Month: April 2019

Bonzo Joined the RAF …

Here is a delightful photograph and story in another of the RAF’s brilliant PR campaigns. BONZO JOINED THE RAF IN ITALY Read More

Harris, Bomber Command & PR

Our post of 27 April 2019 contained a Press photograph of Harris using a stereopticon. It was only when we came to do a further post on the subject that we realised the link between the Press photograph and an article in The Illustrated London News. Read the Full Article: Harris’s Office, Bomber Command HQ Read More

Photography in the Air War: 2

In February 2019 we featured Captain Bryan de Grineau’s drawing of Lancaster gunners ‘Hotting-up‘ which was published in The Illustrated London News in December 1943. Now here is another fascinating Bryan de Grineau drawing, also from The Illustrated London News, of the underground room at Bomber Command which housed the Photographic Interpretation Section of the Intelligence Read More

Photography in the Air War: 1

Following on from the two last posts on the critical role of photography in the Air War, here is a wartime press photograph of the head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, studying reconnaissance photographs using: a variation of the old-fashioned stereopticon which used to be kept in the parlour to entertain Read More

EVIDENCE IN CAMERA

More from the fascinating 1957 book Evidence in Camera. Wing Commander Peter Stewart was chosen to command a new Assistant Directorate of Photographic Intelligence in the summer of 1941. At this time reconnaissance photographs were showing how badly Bomber Command was failing in hitting its targets, and the photographic evidence of these failures was seldom Read More

Bruneval Raid, 27/28 February 1942

Last Sunday, I went to Goodrich, near Ross-on-Wye, for a talk about the radar aid H2S and the tragic crash which killed its inventor, Alan Blumlein (see H2S AND THE BLUMLEIN CRASH). H2S was critical to Pathfinder navigational accuracy. One of the interesting facts mentioned in the talk was that the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), Read More

Being Proud of One’s Country

I was flicking through Donald Bennett’s autobiography Pathfinder yesterday, and came upon this passage, which seemed strangely reminiscent of a certain situation in the British Parliament today. Bennett is writing of the time that, having resigned from the Air Force, he became a member of Parliament for Middlesborough West, thus beginning a period of intense Read More

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