Operation Crossbow: The Untold Story of Photographic Intelligence and the Search for Hitler's V Weapons

by Allan Williams

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.

Genres: War, History, Nonfiction, Historical, Military History, World War II

464 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 27, 2011

Reviews

[David Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history of aerial photography, its strategic importance and priceless application in WWII is brilliantly told by Allan Williams. From the early days of WWI it had been recognised that there was a need to be able to see just what on Earth the enemy was up to in order to anticipate and forestall and ultimately confound their actions.
A number of maverick characters spent the interwar years setting up commercial companies to make use of the the skills they acquired flying photo reconnaissance in the early days of flying. MI6 gradually became interested and, with hostilities with Germany imminent, to set about organising proper training for photographic interpretation and producing a burgeoning archive of films that, with repeated photo reconnaissance flights show subtle changes in the landscape that could give clues to Axis intentions.
The move from a small building in Wembley to the splendid surroundings of Danesfield house (where I have now spent the night pretending to be in the RAF) in Medmenham with the recruitment of archeologists, geographers, geologists and keen-eyed interpreters with widely differing yet important knowledge of their subject parallels the sort of thing that was going on with mathematicians and crossword puzzle solvers at Bletchley Park.
The RAF and USAF get due prominence and the ultimate battle to see off the threat of vengeance weapons is told in tremendous detail.
Constance Babbington Smith is my new heroine and I have managed to obtain a first edition of her 1957 book, Evidence in Camera, the arrival of which is much anticipated. She appears with RV Jones and others on a splendid BBC programme from 1983, The Secret War (episode 3) presented by the wonderful William Woollard. It is available on YouTube as is the film “Target for Tonight” which is described in the text.

[Tony Styles · Rating 5 out of 5]

They shortened the war…

There are a handful of pivotal moments or operations that took place for the Allies during The Second World War that by their individual inception each could viably claim to have shortened the war. For me, the story of the Photographic Interpreters (PI’s) is up there alongside the work at Bletchley and raises the question, where would we have been if they hadn’t have done what they did…? This is the best read I’ve had in a year; so full of detail, so well written and almost unputdownable at times. A fantastic read hence 5 stars.

[Paul Holden · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Very interesting in places but it suffered from repetition and disjointed timelines. The human element was haphazard in that you’d get a paragraph about a person, including where they ended up after the war, then it’s veer back to the technical narrative without even a section break. But the final chapter was brilliant - detailing how aerial photography had implications for the Cold War and how it developed even further.

[Ayodeji Alaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

The importance of a National Archive of declassified data (on photographic intelligence) detailing the role special individuals, institutions, their inventive capacity and courage, to a nation during crisis, peace and growth cannot be overestimated. The value of Allan Williams and people like him who go out of their way to research this data from primary and secondary sources, then document it in an accessible story telling format so that people like myself can enjoy reading this history is an invaluable gift.

The narrative also makes one wonder what is possible, assuming humanity with enough existential pressure, apolitically devoted its inventive capabilities and collaborative abilities to designing viable zero fossil fuel alternatives to energy production and consumption. Thankfully individuals such as Elon Musk (and his colleagues) at Tesla Motors have begun to demonstrate with vehicle product development that this outcome is feasible.

The value of some of our globe's advanced military industrial complex for constructive civil application probably dwarfs what is emerging from the private sector for various reasons. This industry probably has the ability (but not necessarily the political motivation to unbundle the status quo across the globe's vast energy value chain) to scale up Tesla Motors style "zero emission technology".

I learnt that the complex allied intelligence driven effort to frustrate and limit Nazi Germany's sophisticated ability to deploy drones, V1 and V2 bombs in 1943 over the UK was persistent, expansive, involved and detailed. Even post war application of imaging intelligence to detect where unexploded munitions across "Western Germany" underscores the strategic value of keeping records This book is an enlightening read, thank you Allan Williams.