The weekly times-record. (Valley City, N.D.) 1912-1922, 1920-10-14
SAVED BY CAMERA
How Aerial Spy Prevented Sac.
rifice of Life.
Revealed to General Foch That Posi-.
ton He Had Decided to Capture
Would Be Too Costly an IN.
dertakinq.

BY the eternal fitness of things Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle should write this
story, for in the spelbound hours in
which laconic brown men in khaki and
horizon blue gave it 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 it revealed, also the
curious "rogues' gallery of German
generals which the allied detectives
collected, kept and used with such sure
mi Sht-alSO the odd but 4 be.
ginning must be made.
There is no more astonishing thing
IN the whole marvel Of aerial photog-
gaphy than the cameras ability to
catch the trail Of a walking man. At
two and half miles in the air the
oil "a
footprints Of NAH going across slight
y shelled ground. At mile it will
show them on new-mown grass. At
five miles it will reveal them trailing
across No Mans land"
Consider this: Once the French
were planning to take certain hill,
Knowing that Bavarian landsturm'-
poor machine-gun fghters-held 1t
weakly. At dawn photographer went
up. came dashing back with picture
and Is minutes later the French gen.
eral called off the attack and saved the
lives Of thousands of his men. And
Jet 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
fine white road. The allied detectives
Bending over their prints, followed
shat road to the nearest German can
8o- Hxycf 9th nj,
fographs that the cantonment was held
by PrusSians. Presto! The French
staff knew that crack Prussians were
opposing them and that it would be
nothing short Of suicide to attack.
Deduction of this sort was more than
falf 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 romance give
zoe those sweating, silent men in the
flugouts, studying photographs by the
hour, catching clew here. a telltale
mark there that made Hindenburgs
plans an open book.
Modern Photographic science laid be-
fore each allied general a complete
picture of everything the enemy was
doing and almost everything it was
going 10 do. 1t showed him unniStak-
ably what his own men were doing and
what they could do. 1t relieved MIN
Of conflicting stories from spies, from
human mistake-fOr the camera does
not lie.
Napoleon could not guess what Vel
nngton was planning; Forh could send
up photographer and within an hour
knew what LudendQrf was thinking
Of,