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?
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.
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.)
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.
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
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.