CAMERA IN WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 December 1941, Page 4

CAMERA IN WAR

ENEMY SECRETS EXPOSED VITAL WEAPON. SUCCESS OF X-RAY PHOTOGRAPHY. Wilbur and Orville Wright, flying the world’s first aeroplane, did not realise that they were presenting mankind with a new terror. So the early experimenters in photography can hardly have imagined that their scientific toy would become an indispensable adjunct of twentieth century war. For that matter, most people today think of a camera as a handy device for recording the features of friends or for illustrating newspapers and magazines. But if one side or the other suddenly lost all knowledge of photography, it would also lose the war.

The camera is no secret weapon—although every nation has its own secret photographic tricks; it is the device by which fighting forces learn the opposition’s secrets. Where is the enemy massing his forces? Where are his supply lines? His transport systems? Essential industries? What sort of terrain must the army cross to engage him? ’ls that city block genuine, or a camouflaged imitation built on a lake? Those are the sort of questions the air camera—the longdistance, probing eye of the general staff —can help to answer. But munitions output is as vital as strategy in world war and in this, too, the camera has an important place. By X-ray photography, flaws in tanks, guns, and planes can now be found before they leave the factory instead of in the heat of battle. The X-ray camera would have revealed that missing horseshoe nail for lack of which a kingdom was lost. ACCURATE INFORMATION.

The camera’s aid is also enlisted in preparing maps, duplicating records and preparing documents and plans. Dash and initiative win battles, but not unless they have for their foundation sound planning; and sound planning depends on accurate information. Before bombing began in this war, frequent communiques on either side mentioned flights by single enemy planes. There was no mystery about these flights; they were carried out by reconnaissance planes, their automatic cameras loaded with large rolls of special aero film. To the pilots, the work of those early days of war was dull when it was not dangerous. But without those pictures, the recent blasting of the Ruhr could not have had a fraction of its effectiveness. And it would have taken our pilots far longer to discover such tricks of camouflage as that by which the Germans hoped to save vital parts of Hamburg. Getting those pictures was by no means a simple operation. Aerial photography requires the closest cooperation between pilot and photographer and competent mapping pilots are comparatively few. They must have a sort of bushman’s instinct of the air. A red flash on the pilot’s control board tells him when an exposure is about to be made, and he has to keep his plane level, steady, and directly on its course—difficult enough when weather pranks dump the plane about. Unavoidable drift or fluctuation makes it necessary to allow for a considerable margin of error, so the pictures are made to overlap, sometimes as much as 60 per cent. PRECIOUS MINUTES SAVED.

In the battle areas, particularly in a war of movement like that now raging on the Eastern front, minutes are as precious as battalions, so portable flight laboratories for developing and printing the negatives on the way home have been installed in some reconnaissance planes. And every nation is experimenting with “facsimile transmission,” by which air photographs could be radioed back to headquarters while the plane is still far from its base.

Even night does not stop the air photographer’s prying. Huge flashbombs parachuted down, and supersensitive film combine to make possible the photographing of large areas. Pictures showing the damage meted out by the R.A.F. in its night raids over Europe have been taken in this way.

The prime advantage of the camera record over the human observer, of course, is that the camera has a perfect memory, and for it one hurried glance is enough. But it also sees deeper. In a print the trained eye can detect the change of colour in greenery scorched by gun blast which the mere eye misses. And recently natural colour film has also been used to detect camouflage. It distinguishes artificial from natural colourings and, in night reconnaissances over burning objectives gives the expert reliable clues to the sort of materials set alight by the raiders. RECORDING RESULTS OF COMBATS. Camera “guns” are used to record the results of aerial combats. They are usually fitted to gun-mountings and the trigger operating the guns also sets the camera mechanism in motion. Air photography is the most spectacular wartime branch of the science, blit there are many others: X-ray examinations of recruits and wounded men as well as of weapons, photostatic copying of maps and documents, photographs for military records. But don’t blame the “Digger” who does not bother about all this, but believes the high point of photography is reached by the box camera that took the “snaps” of young Joe and Jean he gets from home.