RAF Photographic Reconnaissance Unit

Deirdre Costigan Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of the RAF Photographic Reconnaissance Unit during the Second World War.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I begin by placing on record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for granting me this debate, and for its flexibility in allowing me to move the debate from the previous date to accommodate my recent compassionate leave.

I am especially proud, as the daughter of a second world war veteran, to open this debate, and I am honoured to do so on the 80th anniversary of the end of that global conflict. As this is the second debate on the national monument for individuals who served in the RAF reconnaissance units during the second world war, I wish to use this opportunity to update the record on the progress that has been made on this campaign, and to highlight how the Minister might help to further bolster its incredible ambition.

Since 2019, the Spitfire AA810 project has sought to achieve recognition of the work carried out by members of the Royal Air Force more than 80 years ago. Indeed, it has taken the project more than six years to locate and access, where available, the official records to build a measured picture of exactly how important their work was. The unarmed reconnaissance units and squadrons were formed in 1939, and their work would play a vital part in every single theatre of allied operations in the second world war. Every invasion, every operation and every tactical decision taken by the allied supreme command substantially used the intelligence brought back by these young airmen, the fewest of Churchill’s few. The secret war—a spies in the skies war—was carried out from just a handful of bases, their work largely unspoken. The photographic intelligence team supporting them—men and women from a variety of backgrounds—worked hidden away in requisitioned homes. Their work, too, is set to be recognised for the first time, and I shall cover that later in this speech.

By the end of the war, those young airmen had delivered some 26 million photographs—all compiled, categorised, analysed and reported on within 24 hours of the aircraft returning to the UK—intelligence from which would arrive not far from this place in the then Cabinet war rooms below the Treasury. With decades of hindsight, experts now recognise that aerial photography produced some 80% of the intelligence used for the strategic planning of the allied tactical campaign. Supported by Enigma decoding and the work of the Special Operations Executive in occupied enemy territory, the efforts of these men and women considerably shortened the war, saving hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of lives. Therefore, those of us who, like me, are direct descendants of second world war veterans owe a particular debt of thanks to the airmen of the photographic reconnaissance unit, because without their work, our fathers and grandfathers would literally have been advancing into the unknown.

With the war over, a new cold war era was coming. Intelligence developments would remain secret, the work pioneered by these individuals hushed up in a wider world of uncertainty. But who were these people and how do we recognise them, for there were not many?

In the early days of the campaign, it was found that the records of those who served had never been collated. By searching the orders of battle to identify the units tasked with that vital work, it was possible to access those individuals’ public operations record books and begin the painstaking work of piecing together and cross-referencing the names of all who had served. From those pages grew a list of names, but they were names without a story. It has been a mammoth effort for nearly six years for the team to find out who those people were, where they had come from, and importantly, what happened to them. To date, 1,747 names have been identified as eligible for inclusion on the monument, but publicly accessible records have enabled the fate of only 1,408 of them to be confirmed. It is also worth noting that as research has continued over the years, the death rate percentage has fluctuated as more information has become available. Nonetheless, it has remained stubbornly in the mid-40% range for some time now.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate, at which many of us are here to support her. Two of the names on that list of 1,747 people are from my constituency of Ealing Southall, including Warrant Officer Mervyn Harris, who was reported missing in action in June 1945, just before the end of the war. His body was never found. Sergeant Frank Bastard, from Chandos Avenue in Northfields, survived the war and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for flying after a pilot was injured. Warrant Officer Harris has a local memorial at the NatWest bank in Southhall, where he used to work. Does my hon. Friend agree that, although local monuments are a great thing, we need a national monument to properly recognise those people’s sacrifice?

[Ms Minns]

I completely concur, and I am delighted that we are here today talking about just such a national monument.

Tragically, the project has been able to confirm that 629 of those men— representing 45% of those who could be found—were casualties. Of those who were killed, a third are still missing in action to this day. As they flew solo over great distances, with instruments such as radios having been removed to improve the aircraft’s range, we simply do not know where they went down.