The Reconnaissance Plane That Helped Win World War II
Nimble and fast, Spitfire PR planes ran vital photo missions for Allied forces.
Alone and unarmed, British Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot Alastair “Sandy” Gunn took off from Wick air base in northern Scotland in a Supermarine Spitfire PR.IV, a camera-equipped version of the storied single-engine fighter plane. His destination was a fjord near Trondheim on the Norwegian coast, where the German battleship Tirpitz had taken refuge. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was deeply concerned about the Tirpitz and the threat it posed to Allied convoys carrying tanks, aircraft, and other weaponry—along with more mundane supplies such as boots and telephone wire—to Soviet ports on the Arctic Ocean, a hazardous voyage of up to 2,500 miles that skirted Norway’s northern coast.
Gunn’s mission was to locate the ship, photograph it, and return to Scotland with the film—a 1,200-mile round-trip journey over frigid waters and enemy territory.
He never made it back. Somewhere above the snow-covered mountains near Trondheim, two Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters intercepted his defenseless Spitfire and riddled it with machine-gun and cannon fire. He bailed out of his burning airplane and parachuted to the ground, only to be captured a few days later.
Gunn’s reconnaissance flight of March 5, 1942, was the RAF’s 113th mission to find and photograph the Tirpitz—a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game that paid dividends for the Allies. The relentless surveillance by pilots flying Spitfire PRs—the PR standing for photographic reconnaissance—kept constant pressure on the Kriegsmarine (Germany’s navy). Though the Tirpitz remained a potent threat, it was never free to roam the Atlantic and was ultimately sunk by RAF Avro Lancaster bombers in November 1944.
The effectiveness of Allied photo reconnaissance during World War II owed much to the courage of pilots like Gunn—and to the Spitfire PRs, which were flown primarily by British units but were operated in significant numbers by American reconnaissance squadrons as well. Based on the nimble, elegant fighter that had won fame in the Battle of Britain, the camera-equipped Spitfires—which came in a dozen variants—were adapted for a very different mission. Instead of firepower, they relied on speed and stealth to complete their sorties—anticipating the high-altitude spy planes of the Cold War, such as Lockheed Aircraft Corporation’s U-2 “Dragon Lady” and SR-71 “Blackbird.”
Alongside reconnaissance versions of the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, the Spitfire PR series played a major—if little-known— role in some of the most important Allied operations of the war. These included the D-Day landings, the so-called Dambusters raid that disrupted the water supply to Germany’s industrial heartland, and the bombing of German V-2 rocket facilities at Peenemünde and elsewhere.
The pilots were as varied as the missions they undertook. They included a prewar race car driver, a famous jockey, a conscientious objector, and seasoned test pilots, along with men from across the British Commonwealth and even American volunteers. Whatever their backgrounds, all shared the same goal: to stealthily penetrate hostile airspace and bring back the images that would help win the war. “The estimate we now have, with 80 years of hindsight, is that 80 percent of the information that was used by the Allied high command for the strategic planning of the tactical campaigns in the Second World War came from photographic reconnaissance,” explains Tony Hoskins, a British aircraft restorer and historian of the Spitfire PR.
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The Route to Reconnaissance
Military leaders have long understood the value of aerial intelligence. In 1794, during the Battle of Fleurus, the French Army made the first recorded military use of an observation balloon, sending two men aloft to spy on Dutch and Austrian forces. Observation balloons reappeared decades later in the American Civil War, and again during World War I, when tethered, manned balloons—nicknamed “sausages” for their elongated shape—bobbed above the trenches on both sides of the western front.
It was in that conflict, beginning in 1914, that airplanes—especially reconnaissance airplanes—first played a significant military role. At first, observers on reconnaissance flights simply jotted notes as they passed above enemy trenches, artillery positions, and troop concentrations. But notepads soon were replaced with handheld cameras using five-by-four-inch glass negatives, and eventually by cameras fixed to the fuselage and operated remotely from the cockpit. The work was vital to planning infantry assaults. It was also very dangerous: Pilots had to keep a straight and steady course to capture image sequences, which made them vulnerable to ground fire and attack by enemy fighters. As cameras and engine technology improved, reconnaissance missions in open-cockpit biplanes flew ever higher, eventually capturing sweeping panoramic images from altitudes of up to 20,000 feet.
It would take another war to realize the full potential of photo reconnaissance. As the Nazi menace loomed over Europe in the late 1930s, Britain’s primary reconnaissance aircraft was the twin-engine Bristol Blenheim, which had been designed as a light bomber. But the Blenheim was obsolete from the start. Though armed with machine guns, it was no match for faster German fighter planes, which dispatched them in shocking numbers in the first months of the war.
Frederick Sidney Cotton had a better idea. Born to a wealthy family in Australia, he flew for Britain in World War I, failed at several business ventures back home, and eventually moved to Newfoundland, where he established an airmail service, ran an aerial survey business, and participated in search-and-rescue operations. In the spring of 1939, he began flying covert reconnaissance flights for the British Secret Intelligence Service, soon to be known as MI6, in a twin-engine Lockheed 12A Electra, operated under the guise of a private company and equipped with three F24 cameras in the cabin floor.
Cotton had a gift for innovation—among other things, he figured out a way to prevent lens condensation by ducting warm air from the cabin—and the images he and his Canadian copilot, Robert Niven, brought back from overflights of military installations in Germany and Italian territories in the Mediterranean and Africa were far superior to anything produced by the RAF. Along the way, the men found an ally in Flying Officer Maurice V. Longbottom, who had been tasked with analyzing their photographs. All three agreed that the RAF’s approach to reconnaissance was entirely wrongheaded. In August 1939, just weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland, Longbottom summarized their thinking in a groundbreaking memo. It called for “the use of a single small machine, relying solely on its speed, climb and ceiling to avoid detection.” The Spitfire was the obvious choice for the job.
Adapting an Icon
Designed by R.J. Mitchell—the brilliant engineer whose sleek monoplanes were three-time winners of the Schneider Trophy, a prestigious seaplane competition held sporadically from 1913 to 1931—and manufactured by the Supermarine Aviation Works in the port city of Southampton, England, the Spitfire first flew in 1936. It was fast, agile, and strikingly beautiful, with distinctive elliptical wings and a powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. The fighter soon achieved legendary status during the Battle of Britain in 1940, when Spitfires helped repel the mighty German Luftwaffe, denying Hitler the air superiority he needed to launch an invasion.
With the backing of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, Cotton established an experimental development unit at Heston Aerodrome near London, where Spitfires would be adapted for reconnaissance. To reduce weight, the planes were stripped of guns, radios, armor plating, and even their bulletproof windscreens, which were replaced with lighter Perspex panels similar to plexiglass. Extra fuel tanks were installed behind the pilot’s seat and in the leading edges of the wings, nearly tripling the Spitfire’s range.
Cameras were mounted vertically in the wings for high-altitude photography, with additional oblique cameras housed in the fuselage behind the cockpit for low-level missions. Streamlining measures—such as plugging gunports and filling seams with plaster of paris—boosted the Spitfire’s top speed from 360 to 396 miles an hour. To make the aircraft more difficult to see against the sky, they were painted in delicate shades of pale blue or green, including one that Cotton called “camotint.”
In November 1939 an early version of the Spitfire PR series flew on its first mission, with Longbottom as its pilot. According to an account in Spitfire Pilots’ Stories by Alfred Price, Longbottom passed over the German city of Aachen at 33,000 feet, taking pictures—he thought—of military installations. He was disappointed to discover on his return that he had photographed the countryside just across the border in Belgium.
Subsequent missions by Longbottom and other pilots fared better, and Dowding was persuaded to hand over more of the coveted Spitfires to Cotton’s Club, as some called his Photographic Development Unit, soon renamed the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit.
High-Altitude Photography
Cotton’s contribution was apparent from the start. In May 1940 Spitfire reconnaissance flights brought back photographs of German Panzer columns surging across France. Alerted to the threat, British commanders had just enough time to organize the successful evacuation of Dunkirk.
The missions were grueling, and not just because of the constant threat from enemy aircraft. Pilots navigated with only a magnetic compass, maps, and a wristwatch—a daunting task in the best of times, often made worse by the dismal weather. At normal mission altitudes of 25,000 to 35,000 feet, they flew in unheated, unpressurized cockpits, breathing bottled oxygen and warding off subzero cold with fur-lined boots, layered undergarments, and electrically heated flight suits. Until late 1942, they didn’t even have the reassurance of a radio.
Cockpit heating arrived the same year as radios, along with the Spitfire PR.XI, the most widely used of the series. The new variant had a top speed of 422 miles an hour and could reach heights of 44,000 feet, giving it a significant performance edge over almost anything else in the sky. “If you were attacked in a Spit, you could nearly always get out of trouble, especially the PR.XI,” said one pilot. Rearview mirrors were installed so pilots could watch for the vapor trails that would reveal their presence—the solution was to change altitude and direction—as well as hostile aircraft. In some variants introduced toward the end of the war, cockpits were pressurized to reduce the risk of hypoxia during long sorties at high altitudes.
By the time the PR.XI came out in 1943, Cotton was long gone, booted from his position two years earlier after falling out with his superiors. But the RAF continued to rely heavily on the techniques he had pioneered for high-altitude, high-speed photography. These methods produced overlapping image sequences that, when viewed through a stereoscope, rendered precise three-dimensional views of enemy fortifications and terrain.
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Much of this analysis was carried out at the RAF’s Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, where members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)—formed in 1939 to fill noncombat roles in the RAF—worked side by side with male colleagues. A third of the 635 interpreters were WAAF personnel, trained to interpret aerial imagery. Among the most celebrated was Flight Officer Constance Babington Smith, a child of imperial privilege—one of her ancestors, Lord Elgin, had the Parthenon marbles stripped from the ancient Greek temple and sent to England—who had worked in fashion before the war.
She led a team of 15 interpreters at Medmenham, and had been told to keep an eye out for “some sort of tube out of which a rocket could be squirted.” On November 28, 1943, RAF Squadron Leader John Merifield overflew the town of Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic coast in a twin-engine reconnaissance Mosquito with its cameras whirring. Back at Medmenham, Babington Smith peered through a stereoscope at the images he had captured. The prints revealed a cruciform shape on rails—a V-1 flying bomb. The discovery of this heretofore unknown weapon was a major intelligence coup that culminated in Operation Crossbow, a sustained Allied air offensive against German launch sites in Germany and France.
Flying Behind Enemy Lines
For pilots, photo reconnaissance missions were among the most dangerous, comparable to those of Britain’s Bomber Command, whose wartime losses approached 50 percent. “Certainly, in the early part of the war, your life expectancy was 13 weeks, and you would only do three trips a week if the weather was good,” says Hoskins, the Spitfire expert.
Almost by definition, the targets of Spitfire photo missions were heavily defended by antiaircraft guns and often fighters. One of the most common such missions was bomb-damage assessment. Before an attack, Spitfires would make photo runs over the city or factory to be bombed. The reconnaissance flights would be repeated once the smoke had cleared, sometimes within hours. Comparing the before-and-after images enabled “same-day analysis of whether the target had been eliminated,” explains Hoskins.
In March 1944 Maj. Walter Weitner—commander of an American photo-reconnaissance squadron—took off from southwestern England on a mission that showcased the perils of these flights. As recounted in Price’s book, Weitner had been tasked with photographing damage from the first major daylight attack on Berlin by American bombers. As he neared Berlin in his Spitfire PR.XI, he noticed three black Messerschmitt Bf 109s in his rearview mirror. They were trailing at 1,500 yards. Weitner pushed the throttle forward and began to climb, taking advantage of the modified Spitfire’s extra speed. He leveled off at 41,500 feet and slowly pulled away from his German pursuers.
A few minutes later, Weitner descended to 38,000 feet as the German capital spread out beneath him, shrouded in smoke and haze from recent bombing raids. Leveling the aircraft, he switched on the cameras under his wing, which captured a three-mile-wide strip of ground at five-second intervals. He lingered over the city for 25 minutes, taking roughly 70 photographs, then turned for home. After four hours and 18 minutes in the air, he touched down—just seconds before his fuel tanks ran dry.
Some missions demanded the kind of detail that could be captured only at low altitudes, with cameras mounted behind the pilot and angled to the side. Pilots dreaded these sorties, which required them to fly straight and level within easy range of antiaircraft and rifle fire. The missions were called dicers, because the pilots were thought to be rolling the dice with death. “As the target got nearer one’s mouth got completely dry,” one Spitfire PR pilot recalled of his low-level pass over the German naval base at Brest in occupied France. “Anyone who was not frightened at the thought of going in to photograph one of the most heavily defended targets in Europe was not human.”
Yet the payoff could be high. On December 5, 1941, Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hill streaked over the grounds of a clifftop villa on the Normandy coast at 200 feet, capturing images with an oblique camera. One of them revealed a 10-foot parabolic antenna—proof of a German radar installation. In a now famous operation carried out in February, British airborne troops raided the site and brought components back to England, where they were scrutinized for insights into German advances in radar. Hill was killed the next year on another low-level mission.
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Preparing for D-Day
Spitfire reconnaissance planes played a critical role in the invasion of Normandy. For several years, they had flown at high altitudes over occupied France to identify German radar and wireless facilities as targets for Allied bombers. By the time of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, “transmissions were detected at only five out of 98 sites,” writes Andrew Fletcher in Spitfire Photo-Recce Units of World War 2. “The success of the PR organization in identifying all of the enemy’s radar installations was a major contributing factor to the initial success of the invasion.”
In the months leading up to the Allied landings, Spitfire PRs made repeated high-altitude passes over the Normandy beaches, allowing planners to build up a clear picture of German fortifications and supply routes. Other missions flew far lower, often skimming the cliffs at dawn or dusk. Some Spitfires were
painted pale pink, as camouflage against rose-colored skies. The images they brought back, when viewed through stereoscopes, revealed the invasion beaches in stunning three-dimensional clarity. Beach defenses—like the spiky “hedgehogs” placed as defenses against landing craft—appeared so vividly, Hoskins says, “you could measure the height.” Even trip wires could be detected in some photos.
On D-Day itself, and in the days that followed, the missions continued at a frenetic pace, gathering near real-time intelligence that Allied commanders used to judge their progress and decide where to send reinforcements.
Despite its vital contribution, the Spitfire PR series is often overlooked in histories of the air war in Europe. That is beginning to change—thanks in no small part to Alastair Gunn, the RAF pilot who was shot down over Norway in 1943 on a mission to photograph the German battleship Tirpitz. Following his capture, Gunn was sent to Stalag Luft III, a prisoner of war camp in what was then Nazi Germany (today Poland), where on the night of March 24, 1944, he took part in the famous tunnel breakout known as the Great Escape. He was recaptured within hours and executed on April 6 by the Gestapo on Hitler’s orders.
But Gunn’s story did not end there. More than 75 years after Gunn’s death, Hoskins, the Spitfire expert, learned of the incident and organized a search for the downed aircraft, which he eventually located in a mountain peat bog. Hoskins brought it back to England, where he is slowly restoring it to flyable condition—honoring the nearly forgotten spy plane and the courageous pilots who flew it.
