Spies in the Sky

SPIES IN THE SKY is the thrilling, little known story of the partner organisation to the famous code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. It is the story of the daring reconnaissance pilots who took aerial photographs over Occupied Europe during the most dangerous days of the Second World War, and of the photo interpreters who invented a completely new science to analyse those pictures. They were inventive and ingenious; they pioneered the development of 3D photography and their work provided vital Intelligence throughout the war. With a whole host of larger than life characters at its heart, from the legendary pilot Adrian 'Warby' Warburton, who went missing while on a mission, to photo interpreters Glyn Daniel, later a famous television personality, and Winston Churchill's daughter, Sarah, SPIES IN THE SKY is compelling reading, and the first full account of the story of aerial photography and the Intelligence gleaned from it in nearly fifty years.

ISBN 1408702800   Pages 416 ISBN13 9781408702802 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 795 Publisher Little, Brown Book Group   Published in London Imprint Little, Brown   Height (mm) 240 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 160 Publication date 15 Sep 2011   Spine width (mm) 36 DEWEY 940.548641   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

As Taylor Downing's superbly researched and fluently written Spies in the Sky proves, just as important to victory in the Second World War as the code-breakers at Bletchley Park were the photo interpreters of Danesfield House at Medmenham...Downing faces head-on the charges that photo intelligence failed the Allies when it came to identifying Auschwitz and Hitler's plans for the Battle of the Bulge, and he convinces. Staffed with larger-than-life characters such as Professor R.V. Jones, the lovely Connie Babington Smith, John Merrifield (who photographed a V-1 being test-launched) and Michael Suckling (who spotted the Bismarck), Spies in the Sky fills in a huge gap in Second World War historiography in both an exciting and intellectually stimulating way. No-one will be able to write a history of the conflict again without giving Medmenham its central role in Allied Intelligence-gathering. -- Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War

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