Winston Johnson’s wartime service was as a navigator/specialist wireless operator. He was involved in top-secret work, some of it with 109 Squadron, a founding Mosquito squadron of the Pathfinders. On 31 January 1945, Winston was posted overseas to the BLA, the British Liberated Area, where he remained until 18 May 1945, possibly as part of
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
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
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
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
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),
