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).
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
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.
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
"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"
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.