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."
Aerial photographs of their servers being "slashbombed" and crashing in flames.
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
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
But seriously, the archive sounds like a great idea. There should be more historical material of this sort accessible online.
Will they also have pictures of the devastated dresden after they bombed the city center crowded with hundreds of thousands civilian refugees and no military targets in sight?
...more people understand what a tremndously heroic thing all those soldiers did can only be a good thing.
For those of you who have never seen "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers", I recommend them. Remember, freedom comes at a price, and we should all be very thankful to all those who have paid it, and one way is by learning about, and appreciating the sacrifices made. As this archive will only further add to our accuracy or the historical events, this can only be a Good Thing.
libertarianswag.com
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).
I think the server hosting the pictures was from Second World War too...
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Great, now we've Slashdotted the Second World War. Do you have any idea what we might have done to history? Doesn't anyone watch quality movies like Timeline anymore?
Sailing over the event horizon
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
There's a reason they use AC for their trolling: being cowards, they prefer anonymity.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
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 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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Never has so much bandwidth been sought by so many, from so few.
He who fights with Monkeys must take it upon himself not to become a Monkey.
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
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
"He started it" carries a lot of weight when Western civilization is at stake.
If the Germans had not placed Hitler in power, if the Germans had not sustained him in power, if Hitler had not plunged Europe into a war of conquest and genocide, then not a single Allied bomb would have ever fallen on German territory.
To use another cliche, you reap what you sow.
Hitler and the other fascists, including those ruling Japan, had to be stopped, at any cost. The cost of defeat was unthinkable.
Trying to take the moral high ground in war is pointless. Death is death, regardless of motive. But, that is no reason to avoid fighting to win.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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.
"They committed senseless crimes, so we responded the same way" - this is pretty lousy argument if you think about it for a second.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
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.
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
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
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
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.