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."
Believe it or not, Roald Dahl, the slightly scary looking and GREAT writer of childrens novels was awarded the international aerial photography award during the Second World War for taking highly detailed shots of the Gaza Strip, Crete Gardens and perhaps most famously, the Great Pyramids... he later detailed these flights in his biography
I have a remarkable print upon my wall of these black and white photos, clear, amazing for the time and look almost isometric, perfect angle shots
Not bad for a man who wrote about a "cunning" fox
Kudos
Well the TARA archive is already slashdotted...
But I'm most interested in getting answers to these questions --
-- What's the license/use/citation policy? e.g. Can I make prints?
-- Can I buy/license a copy of the entire archive? (Perhaps loaded onto one of these).
does germany have pictures of the nazis bombing london?
This site was already playing up a few days ago when I looked at it. Its the Public Records Office all over again.
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.
I expect the war games people will have a field day with all this stuff.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
For those of you who have never seen "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers", I recommend them.
And for those of you who haven't seen U-571, don't bother. Whoever was responsible in portraying the capture of an Enigma machine as the work of the USA, when it was in fact done by Brits aboard HMS Aubretia, should be shot. If you weren't aware of this pretty-insensitive reworking of history, you can read about the fuss it caused here
Let's give credit where credit is due; WWII wouldn't have been won on the Western Front without the USA; but the Brits held out for a couple of years against the greatest military in the world, and were instrumental in defeating the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. That shouldn't be taken away from them.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
This was linked to on Fark early this morning, hence the slashdot effect actually happened prior to it appearing on slashdot.
This would be truly amazing (especially for WW2 history buffs) since the only images ever seen of the conflict from non-participants have always been from a first-person cameraman (possibly staged) perspective (or fighter/bomber cams).
I want to see the Russian move into Berlin from above.
What will be the resolution of these photos?
These pics could be useful for people who want to check for unexploded bombs. If you see a line of craters with a gap, the gap is likely as not the location where one fell into the earth and didn't go off. So if they include the results of bombing runs, it could be useful.
I had a friend who did this, inspecting WW2 photos for signs of unexploded bombs for property companies.
A few months ago i had my senior pictures taken by this little old guy with a terrible tupee, but while he was setting up his equiptment he was telling me about how after high school(he graduated from the same school as me) he joined the navy as an ariel photographer for the pacific campaign. I guess he flew missions for mapping iwo jima and a few other of the key islands. It was interesting to hear about to say the least, to bad this is /.d, but form the other posts i assume its all european photos.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Good question there... You can find pictures of Darmstadt which was bombed as a preparation for Desden, home of the famous Dresden technique where incendiary bombs are thrown in a way that would raise the temperature so the rest of the city can burn and suffocate. Aka the shoehorn technique.
Why have you been ranked "flamebait" (flame? did someone say flame?) while 10 million civilian Germans were killed that way and countless Japanese children too I do not know.
Probably because we are a few, ex Allied or ex Axis countries decendants, who have taken the trouble of verifying historical facts and get both sides of the story. My own history books never mentioned all the civilian bombings, they mentioned Hiroshima, Nagasaki but they never did mention Kobe and the fact that regular bombings did more victims than the A bomb everyone talks about when they try to sound informed. We were never asked to read The Graveyard of The Fireflies (or watch the modern animation). Now that would tell us a bit more about WWII's reality.
I think those who did live it aren't too proud (my own stepd dad being a B-24 flight engineer) and those who were on the receiving end never had a voice... Because it doesn't look too good.
Remember, we were the GOOD ones. If we did look bad, it meant the commies were the good ones, so that simply had to go.
Well, I want to thank you for having the courage to stand up and reminding us what good it actualy was. I hope that instead of replying to this post and yours in hatred, people just start wondering "What the fuck are you two talkign about" and double check any points made here on the Internet. That in itself would be a heck of a victory.
Just to be sure, the site is not responding, but is it actually because of a /.'ing? In a different article I read about this, it said the site will nt be up until Monday, and because of that, it was not responding when I tried to access it yesterday.
Just pointing something out here... Most of these movies are made in "Hollywood", in the USA. For what? Entertainment. Movies are made for a particular audience, and since these movies were made in the USA, they were meant to to entertain, install pride, and patriotism of into the American Viewers... If a movie is made in any other country, who do they concentrate on? Then do the same. Because the USA filmmaking industry is so big, many films go out to other countries for their entertainment value, and thus are going out beyond the target audience. Some appreciate the origin of the movies, and the intended audience, and some just whine about it. If I saw a movie from Japan, I would expect to see if glorifying their history and/or culture. Same with any other country. If people want to see facts, they watch a documentary. If they want to watch something entertaining, that leaves them with a sense of pride and patriotism, they watch a movie. That said... If you do not like the way events are slanted in a movie about WWII, then watch something out of your own country. That said, I know that the winning of WWII was in a very large part due to the British that fought and died as much as it was by Americans... The thing to remember is that Britain was a smaller nation, and yet was able to hold the Germans off for a very long time... Besides the revolutionary war, and that pesky war of 1812, Britain has long been an close ally. I have great respect for the people there, and their contributions to the world. Not that I usually hold a grudge, but I cannot say the same for certain other unnamed french and german countries... :P (Yeah, I still sore about the war. I'll get over it.)
Those acts were horrific but they were carried out with the intent of shortening the war by breaking the morale of those civilians and others in other German towns and cities who heard about them.
Many hundreds of thousands of civilians were indeed killed by those raids, but during the day those same "innocent civilians" were out making bombs, planes and tanks in Germany's armament factories. Pretty much all males in Germany from age 14 upwards (though much less so females), including millions of slave labourers impotred from the occupied countries, spent their entire days directly supporting Germany's war effort. Bombing them was a valid action of war that resulted in a lower overall loss of life. And no matter how you cut it, given that the Germans started the whole thing off, it was better to kill them than be killed by them.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
Let's give credit where credit is due; WWII wouldn't have been won on the Western Front without the USA; but the Brits held out for a couple of years against the greatest military in the world, and were instrumental in defeating the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. That shouldn't be taken away from them.
While we are handing out credit for the victory in WW2, let's not forget about our friends, the Russians. The Russians fought the brunt of the German war machine, and wore them down through sheer attrition. I don't recall the exact number of Russian war dead, but it ranges in the millions. If the Western Allies had to face the main core of the German army, I don't know if we would have won.
The German army was so strung out by the time of D-Day that they had to resort to conscripting men from many of their Eastern European conquests (Russians, Poles). It was these men who manned the beaches of Normandy, by and large, on D-Day. There is even a story about how the Allies captured a group of soliders from the Far East (Korea, I believe). It turned out that they had been conscripted in the Russian army to fight the Germans, captured by the Germans, and then conscripted into the German army! Other than the German officer pointing a Luger at them from behind, they were not very motivated to fight in this battle.
If you are interested in learning more about the contributions of the US during WWII, I urge you to read _D-Day_ and _Citizen Soldier_ by the late Steven Ambrose (the same historian who wrote the book _Band of Brothers_ on which the mini-series is based). If you want more insight into the Russian Front, a good book to read is _Stalingrad_ by Anthony Beevor. While this book doesn't cover the whole Eastern campaign, it does give a lot of insight into the brutality of the fighting on the Eastern Front. While the Germans and the Western Allies were at war with one another, there was a great deal of respect between the grunts on both sides. However, the Germans and Russians absolutely hated each other, which made for brutal fighting conditions, the likes of which were rarely seen on the Western Front.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
As a former student of the University of Keele, I am shocked and stunned that the place is actually home to something interesting! For those who've never been, Keele is a village on top of a hill with a University which was built on the land of an old RAF site, hence the link with Kew in this case I would guess. It's not exactly the centre of the universe. Other features of note include a nearby motorway services and the fact that it was where 'A very peculiar practice' http://www.phill.co.uk/comedy/practice/ was filmed (starring Peter Davison, later of Dr Who fame).
Remind me once again, who declared war on who first? I think you'll find that Germany declared war on the US first. And Germany was the nation that started the bombings of civilian targets with their campaign on London.
-Cnik
Sorry guy, but war is hell to quote a popular phrase. Is sad that we don't use that technique anymore. If we beat the iraqis like we beat the Germans in WWII then we would not have 500 Americans dead in iraq right now.
The problem with the iraqis is they don't know they lost the war. The nazis knew they had their ass handed to them. Ditto for the japs. That is why they were so eager for peace.
Dunkirk was a victory...
Put it this way, the French lines collapse and the Belgians surrender. You've got nobody defending your flanks, and Germans are pouring thru and attacking from behind. Getting any troops out is great, getting the bulk of your army away to fight another day is amazing.
I'm an American (family arrived well before the Declaration of Indenpendence even), but my fellow Americans here who speak so boldly about German atrocities against England, or make comments like "war is hell" with regard to American strikes against places like Dresden, are sadly lacking a good understanding of history. I can't blame them though, as American history texts have a very different view of the war than those found in Europe.
Having studied in Germany for a while, I can assure my fellow countrymen that you have no idea just how appalling it is what we did to Germany.
Yes, what the Germans did to London was very, very bad. Inexcusable. But, they really just targetted London. The RAF was also quite able to defend the country.
By the time the allies started bombing Germany, the Luftwaffe was already a wreck, completely unable to function. England suffered in London, but Germany suffered in Frankfurt, Muenchen, Berlin, Hamburg, and so on. Basically, every major city in Germany was levelled. Even many minor cities that just happened to be in the flight path of American bombers. A prime example of this is Muenster, where I studied. The only thing there is a nice university and a bunch of college kids, but it is the last/first city you come to on the border if you are flying from England. It was levelled just because it was a convenient place to drop bombs. As I mention above, by the time most of these bombing raids were occuring against Germany, the war was lost for them anyway, making the raids purely gratuitous.
To this day, if you are doing any kind of construction in Germany, you have to hire a crew to come out and look for old unexploded bombs. Most Americans really don't understand that Dresden (as just one example of atrocity) was completely non-military. Some sources even indicate that many of the refugees probably weren't even Germans, but rather eastern europeans who were fleeing the Russians coming from the east.
Then there is that matter of the 50 years of occupation after the war by the Russians that was allowed, even encouraged by the allies. Even though Germany is a united country now, its borders were shrunk significantly by the Russians - where Poland is today used to be a major German state, and historically, Poland was farther to the east. The allies let all this happen, because they wanted to turn Germany into a minor agricultural state.
Much of the intrigue of the war was the training ground for later US foreign policy "techniques" in places around the world. We like to keep countries down in remarkable ways. In fact, it is quite appalling to watch what America is doing in Iraq right now, as it is basically the same kind of model we tried in Japan and Germany. Germans today hate our guts (as they should), and it is likely we will fail with Iraq due to the same mistakes we have perpetually made elsewhere. Unfortunately, we are poor students of history.
I am constantly amazed by even my educated American friends who still feel that Germans "aren't sorry enough for the war." This is as silly as calling the French "surrender monekys." Remarks like these just make it that much clearer how little of European history and European affairs Americans understand. What's perhaps even more appaling, is that even after being involved in two european wars, and claiming to be allied with european powers since that time, Americans (especially our governemnt)*still* have no concept of these things.
i was there three days ago and there was a nice "shop" button on the menu,the site was dead then as the whole worlds media has been pluggin this all week.
UK isn't like USA where all goverment data is free, (even though it was our taxes that payed for the data and in this case people died grrr)
so i expect we (and everyone else) will have to pay to view them just like we did with the 1800 national census, we can't even get friggin weather data without paying for it, so ironicly we (us cheapo web developers) have to get it from the USA
FFM
You took a rather odd view of Canada's involvement
As a Canadian, I tend to downplay my own importance and that of my country. What won WW2 was massive force supplied by our neighbours to the south.
We *were* a formidable force at that time because it was needed then, but now we are only known as Peacekeepers and world-class snipers (and maybe comedians). I don't speak for all Canucks, but I think we like it that way.
How about dynamically generated content in message postings that indicates if the target URL is responding ?