering evidence of just how

difficult it was to keep their plans veiled from Allied eyes.

But Hitler was determined to persevere.

The V weapons programme was relocated, well beyond

the spying lenses of the Spitfire,

to the distant forests of Poland and to the Harz Mountains

in the anonymous heartland of Germany itself.

Just outside the small town of Nordhausen, a mountainside was

turned into a massive underground factory to produce V weapons.

When you put it underground, first of all it is devilish hard

to bomb and it's impossible to tell what is going on inside.

The V2 was no mere dabbling in new technology...

the Nazis really believed it had the power to swing the outcome

of the war and threw their best minds and resources at it.

The ruthless SS, now in charge of the V weapons programme,

conscripted 60,000 slave labourers to work

in infernal darkness in the mountain factory.

I was selected for slave labour.

Entering the tunnel the place was lit up, massive it was,

the tunnel was 21km in total.

I immediately thought, good God, we're going to be kept here

and we're never going to see daylight again.

The dust and the dampness, it was unbelievable.

People either lost the will to live

or just through the conditions they couldn't cope with it and they perished.

There were dead bodies lying all over.

The human tragedy unfolding in the mountains and at

the Dora Concentration Camp was not evident to the PIs at Medmenham.

Even if it had been,

not even the Tallboy could have made a difference.

The V weapons could no longer be destroyed at source.

Now the only solution lay in finding

and wiping out their launch sites in Northern France.

A first lead came from the French resistance which

warned of a lot of clandestine German building.

The information that was being provided by

the French resistance was extremely good.

They were picking out areas which the Germans had kept

people form going into a particular area. That was a good sign

that something secretive was going on.

This time, the spy planes would have to look a lot harder to

find their targets.

The only thing you could really see was a ramp.

They put them in these little groups of woods.

I think the first time I spent about half an hour before I finally

caught on how I could actually see them

and after that it got easier, but they were still very difficult to spot.

What the PIs saw through their stereoscopes was perplexing...

woods full of new buildings, all of weird shapes and sizes.

As well as the ramps, there were buildings that

looked like skis turned on their side.

So they became known as the ski sites.

Looking at it from the air is one thing

but actually ground checking is fascinating.

Nobody could imagine what on earth you would build a building

this shape for.

In all 96 sites... all almost identical...

were identified by Medmenham.

When these were first seen, they were a complete mystery.

Nobody knew what they were for.

This has got the classic ski structure signatures on it,

which became, of course, the giveaway.

Looking at these photographs makes you realise what a challenge

it was for the PIs at that time.

There was a lot of searching in the dark, you might say.

The problem the PIs faced was that a vital piece of the jigsaw

was missing. They still knew nothing about the existence

of the V1 flying bomb.

It was not discovered until late 1943, on a photograph of Peenemunde.

To the untrained eye it looked like nothing at all.

You could see it was some sort of flying vehicle

but what sort of flying vehicle?

A lot of work was involved in inferring from what could be

seen from measurements, from experience,

from thinking of what it could be and what it could do.

A whisper went around the whole station so we were all very

well aware that this was something absolutely fantastically important.

It's just a small blur really.

It's just a tiny cruciform shape sitting on a ramp very similar to the ramp over there.

And that then with the ramp

and the sites that they'd already witnessed began to put

the story together and they realised that the threat was

almost certainly a small pilotless aircraft,

almost certainly a bomb, of course.

It took a great leap of the imagination from the PIs

to identify a blurred cross as a flying bomb.

Using modern computer graphics we can reveal what they saw...

a deadly V1 poised to be fired.

The mysterious ski shaped buildings

turned out to be V1 store rooms.

Suddenly all those strange structures in France meant something

and now they knew they were the ramps

that were going to launch the V1s.

They plotted the ramps and they could see

exactly where the V1's were headed...

Southampton, Portsmouth, London.

Thanks to the Wild machine, it was clear the Nazis were on

the verge of launching a devastating bombardment of the south of England.

The timing could not have been worse for the Allies who

were in the midst of plans to invade France.

They were planning on the D-day landings

and how was this going to affect those plans?

The Germans had planned to launch up to 2,000 V1s a day.

If you could have had a couple of those the V1s hit a troopship...

It was vital that they attacked them and wipe them out,

otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to invade.

This prompted the Allies to launch Operation Crossbow at the end of 1943.

Its success could determine the outcome of the whole war.

Bombing the ski sites became a priority.

It began two days before Christmas.

The heaviest bombing I ever saw...

you couldn't see much of anything. There were so many craters.

If it hadn't destroyed those sites, it's hard to tell

what would have happened to the Normandy invasion.

It would have probably had to have been put off.

There's no doubt at all that the intensive bombing

of the V1 sites must have prevented a substantial

part of the intended attack from ever arriving.

It was vital to the mounting of the invasion.

Now the biggest thing for Medmenham was to plan the invasion of Europe.

This was a fantastic effort.

Hundreds of daily flights monitoring all the activities.

On the Normandy landings, every platoon commander had

photographs of where he was landing, where the mines were

and where the obstacles were, everything was known.

Guided by Medmenham, Operation Overlord

was launched on June 6th 1944.

And the feared German missiles did not rain down on the Allies' parade.

But that particular nightmare had been merely postponed.

What came next, made it dramatically clear how important

it had been for D Day to happen on schedule.

The first V1 landed on London

a week after we were ashore at Normandy.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

The V1 brought terror to the streets of London and soon became

known as the Doodlebug because of the sinister sound it made.

It went pup, pup, pup, then suddenly stopped and you hoped that you

weren't under or anywhere near

where it was going to drop.

EXPLOSION

Eileen Alexander was 11 when she heard that terrifying sound

overhead near her East London home.

Her ordeal that day made her national news.

There was a big explosion.

I was knocked from the door, right to the end of the shelter

and I was really badly bruised from head to toe.

It was really dark and black and you couldn't see anything,

I was very frightened.

When it cleared a little bit, I saw the devastation.

My house had gone. So I was crying then and then a fireman came along.

We'd lost everything, but we didn't lose our lives.

As the death toll mounted into the thousands, the British fought back

against these unmanned killing machines in any way they could.

RAF Medmenham played its part by uncovering the source

of these terror weapons.

It was a real game of cat and mouse. Every time they were caught out,

the Germans had an uncanny knack of finding a new way of doing things.

Now they were using less conspicuous launch areas

and artful camouflage to hide their V1 operations.

They developed very small sites

and they would bring the missiles at the last possible minute,

set up missile, fuel it, launch it and get out of there.

The 3D photos again came into their own as the PIs

looked for a needle in a haystack.

These were much harder to find. This is an example in Holland.

It's at a sugar factory

and the signatures that give away the site are actually very tentative.

There is scarring on the land.

There is damage on a building roof.

And the ramp is almost impossible to see, here tucked inside the building.

You see that pattern you've got there of those scarrings

were not something that's normal at all.

This shows the V1 taking off the ramp and the booster motor

and the dolly that supported it are dropping off

and that's what you're seeing here, causing scarring.

Under the direction of Medmenham, Allied bombers were able to

target these sites and limit the Doodlebug barrage against London.

This gave the ground forces time to sweep up

the V1 emplacements as they fought their way across Northern France.

But the Germans were not finished yet. An even greater threat

laid waiting in the wings.

We just thought what next? Because this was a new kind of thing...

rockets and so on. Hitler was capable of anything.

The last Doodlebug fell on the 7th September 1944

and the Battle of London was declared over.

Just one day later, the unimaginable happened.

The first V2 rocket crashed into Chiswick in west London.

What made it so terrifying was that it travelled

at supersonic speed and came out of nowhere with no warning.

Defences against the V1 was possible.

There was no defence against the V2.

Once they fired, they're gone.

The notion that you could be blown up by something before you

even knew it was coming was always a bit alarming.

I was probably the first to see a V2 going up.

I was on my way to a target

and suddenly through the cloud came a vertical contrail.

And I thought hey that's funny. I thought it must be a rocket.

I tried to take a photograph of this contrail, but I failed.

When I got back to base, I reported this, of course,

but nobody else believed it and it was called it Taylor's Folly.

Taylor's Folly was Medmenham's worst nightmare.

This was a major problem, because the V2 was mobile.

So you'd fly and think, "dash here it is, here's one"

and you'd photograph it.

All they did was pour a big concrete slab and the trucks would come

and they'd erect the rocket itself and refuel it,

sitting on this concrete pad.

Then they'd fire it and drive off.

The whole thing about the missile system was shoot and scoot.

So Medmenham needed to find ways of containing the threat of the V2.

And here is the famous V2.

What RAF Medmenham did at the time was

they looked at the whole production facility in the Harz Mountains,

and they attacked the transport system and the type of vehicles

they were using and all the supporting infrastructure that

supported the V2 which made it an incredibly difficult challenge.

The only way to stop the V2 in the end was the army,

to overrun the launch sites which was what they did in the end.

By the time it went operational, forces on the ground had

almost pushed it out of range of the major targets.

The V weapons claimed about 9,000 lives in England

but it could have been so many more had it not been for Medmenham.

The PIs had been proved right.

Those mysterious tubes and ramps at Peenemunde had indeed

presaged an entirely new era of warfare that could easily

have rained untold destruction down on England.

It saved London from total obliteration.

The V2 was a testament to German ingenuity

and as soon as the war was over

the Americans and Soviets rushed to grab their technology.

We looked upon the Germans as great scientists and they were.

They provided us a lot of information.

The key figure in the development of the V2, Werner von Braun,

went on to become the architect of Saturn V which took man to the moon.

Von Braun, he should have been tried as a war criminal

and everybody who ran Dora Camp.

They were using slave labour, us,

who were really brought down to animal level.

The V2 was also built on German barbarism, as was clear,

when Dora was liberated.

The dead were stacked like cord wood.

Thousands of dead people were there, that were the Dora inmates.

They weren't burying the dead, they were just stacking them

outside the underground.

We were robbed of our future, of our youth.

It's just unbelievable...

..what we as humans are able to do to each other.

The appalling scenes at Dora were yet more proof of the kind of war

the PIs at Medmenham and the spy planes helped to win.

70 years on, and veterans from Medmenham are holding

a reunion at Danesfield House.

It's going to dive bomb us!

They may not have achieved the celebrity and recognition

of their intelligence colleagues at Bletchley Park.

The reconnaissance pilots lacked the glamour

of the fighter boys of the Battle of Britain,

but their unsung contribution to the war was as important as either.

Without the unique qualities of the people who worked there,

we would have been far worse off.

I think the war would have been extended by a year or two. They made a huge contribution.

I always felt that when the war was over

and I was demobbed, in a very small way

I had contributed something of value to the war effort.

People were doing it for the sake of the job

and because the job was worthwhile and exciting, valuable and you could see the point of it.

I feel we did a useful job and helped to shorten the war.

I just liked being my own boss.

I liked doing my own thing.

If I goofed up I was the one that goofed up.

It meant so much to me. It meant so much to the rest of my life.

And I loved it.

This is a wonderful aeroplane, and it still is really the love of my life.

It's not really a war machine because photographs can't

do any harm to anybody until we drop bombs on the Germans as

a result of these photographs which of course in the end won us the war.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]