World War Two From Above: An Aerial View of the Global Conflict.

• Author: Harris, Stephen
• Position: Book review

WORLD WAR TWO FROM ABOVE: An Aerial View of the Global Conflict

Author: Jeremy Harwood

Published by: Exisle Publishing Ltd, Auckland, 208pp, $44.99.

Bletchley Park's role in decoding German Enigma messages is rightly credited with shortening the Second World War and saving millions of lives. But the work of photo reconnaissance and interpretation contributed at least as much to detecting enemy threats both technical and tactical. Without the eyes in the sky and the forensic expertise to make meaning of what the photos revealed, much firepower and many months would have been wasted, and many more lives lost. Outcomes critical to the Allies' victory, such as the D-Day landings, could well have turned out very differently. This aspect of World War Two From Above provides a compelling thread through Jeremy Harwood's wideranging account of air power, both soft and hard, during the greatest conflict the world has known.

Harwood begins this 208-page tour d'horizon with the rapid emergence of aerial photography during the First World War, describing how air combat and photo reconnaissance developed in tandem, yet demonstrating the greater significance of the photographic mapping to where the war would be won or lost, namely understanding the vulnerabilities and defensive strengths of the opposing armies on the Western Front. By mid-1917 Germany was taking more than 4000 photos a day, and in the last ten months of the war alone, the Western powers amassed more than 10 million photos of the shifting frontlines.

By the global conflict to follow just 21 years later, the balance was shifting in favour of air power as a determinant of victory. Harwood describes this explosive evolution in snappy segments, among them: the 'Blitzkrieg' victories over France and low countries; Britain's desperate monitoring and bombing of the German invasion fleet in the French and Belgian Channel ports and the Battle of Britain in which the Luftwaffe failed to gain the air supremacy to enable the barges to bear the Wehrmacht across to England's south and eastern coasts. The night-time 'Blitz' of British cities over the winter of 1940-41 proved wrong the predictions that targeting civilians would break the spirit of resistance --as the Bomber Command chief, Air Marshal Harris, found with the strategic bombing offensive that produced such conflagrations as the firestorms of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Harwood paints the gradation as the military initiative and...