Crowd Sourcing World War II: The Normandy Photo Contest

The Military Intelligence required to land on the beaches of Normandy France in 1944 was massive. And while Allied Forces were up to the task in gathering terrain maps, soil samples and German defensive positions, a TON of valuable information was gained through a BBC Photography contest and photos submitted by the public. In this episode, we talk about different types of intelligence gathering, how they’re used in modern warfare, and this ingenious idea for gaining information that helped plan the landings on D-Day. Then we chat with Comedian and podcast regular, Jay Black!

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A major part of war is intelligence gathering. And this falls into a few different categories. One of them is signals intelligence. This is the stuff you think of when you think of military intelligence. It includes monitoring radio, internet and telephone traffic. Intercepting text messages, online chatter and things like that. But it also includes decrypting official military communications from other militaries and tracking vehicle movements and radar signatures.

But that’s not all there is to the intelligence world. There’s also reconnaissance and surveillance. This is usually the type of intelligence gathering that includes aerial photos from spy planes, drones and satellites. But it could just as easily include photographs from the ground. An offshoot of this is geographic and environmental intelligence, which is mapping out terrain and soil types, but also weather patterns, tides, and vegetation. 

There’s human intelligence – this is basically what we refer to as spies but also could include getting intel from civilians or captured enemy combatants. 

And finally – there’s open-source intelligence. This is using available public information in order to inform our military of what they need to know before going into an area. For instance, checking newspapers, public photographs and social media as well as monitoring the movement of civilians. 

All of these things are used together in order to learn about your adversaries, and we’re seeing it in real time with a couple current conflicts. The ones I really want to focus on are the combination of human intelligence and open source intelligence. Because social media has caused a confluence of these two things. People put personal stuff online and that information becomes public. Our current military members are trained to be aware of the things they put online for this very reason. Each branch has their own training protocol and they all revolve around protecting sensitive information like locations, names, military equipment and movements.

In the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Open-Source Intelligence analysts and government agencies have used satellite images, social media photos, and videos to track Russian troop movements and equipment locations. The Ukrainian government and allied groups have leveraged geotagged social media photos to pinpoint and target Russian positions. This not only helps Ukraine learn about troop positions, but also the types of equipment in those locations. This was especially true during the 2014 invasion of Crimea, when intel was leaked to Ukraine because Russian soldiers had shared photos and videos without turning off their location services on their phones.

In the Syrian Civil War, governments used social media photos and videos to track the online activities of ISIS recruits and sympathizers. These materials often revealed locations and plans. There’s also the case of photos and videos uploaded by activists and civilians being used to verify the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Today’s story is about the use of human and open-source intelligence during World War II – long before social media. And it was actually supplied by the public.

In World War II, the Allies were suffering heavy losses for the first couple years of the war and it wasn’t looking good. Things started turning in early 1943. The German forces had suffered horrible losses on the Eastern front and Mussolini’s government collapsed in Italy. The Allied invasion of France – known during the planning as it’s secret code-name Operation Overlord, was starting to be planned early in 1943 and it really required a huge effort by the Allied intelligences agencies. These would have been Britain’s MI6, and the American OSS, which was sort of a precursor to the CIA. There were other smaller agencies and groups involved, but these were the two main agencies responsible for gathering intelligence and planning the invasion, which we now know as D-Day or the Invasion of Normandy which happened in June of 1944. 

Normandy was chosen as the location because of its strategic location and weaker German defenses. And part of this intelligence was creating an entire web of deception to trick the Germans into thinking we were landing somewhere else. If you want to know more about that, research Operation Bodyguard, which is a CRAZY story and one too detailed to get into here. It could be its own episode, but it’s been covered by so many other people – just look into it. It’s a pretty crazy story. But before this huge amphibious assault – which was the largest ever in history – could take place, the armies and navies needed to know as much as they could about the terrain of the landing site. 

Think about it – if a bunch of Americans or British started showing up and surveying the ground in Germany-occupied France, it would send off all the red flags that maybe this would be the landing location. So how did they get all of their intel?

They needed to know the layout of the land, the soil and sand density, the tide tables, and where ideal locations for German fortifications would be. This is where we come back to the different types of intelligence gathering we discussed before the break. Aerial photography was used by the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces. Covert agencies worked with French resistance fighters to gain intel on the ground like supply lines, German troop movements and weak points in their defenses. Allied submarines patrolled the coast line from a distance and divers were able to gather soil samples. 

But a huge – and I mean HUGE effort was made through a diabolical plot. They wanted photographs. The pictures they collected from tourist guide books and pre-war maps were great, but only showed so much. In order to piece together a complete picture of the beaches, MI6 and the Allied Naval forces turned to the BBC. 

In March of 1942, this effort had already started – before the official planning of the Normandy invasion had even began. Director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, had gone on BBC and asked for people to send in their photographs and postcards of Europe that they had taken on vacation. Of particular importance to the Navy were pictures taken on Europe’s beaches – from the Pyrenees in the West to Norway in the East. They didn’t ask for photos from particular locations, but just asked for their beach photos and where they were taken, and the entire thing was framed as a photo contest. Hundreds of thousands of entries were immediately mailed in. They were photos of landscapes, photos of a toddler sitting on the beach, photos of a couple kissing next to a stream, and postcards they’d collected on their holiday vacations. 

By 1944, more than 10 million photographs had been collected and analyzed. They would look at the photo of the toddler and be able to see in the background how the beach sloped and dropped off into the ocean behind him. Or how the foliage hid the road behind the photo of the couple kissing. These photos were used extensively during the planning of Operation Overlord and map and 3D model makers used them to determine exactly where the Allied Forces would be able to focus and where paratroopers would need to land. 

It was an ingenious combination of Open-Source and Human-Intelligence that absolutely helped guide the successful invasion of Normandy’s beaches on D-Day. It was a deadly day – don’t get me wrong. D-Day was deadly, with over 10,000 Allied casualties, including more than 4,000 deaths, as troops faced fierce German resistance, fortified defenses, and rough conditions on the beaches of Normandy. It was a success because meticulous planning, overwhelming Allied air and naval support, and the sheer determination of the soldiers overwhelmed German defenses, securing a vital foothold in Europe and marking the beginning of Nazi Germany’s defeat. Those millions of photos sent in to the BBC marked a huge civilian effort in the landing. It was a 1940s version of Ukraine troops searching through geolocated Instagram photos. And it was all free and cost the Allies no dangerous spy missions.  

World War II was won with a combined 50 million soldiers in the Allied Forces. But supporting those forces were the civilians of those nations. They helped by joining resistance movements in Europe. They manufactured war-fighting equipment at production rates that the world had never seen. They raised money, war bonds and took part in rationing. And by supplying their old vacation photos, their direct contributions to the intelligence gathering was absolutely invaluable in helping the Allies win the war. The Internet Says it’s True.

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Forgotten history, bizarre tales & facts that seem too strange to be true! Host Michael Kent asks listeners to tell him something strange, bizarre or surprising that they've recently learned and he gets to the bottom of it! Every episode ends by playing a gameshow-style quiz game with a celebrity guest. Part of the WCBE Podcast Experience.

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