The Miller press. [volume] (Miller, S.D.) 190?-current, 1919-10-16
SAVED BY CAMERA
How Aerial Spy Prevented Sac
rifice of Life.
Revealed to General Foch That POSI-.
tlon He Had Decided to Capture
Would Be Too Costly m Un-
dertakinq.

BY the eternal fitness Of things Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle should write this
story. for in the spellbound hours In
which lacOnic brown men in khaki and
horizon blue" gave 1t to me / visual
lied no one SO much as Sherlock
Holmes-grim, brooding and penetrat-
~ing--riding In their places miles over
the smoke of Flanders sitting IN their
places In the map-littered dugouts be-
hind the lines Of battle, untangling the
mysteries OF uncanny secrets, Douglas
Reid writes in Popular Mechanics
magazine. 1t Is the story of the great.
est detective system ever devised by
man, the inner story of how the al
lies by aerial photography and weird
deduction from meaningless prints Of
the German lines solved the riddles
of the foe-the story Of the camera,
the best spy of the time" Into this
story will come the strange case Of
the human footprint and the countless
things Of stealth 1t revealed. also the
curious ~'rogues' gallery" Of German
generals which the allied detectives
collected. kept and used with such u III
might-alsO the odd . but a be-
ginning must be made.
There Is no more astonishing thing
In the whole marvel Of aerial photOg-
raphy than the cameras ability to
catch the trail of a walking man. At
two and a half miles In the air the
ordinary aerial camera will show the
footprints Of a man going across slight
ly shelled ground. At a mile 1t will
show them on new-mOwn grass. At
FIVE miles II will reveal them trailing
across mo Mans land"
Consider this: Once the French
were planning to take a certain hill.
knowing that Bavarlan "landsturm"-
poor machine-gun fighters-held II
weakly. At dawn a photographer went
up, anne dashing back with a picture
and Is minutes later the French gen.
eral called off the attack and saved the
lives of thousands Of his men. And
yet the camera had caught no remark
able thing. 1t merely showed that one
group of men had gone out and an
other come into the trenches during
the night. The footprints of the Ger
mans told that much. The incoming
trail, followed back, was found TO
emerge from a woods; lying beside a
fine white road. The allied detectives
bending Owe their prints, followed
that road to the nearest German cam
an,a~n arI n.nxnI Lxy r4il1 pfhas nhn-
tographs hat the cantonment was held
by Prussians. Presto! The French
staff knew that crack Prussians were
opposing them and that 1t would be
nothing short Of suicide to attack.
Deduction Of this sort was more than
half of the work Of the aerial phOtog-
raphy sections of the allied armies.
The work of swapping pictures from
the air was picturesque, dangerous, he
roic; but for thrill and omanc give
me those sweating, silent men in the
dugouts, studying photographs by the
hour, catching a clew here, a telltale
mark there that made Hindenburg's
plans an open book.
Modern Photographic science laid be-
fore each allied general a complete
picture of everything the enemy IA
doing and almost everything 1t vas
going to do. 1t showed him unmistak-
ably what his own men were doing end
what they could do. 1t relieved him
Of conflicting stories from spies, from
human mistake-for the camera does
not lie.
Napoleon could not guess what We'll
lington was planning; Foch could send
up photographer and within an hour
know what Ludendorff was thinking
Of.