[by NIGEL JONES, Daily Mail]

It may be the cinema fashion of the moment, but 3D technology is almost as old as photography itself – and, as a new documentary reveals, it was used by British boffins in World War II to foil a Nazi plan to flatten our cities with a barrage of rockets.

The BBC film, Operation Crossbow, highlights for the first time the work of a secret team who used special 3D machines to make sense of millions of aerial photos taken from the skies of Nazi-occupied Europe.

‘We were risking our lives to take those pictures,’ says pilot James Byrne, who flew a Spitfire armed only with cameras over German cities, ‘But we trusted the backroom boys and girls to interpret the photos and show what the Germans were doing.’ And what the Germans were doing was rocket science – developing a deadly array of advanced missiles known as ‘V’ (for ‘vengeance’) weapons.

They planned to bombard London and other British cities with them and turn their looming defeat into a last-ditch Nazi victory. The V1 was a flying bomb, nicknamed the Doodlebug, designed to suddenly cut its engine and drop on a random target. The second, even deadlier Nazi secret weapon, the V2, was developed by super-scientist Wernher von Braun, who used the same technology after the war to mastermind the US Apollo programme.

The V2 was the world’s first space rocket, and it shot straight up into the stratosphere then plunged down on its target without warning, causing huge devastation and panic. More than 10,000 V1s were fired during the war, causing 24,000 casualties; and 1,400 V2s were launched, killing nearly 3,000 people – the same number who died on 9/11.

‘In today’s language they were weapons of mass destruction,’ says Geoffrey Stone, a member of the extraordinary team recruited to counter the deadly threat. The team, called the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, was an eccentric mix of Oxbridge dons, enthusiastic hobbyists and WAAFS – young female volunteers keen to do their bit to help win the war.

‘We came from all walks of life,’ recalls Elizabeth Hick, now a spry 88-yearold but then 20-year-old Section Leader Elizabeth Johnston-Smith. ‘There were botanists, geologists, architects, mathematicians. I was an artist who had studied drawing at the Royal Academy and won medals, so I had a good eye. That was why I was recruited.’

The team lived and worked at Danesfield House in Buckinghamshire, which was requisitioned by the Government and renamed RAF Medmenham. They analysed millions of aerial photos of Nazi-occupied Europe taken by aircraft fitted with special cameras. Their job was to measure the effects of Allied bombing and look for concealed enemy bases.

‘Nothing moved in Europe without us noticing it,’ boasts James Byrne. ‘We flew at 30,000ft but we could spot a man on a bike in a street.’ Interpreting the pictures was down to the skills of the men and women at RAF Medmenham. ‘We soon learned to tell the difference between houses and factories,’ says Elizabeth Hicks.

One day a spy plane photographed some mysterious circular structures at a remote spot on Germany’s Baltic coast called Peenemunde. At first these were not seen for what they were – the first V2 rocket silos – and were initially misidentified as a sewage works. This is where 3D came in (a technology that, as newly found film footage will show in a Sky TV documentary later this month, the Nazis were also experimenting with).

Thanks to two special 3D devices called Vildt machines, the Medmenham team were finally able to see what was really going on at the mysterious Peenemunde site. As Stone explains, the machines had special lenses that converted ordinary photographs into lifelike 3D images. ‘They showed the shadows cast by the 14ft-tall rockets. It finally dawned on us what they were.’

Churchill lost no time in ordering a devastating bombing raid on the rockets’ home. Another puzzle was solved by 3D when the team identified strange ski-shaped bunkers across northern France – the V1 launch ramps. A massive wave of bombing attacks, Operation Crossbow, knocked out many of the sites.

‘The damage done by the V1s and V2s they did manage to fire was bad enough,’ says Stone, ‘But if they’d launched the 2,000 a day they’d planned, D-Day would have been wrecked and the war might have been lost.’ As Elizabeth Hicks puts it, ‘For us, it was a good war.’

Operation Crossbow, BBC2, tomorrow, 9pm. WWII In 3D is on Sky3D, 26 May.

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