Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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.