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WW2 Aerial Photographs Go Online
aquarium writes "The Guardian Unlimited reports that unique aerial photographs of some of the key events of the Second World War are to be made available for the first time over the internet. The photographs are being made available through a website created by The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA) at Keele University - an official place of deposit for the National Archives at Kew, West London. The entire archive of more than five million aerial reconnaissance photographs, shot by the RAF over Western Europe during the conflict, is going online starting Monday. They include American troops landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, the seizure of the Pegasus bridge by British paratroops, the aftermath of the first 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne, and the German battleship Bismarck as the Royal Navy hunted her down. The multiple photographs taken by the high resolution cameras meant they were able to create 3-D images through an instrument called a "stereoscope". The technique was used to construct a detailed picture of the Normandy terrain ahead of the D-Day landings."
It is a device that is a more complex version of a 'View Master' toy. Take two images from different angles. Feed one image to the right eye and the other to the left. Performs amazingly well.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
According to the BBC, "The pictures will go online on Monday." In the meantime, you can see six of the pictures at the BBC News web site if you read the article "WWII archive photos go online".
Just so everyone knows, the website: (http://www.evidenceincamera.co.uk/) has not been slashdotted, it isn't online yet, I went there about 3 days ago and it was the exact same.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
And also remember when watching Private Ryan and Band of Brothers... (particularly) the British, and to a lesser extent Canada and Free French also fought and died while making spectacularly brave raids -- and much of the D-Day innovations and intellegence data was obtained/developed by the British. Not that Spielberg or Tom Hanks bothered to cover such things, it was just the good old boys of the USA who did everything.
Look up "genocide", asshat.
For those of you who didn't read the article, it says the archive will be opened on Monday. That's tomorrow. Don't get your knickers in a twist, just come back tomorrow and see it.
In this context it refers to how well you can tell two pieces of information apart at a distance (there's probably a correct definition, but I can't be bothered finding it).
dictionary.com: 6. The fineness of detail that can be distinguished in an image, as on a video display terminal.
Like a lot of other terms, the original meaning has been taken by computers and placed somewhat out of the context it was originally used for.
Best guess, its probably some old server on the end of a shared university 10mb line or something. JANET are going to be so pleased.
Don't be so certain, JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork, which links together UK universities) has a 10 Gbit/s backbone. That's a pretty fat pipe...
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
It isn't online until Monday!!!
Why the fuck can't you dickheads get that through your head?
Dude, you obviously know little about UXO. It may be one tool, but it is not reliable in making determinations about UXO. At best, this is a limited tool for only one source of UXO.
Most of the UXO they deal with in Europe is artillery shells and mines, and they do not have any kind of regular pattern.
Talk to one of the large group of Belgian engineers who are still disposing of it. And not just WWII aerial bombs, but artillery from BOTH World Wars. Including the gift that keeps on giving, chemical munitions. The mines were concealed in the first place.
Most UXO is found the old fashioned way -- farmers and construction workers who call it in.
Dresden was a strategic military target in so many ways that you dishonour the memory of your father with your pathetic revisionism.
Also I think you'll find that Britain dropped lots of those bombs too, not just the US.
Large scale terror bombing was invented by the Luftwaffe.
Presumably you don't put their raids in the same category as the US/UK raids on your father's home because the targets were mere untermenschen?
I'm glad your father died before he spawned more garbage like yourself.
> For those of you who have never seen "Saving
> Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers", I
> recommend them.
While I don't disagree with the sentiment of what you say, I wish those films were not so blatantly US-centric. Anyone watching them would be perfectly justified it concluding that America fought against the Axis powers alone and the Europeans and Anzacs had nothing to do with it.
And just to decimate my karma even more, I would remind anyone who is inclined to think of America as an unusually heroic military force that they have never won a significant military victory without superior numbers or equipment. I don't believe any other nation in history has that distinction.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Both the Poles and the British intercepted an Enigma machine. You can read the whole story on Wikipedia; in a nutshell: the Poles intercepted a commercial non-military version well before the start of the war. It was however close enough in construction to be useful in understanding how to decrypt Enigma's messages. In '39 the Germans started to use more advanced versions, and the Navy used even more advanced versions. Therefore the British tried (successfully) to capture a Navy version from a U-boat.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
For those who have never seen the results of a large (or even medium) format B&W camera you're in for a surprise - the grain size is smaller, the continuous tone is better (than color) and the results astounding.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
From the section asking if the bombing was justified:
One popular charge against the bombing is that the city was not a military target. However, other evidence suggests otherwise; The city contained the Zeiss-Ikon optical factory and the Siemens glass factory (both of which were entirely devoted to manufacturing military gunsights). The immediate suburbs contained factories building components of radars and electronics, and fuses for anti-aircraft shells. Other factories produced gas masks, engines for Junkers aircraft and cockpit parts for Messerschmitt fighters. After the attack, Germany was to claim that Dresden's industry was only making civil goods, a notion which much of the world accepted, and still accepts, as true.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We call this "pre-slashbombing" because hey --- none of us really read the articles and know that the server isn't really online! I'm sure the people over in the UK right now are just laughing their asses off looking at all the requests to the server and saying "Americans..."
One thing, it just moves me to look at that BBC picture of Auswitz with the smoke coming up and knowing what the smoke stack represents. Unbelievable. It just gives me a new respect for what those people really went through, and thanking my lucky stars I was born now and not then.
Parent post is that of a lying troll. 10 million German civilians were NOT killed in WWII. 780,000 WERE killed. Not even the German military lost 10 million.
As for Harris, whilst he may have gone too far in saying that he was targetting the German population, back then there wasn't really a choice. A city was the target of a raid because a city was the smallest target that could be hit. Even then, early in the war, many bombers missed entire cities.
Actually the attacks on civilian targets by both sides began with the accidental bombing of a british city by the germans, mistaking it for an airfield. Then the brits hit back and things escalated. The V2 wasn't used until the end of the war.
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
Bullshit!
Read your history on Poland, Latvia, Austria, Lithuania, and Romania.
(I'm not trying to start a flame war here. This is a list of countries where there was extensive collaboration with the Nazi policy of genocide against Jews and Gypsies. This is not to say that there weren't people in each of these countries who risked their lives to resist the Nazis and their policies.)
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
At 7.30pm this second wave of planes arrived and the first of 500 tons of high explosives began to shake the city centre. Incendiaries, both exploding and non-exploding, continued to fall amid the bombs as a continuous stream of droning bombers passed over the city. Some were aimed at industrial targets around the city but many others concentrated on bombing the centre of the city ... to create a firestorm.
The populace hid themselves in cellars, crypts and air raid shelters as the heart of the city was ripped apart above them. Others stayed in their homes, thousands of which were destroyed or damaged. The bombing continued, with the addition of oil and landmines.
The landmines were particularly notorious. They took form of a large metal box suspended by a parachute which would slowly and silently fall and explode above ground level with a deafening roar totally flattening anything that lay under it. The church of St Nicholas in Radford was destroyed by one of these landmines leaving dead and injured in the crypt and only one course of stones standing.
Just because the Germans were not quite as adapt at killing cilvilians does not mean they were not targeting them - you are implying the sort of smart-targeting in existance today but there was nothing of the sort back then.
I am not sayng the the firebombing was a good idea, only that there was some military presence there (as there was in most any city of size in Germany) and this confuses the issue quite a bit more than your "revisionist history" comment would lead one to believe.
I am half German myself and feel quite strongly that despite things like the Dresden firebombing, Germany was doing much worse things overall. Although not that many were killed in the Blitz, you forget that Hitler was fighting multiple countries and using similar civilian demoralizing tactitcs on everyone. They were just spread around more.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh gee, don't anyone mention Hiroshima.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
It first occured while neo-cons were in power so it must be an absolutely awful idea.
Actually, "shock and awe" is the logical and moral successor of the Geman Blitz. So the neo-cons didn't invent it, they just followed the lead of the Nazis.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
By design and by capability, Japan's war production was distributed into a huge number of small shops, the Japanese military leaders feeling this method would blunt any attempt at effective strategic bombing by the US. Up until January 1945, they were right.
Curtis Lemay had been working the 8th Air Force in England during 1942-43, and then sent to the Pacific theater in July 1944, rising to head the 21st Bomber Command in January 1945. Using what he had learned from the Brits in England, he proceded to fire bomb Japanese cities into ashes. On March 9-10, 1945 the firebombing of Tokyo killed 110,000 people, far more than either atomic weapon did.
He went on to lead the Berlin Airlift, and to head the Strategic Air Command from 1949 to 1957, becoming Air Force Chief of Staff in 1961. He also was George Wallace's running mate in 1968.
On chemical weapons in the rockets.
It would have been very costly to the Germans to do that.
Say in July 1944 had the V1s and later on V2s been equiped with chemical weapons it might have killed...twice as many British citizens as the conventional warheads did, seeing as a V weapon's warhead was 1,870 pounds in the V-1 and 2,000 pounds in a V-2.
http://www.ww2guide.com/vweapon.shtml
V-1 Number lauched: 10,000 against the UK, 12,000 against Western Europe (up to 18,000 V-1s launched total.)
V-2s - 1,120 were launched against England (1,050 actually impacting the ground in that country )
"About 4,320 V-2 rockets were fired by March 27, 1945 with another 600 expended in training which mainly took place near Blizna, Poland."
"The total bomb tonnage for the Second World War dropped by both the RAF and the 8th and 15th Air Forces in Europe on Germany totalled 1,234,767 tons of bombs more than 60 percent of which were dropped between July 1944 and April 1945."
I don't disagree that the fire bombing of Dresden was an atrocity, but when Germany began bombing London, Britain was by no means able to defend itself
At the start of the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe had 3000 planes within range of southern England, the RAF had 1200 planes for defense. At this point, pilots in the RAF were sent into combat roughly 4 weeks after first stepping into a plane. The Luftwaffe could put about 1600 planes in the air every day, more than the entire RAF even owned, the RAF could put 650-700 planes up if needed, although the bare minimum had to be scrambled to keep the reserves strong. The Luftwaffe began the campaign by targeting front line fighter fields and at the rate the bombers were coming in, ground crews simply could not keep runways operational. Had the battle continued as it was, the RAF would have been decimated within weeks.
The twist however came when an RAF bomber squadron lost their way over Germany and reportedly bombed the outskirts of a major German city by accident. This enraged Hitler who immediately ordered ALL bombers to target London. This single command allowed the RAF to repair the runways and get their planes in the air, and it also meant that they knew where every single German plane was going to. Had Hitler not given that one command, it is likely that the RAF would have fallen in 2-3 weeks, German landing forces would cross the channel before winter set in and Britain too would have fallen. Had this happened, the US would not have been able to get involved and the world today would be a different place.
I am British and I am not proud of Dresden, I know that I most likely would not be writing this today if it wasn't for the US and Russian forces, but personally I have the greatest amount of respect for the pilots of the Battle of Britain who were willing to face such over-whelming odds against an airforce that had already stormed through Europe and barely stopped for breath, yet they stood up to them and in the end did what was needed of them.
On the other side of the globe at the time, an out numbered and out gunned US Navy and Marine Corps defeated the other third of the Axis powers: Japan. The most critical battle of the war, Midway, the US Carrier fleet out numbered 3:4 by Japan's Carrier fleet, and about 5:1 with the respect to the rest of their fleet. Yet the US pulled out a victory. One of the US carriers, the Yorktown I do beleive, had barely limped into Pearl Harbor, had three months worth of repair work slapped on in 48 hours, and had been thrown into the fray. As horrible as the battles of Iwo Jima was, the US inflicted a 3:1 kill to loss ratio on the defenders.
Against Japan, the US forces held their own despite the fact that the Pacific theatre had taken a back seat to the European theatre until Germany had been defeated.
There might be a statue, and of recent vintage (1992), but Harris was a controversial figure even during the conflict with many questions in Parliament and from the church about the area bombing strategy.
Here's a letter Churchill nearly sent at the time, saying that he wanted no more "wanton destruction". Not that his position is exactly uncontroversial either, hence this National Archives topic.
PS Regarding the church position, my father remembers reading comment in newspapers from a Canon Bell condemning area bombing, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be any record of this books I've read, or on the net.
The Luftwaffe could put about 1600 planes in the air every day, more than the entire RAF even owned
Yeah, but the british fighters had more effective airtime. The german fighters could only stay over London for 10 minutes before they had to go home for fuel.
The Typhoon, and its successor the Tempest, were also prop fighters. The first British get was the Gloster Meteor.
I watched an article on this on the news last night, and they indeed showed aerial pictures of the Dresden firebombing, as well as D-Day, Pegasus Bridge and many other photos.
;) Seems I was right....
I commented then to my wife that if Slashdot posted it, no one would see it until next week
Incidentally it was interesting to see the Pegasus Bridge photo as I had not too recently played that level in Call of Duty!
Visceral Psyche Films
Read your history on Poland, Latvia, Austria, Lithuania, and Romania.
As well as Hungary.
(I'm not trying to start a flame war here. This is a list of countries where there was extensive collaboration with the Nazi policy of genocide against Jews and Gypsies.
In several cases the collaboration involved members of the ethnic groups being attacked.
This is not to say that there weren't people in each of these countries who risked their lives to resist the Nazis and their policies.)
Even over 60 years on parts of the history of the Second World War are parts of myth pushed by vocal and powerful contempoary political groups.
This includes many of the "racial purity" policies of the Nazis, even to the point where several countries have laws against questioning popular dogma. Even by historians and acheologists.
As I saw on a Channel 4 (UK) Docu last night, the US also used firebombing techniques against Japan.
100,000 were killed in one raid on Tokyo.
See Bombing of Tokyo in World War II.
Why didn't the Germans use chemical weapons in their V1s and V2s?
Chemical weapons were never considered by Hitler because he was actually a victim of a gas attack in World War I, when he was fighting for the Germans. After that, he temporarily lost his eyesight, and regained it after two weeks being blind. During the rest of his life, he always had health problems and a lot of long-term after-effects caused by the gas.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.