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                                    137activities of the Wellington, in the main, the theme reflects thedevelopment of the various PR versions of the Spitfire, culminating inthe Mk XIX of late-1944 which could take pictures from altitudes inexcess of 40,000 feet of objectives that were 700 miles from base and, solong as the pilot saw it coming, avoid the attentions of any enemyfighter, even including the Me 262. As the author explains, the evolutionof cameras and film stock kept pace with these developments in aircraftperformance and the ever-increasing height from which pictures werebeing taken was offset by the introduction of lenses of ever-increasingfocal length, so that there was no loss of, indeed there was a steadyimprovement in, discrimination.While it is relatively brief, compared, for instance, to the account inthe book reviewed above, Dr Price%u2019s concise sixteen-page essay is morethan adequate for its purpose. But this is a book about pictures, ratherthan words and I counted 173 of them. There are photographs of Germanairfields and industrial sites before and after they had been veryconvincingly camouflaged, of targets before and after (and sometimeswhile) being bombed, of the D-Day landings, of broken bridges, ofairfields under construction, of shipping under attack, of major navalvessels in dock and so on. Since all of these pictures will, by definition,have been published before (some of them several times) some mayseem quite familiar but the sense of d%u00e9ja vu is countered by the veryinformative captions. I spotted only two minor problems; I was unable tofind the He 111Z to which one%u2019s attention is drawn in the photograph onpage 89 (unless it is the wingtip just protruding into the bottom of theframe %u2013 I suspect that the picture has been cropped a little too tightly),and the identities of the two aeroplane types noted in the photograph onpage 91 have been transposed, ie the Savoia SM 81 is an SM 82 and viceversa. Some of the photographs serve to illustrate tricks of theinterpreter%u2019s trade and there is a particularly good example of the way inwhich a low sun can cast a shadow revealing the profile of an objectivethat had been very successfully camouflaged against observation fromdirectly above. Similarly, there are interesting pictures that reveal thepresence of V-1 launch sites, the tell tale signs being the skid marks andcraters left by doodlebugs that failed to get airborne, and another thatshows how it was possible to distinguish between a real, butcamouflaged, river crossing and a more obvious dummy.There is no pretence at profundity here, the succinct text sets out to
                                
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