Above Wartime Europe: The Top Secret Aerial Photographs of World War Two

In the early 1940s, in a grand, Buckinghamshire country house on the banks of the River Thames, a secret intelligence unit worked day and night to change the course of the Second World War. Its unconventional staff - a remarkable collection of brilliant, eccentric and enigmatic men and women - became some of the unlikeliest, yet most significant, heroes of the War. Bletchley Park had its famous code breakers, but this sister organisation, known as RAF Medmenham, was coordinating one of the largest spying operations ever undertaken - photographing World War Two from the air. With reconnaissance squadrons operating across the globe to produce millions of images, the Allies built up a real-time picture of the War as it happened. From Germany’s Blitzkrieg advances through Europe and the breakneck search for the terrifying Nazi ‘Vengeance’ weapons, to the Allied bombing campaign and the ferocious D-Day assault, the photographic interpreters of Medmenham and the daring Spitfire reconnaissance pilots fought the enemy on every front, denying them the element of surprise and constantly uncovering their secrets.

Now, the classified imagery that Churchill used to plan his strategies and offensives - drawn from a vast archive of wartime aerial photographs, including remarkable 3D imagery - is being published in a unique illustration of the conflict. Ranging throughout Europe and featuring key events including the hunt for the Bismarck, the bitter struggle for the Mediterranean, the bombing of Hamburg, and the daring paratrooper assault of Operation Market GardenA , ‘Above Wartime Europe’ is a landmark volume, revealing to the public for the first time the incredible, Top Secret aerial intelligence photographs that helped win the Second World War.