A Small War,Gallipoli 1915. He Who is Above Sees All: An Early Use of Aerial Photography in Terrain Analysis

Abstract

When Lord Kitchener ordered Sir Ian Hamilton in 1915 to command land operations on Gallipoli he gave him a solitary old One Inch map and denied him any air forces. When Winston Churchill had earlier sent the Royal Navy to break through to the Black Sea, he had ensured that the Royal Naval Division withdrawn from fighting on the Western Front was accompanied by a Naval Air Squadron as its forward reconnaissance element. Ernest Dowson, the Surveyor General of Egypt, appointed to provide local mapping support, soon convinced the Naval pilots of the value of air photography taken systematically to meet his map-making requirements. In September 1915 Dowson wrote a Secret technical report demonstrating for the first time to British Commanders the practicality of mapping from specified aeroplane photographs of the operational area.