Operation Crossbow
11 May 2011
Newly uncovered imagery from the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) is now the subject of a BBC documentary about a top secret Second World War operation.
Codenamed Operation Crossbow, the Allies used 3D photographs to search for and destroy the Nazi’s ‘Vengeance’, or V missile weapons, before they could be launched against Britain. The V weapons were made a strategic priority by German high-command, who believed the revolutionary technology could help turn the tide of the war. Remarkably this same technology would later be used by NASA to propel the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.
The documentary, which goes by the same title, features the work of NCAP Curator Allan Williams and his team, whose ongoing research represents the legacy of a top secret WWII photographic interpretation unit that was based at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire. The team continue to catalogue and archive millions of Second World War aerial photographs, part of an internationally significant collection comprising many millions of military intelligence images dating from 1939 to 1989.
A year in the making, Operation Crossbow brings together the Spitfire pilots who flew photographic reconnaissance missions and took the photographs of V-weapon sites, with surviving photographic interpreters, who had to make sense of the jigsaw of information hidden in the tens of millions of aerial photographs that flooded back to RAF Medmenham.
The reconnaissance photographs – which the wartime interpreters viewed in 3D through stereoscopes – are brought to life in the BBC programme by computer graphics, showing how the intelligence unit hunted the V-weapons by looking for clues among the fine details and contours of the enemy landscape. A number of the reconnaissance missions were flown from RAF Leuchars in Fife.
Speaking about the BBC programme, NCAP Curator Allan Williams said, “Operation Crossbow is a compelling example of how critical the work of the reconnaissance squadrons and the photographic interpretation unit at RAF Medmenham was to the outcome of the war. The imagery we have found in the archive shows the extent of the search for test and launch sites – which involved taking over 1.2 million aerial photographs – and the great efforts made by the Germans to camouflage the sites. But it also shows the dramatic response of the Allied air forces when targets were pinpointed.
“Without this photographic intelligence – which was created at remarkable speed – the Germans could have launched potentially devastating attacks on Britain before D-Day that could have easily changed the outcome of the war.”
While NCAP is made up of millions of individual images, only a small percentage have so far been catalogued and digitised. Discovering exactly what each roll of film contains is an ongoing task requiring painstaking detective work. The long term conservation plan for NCAP includes further research and progressive digitisation of the photography for display online, as well as storing, preserving and interpreting the original photography for public accessibility.
Operation Crossbow is on BBC Two at 9pm on Sunday May 15
