Photo Reconnaissance. The PR Mosquito

In wartime, how do you find out what your enemy is doing? And how could the de Havilland Mosquito help? In this video, we discuss one of the lesser-known roles of the Mosquito - photo reconnaissance. It may be less glamorous than fighters or bombers. But it was vital to the success of the war effort. During World War Two, there were a number of ways of finding out what your enemy was doing. You could listen to their radio traffic. But this was often encrypted, so you had to turn to code cracking services, like the famous Bletchley Park, to help read the messages. And that took time. You could send in spies, but good spies were few and far between. So the solution was - aerial photography. At the start of World War Two, Britain was dangerously short of reconnaissance aircraft. What was needed was a fast aircraft, with a long enough range to fly around Europe. So the authorities turned to de Havilland. Could the Mosquito, which was intended to be a fast Bomber, be converted to carry all the cameras, film and other equipment that was needed for the specialist task of photo reconnaissance?