WAR SPIES IN THE AIR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17110, 15 March 1919, Page 2 (Supplement)

WAR SPIES IN THE AIR.

THE FLYING CAMERA MEN.

VALUABLE RECORDS SECURED.

Taking tremendous risks the British Air Force camera men have played to perfection in fie war the part, of the spy in the enemy's camp. The story mar dow be told.

The aerial camera today is just as much unlike the amateur photographer's box o' tricks" as the pre-war aeroplane of the old Hendon days is unlike our present-day Hand icy Page bombing machine. There are between 20 and 30 types of cameras for aerial photography from aeroplanes and airships, and all. or most of them, are the result of experiments and experience carried out since August, 191-1.

Aftei a while a mechann a) method oi working the camera in flight was devised —a small propeller was titled either forward or aft. and worked a Bowden release attached to the camera. 'Hie plate was exposed, changed, and dropped into a receiving be* by the mere pulling of the string. As the work of the Hying arm of the service extended ashore and afloat so did the work of the air spies extend. T hey photographed submarines resting on the bed of tho Adriatic and Mediterranean ; they pictured the oil patches on the sens which betoken the sudden end by depth charge of a German submarine. They went up in all weathers and at ail heights, diligently collecting picture records of the domes of the enemy on sea and on land. The eye of the atrial camera was only shut when the night hours came and when fog and mist entirely blotted out the earth's surface. To dodge successfully the German fliers and the ever-present bugbear of " Archie,'' the pilots or observers have had invariably to fly at fairly high altitudes— at less than 10,000 ft, and aiways on a zig-zag course. Tho " mosaics," as they are called—picture maps pieced together something like a jig-saw puzzle—are made from thousands of negatives taken with a lens pointing vertically towards the ground. The obliques—panoramic pictures showing the trenches and the country behind them have been taken with the lens slightly slewed round at an angle of a few degree*. A brigade intelligence officer having got a complete set of prints, taken an hour before, sits down to deduce, SherlockHolmes wise, a lengthy indictment of the Germans' overnight activities. He spots at once some newly-made tracks through clearly-defined belts of wire. Ho knowis' for certain then that Fritz has been busy organising some new shell-holes in No lean's Land." The shadows in the photograph tell him approximately the depth and strength of these points; the shadows also tell him perhaps the height and approximate number of shells in a covered dump. He also spots quickly the fact that in another picture large chunks of turf have been removed ; camouflage of guns is in progress near here. Light railways and all trench systems show up with almost uncanny clarity in most of the photographs. Machine-gun costs can be picked out very easily; so can newly-made gun-pits, despite the elaborate methods adopted to hide them. Signs of an impending attack on a larg'e scale)- can usually be deduced by the plainly apparent nowly-made roads for tanks and by the massing of men in large numbers in support trenches and on roads leading from back-area billets.