AIR ESPIONAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 March 1940, Page 3

AIR ESPIONAGE

NAZI PLANES ON JOB SEEKING Mil ITARY SECRETS. j « j NEW SYSTEM OF SPYING. j I This war has produced a new sort of I spy and a new system of espionage which M. 1.5, the special intelligence service of lhe War Office, can make no effort to counter (says a writer in the Melbourne "Age”). It is the espionage of the air. the aerial reconnaissance that, though tracing its origin back to the last war. has reached proportions undreamt of then. Since that first fateful week in September one of the prime concerns of the airforces of both lhe Allies and the Germans has been to pry out the secrets of defences and the military and industrial nerve centres of the enemy. The R.A.F. started this new espionage game early, and the planes that made the first raids over Germany in the first week of the war did not only do so to drop leaflets. They went. too. to steal photographs that, pieced together and supplemented after each successive reconnaissance raid, have given the Allied Military chiefs what is claimed to be almost a complete aerial plan not only of the fortifications along the western front, but the key industrial centres and the key military objectives as far into the heart of Germany as Vienna and Prague.

But the Gorman Air Force has been busy, too. and her espionage of the air has been carried a step further and used, characteristically, as a weapon in the bitter propaganda war that the Nazis are fighting. Recently military experts were staggered by the release to the American Press of a remarkable series of aerial pictures of wartime England, pictures taken by German military photographers on reconnaissance flights over England and Scotland. proving that the Nazi High Command has admirable photographs of many of Britain's military and industrial nerve centres. NAZI PLANS OF ENGLAND. Tite knowledge that the' Germans have such amazingly complete aerial plans of England ready against the day when they decide —if they do —to launch a ruthless bombing campaign on land cannot but be disquieting; but it would be infinitely more so if it were not counter-balanced by the fact that the Allies hold similar key plans of Germany. The recent raids, the most ambitious series of attacks on shipping since the war, produced, for all the mercilessness of the methods employed, comparatively little result beyond the individual tragedies of killed and wounded on the ships attacked. But for the people in lhe towns and villages along the 500 miles of coast over which the raids extended, and indeed for the people ’ throughout Britain, those attacks by Nazi bombers must have carried a grim realisation of what might be in store for them if the Germans turned from sea to land objectives. Many of the large towns along this easleru coast—and certainly all-those important industrially or strategically, from their proximity to big railheads oi' airports or naval stations —were declared danger areas under the evacuation scheme carried through in the weekend war was declared. The fact that in one Kentish town a Nazi bomber swooped down to 50ft and circled the harbour before making out to sea has probably supplied the Ministry of Health, so long harassed by criticism against its evacuation scheme and by the drift back of evacuees to the cities with its most conclusive argument for "staying evacuated." GERMANS FLY HIGH.

Actually for a single reconnaissance plane to fl.v over enemy territory, gel lhe pictures warned, and make off for homo is by no means as difficult or as dangerous a job as the layman would suppose. When there are no bombs to be dropped the pilot can lly high; nearly all the pictures that Germany has ■released as propaganda to vaunt the prowess of her air force and to strike terror in the people of England were laken at. heights well over three miles. A fact, by the way, which serves as useful propaganda for the Allies since it reveals the respect the German pilots have for the British anti-aircraft defences. The machines that the Nazis have used mostly for this espionage work have been Heinkcls and Dorniers, and the photographs published in the American Press prove that they have covered a vast amount of territory. Aerial plans of nerve centres ■ along lhe Thames that the German High Com mand now holds up the sleeve of its black shirt range from Tilbury Docks. 20 miles down the river from London and, five miles further on. the tremendous oil depot at Thames Haven, when Britain has stored huge reserves of oil. to the Downs, where the great bank of the Goodwin Sands forms a huge roadsted that today, one of the chief centres for contraband control, and as well important as one of the local points for the convoy system, is thick with shipping from all over the world.

RECONNAISSANCE RAIDS. I Though Germany has not attempted i reconnaissance raids on as large a scale [ as has the Allied Air Force, Nazi planes lin ones and two. have been flying over England at intervals since the first enemy aircraft, appearing one morning over the Firth of Forth, when the war was over a month old. surprised the people of Britain as much as had the failure of raiders to appear in | those first anxious days of the war. From Dover, in the south, with docks, breakwaters, old forts and modern coastal batteries neatly labelled, the Nazi cameramen have flown north . to Liverpool, with its seven miles of docks, second only to London as a port. ( and on over Scotland as far as Moray , Firth and Inverness: the pictures they . | have carried home with them, publish- , ed now in the American "Life." re- , veal the thoroughness with which they . have done their job. Pictures of Mans- j ion air port. north of Dover, for in- ( stance, are lettered to identify han- x gars, technical shops, munitions dump, , anti-aircraft guns, down to a piece of ( camoullage that the German photo- ( grapher has decided is probably a fake . hedge across the landing field. Many of L the details that have been picked out . in this way are obvious to the naked eye: but a prolonged study of the ori- I ginals of the pictures through a store- I: escape. "Life" states, "would begin to g reveal suspicious signs of camouflage concealing anti-aircraft gun batteries, r For example, a wide road that leads i nowhere, but suddenly narrows to a t path, indicates that there is probably! f a busy battery where the road narrows.l c What is apparently a collage roof, well) and horse trough may conceal gun i C director, and height-finder. Fake '

hedges are indicated on a flying field by painting the ground or planting grass of a contrasting colour." Ail ol such details, it is as well to recall, must be equally clearly revealed in the aerial plans of Germany that the Allied High Command has escured from its Air Force cameramen in this espionage of the air.