Amazing aerial images from WWII

[pokerfan]

By David Wilkes
23rd November 2009

The detail is astonishing. At first it looks like just another castle surrounded by tiny houses and neat fields. But zooming in on the courtyard one can see figures milling around.

They are in fact Allied officers being held in the notorious German PoW camp of Colditz and the photograph is one from an archive of aerial photographs taken by airmen - sometimes flying as low as 50ft - during secret reconnaissance missions in World War II.

Until now the pictures have been kept behind closed doors. But they are revealed to the public for the first time today via the internet amid a painstaking cataloguing process.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1230025/Google-Earth-Second-World-War-Amazing-aerial-images-taken-daring-Allies-revealed-Hitlers-weapons.html

[proteus_lives]

1. Those are amazing!

We still have so much to learn from WWII.

[pokerfan]

2. Escaping Colditz

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/naziprison/colditz.html

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Thanks and remember many allied pilots died doing this

[cowcommander]

4. Casualty rates were horrendous for our pilots

It was a terrible war.

[phasma ex machina]

5. A WWII pilot acquaintance of mine lost half his B-17 crew and spent years in a POW camp.

He said that flak sounded like gravel thrown up against the underside of the plane. The powers that be picked him as pilot because of his innate ability to maintain a fixed distance between his plane and the plane in front of him.

IMNSHO America designed facilities such as Willow Run to manufacture planes faster than the Axis powers could shoot them down. In other words, both plane and crew were considered expendable.

[pokerfan]

7. I read somewhere (Ambrose D-Day I think)

that just in the weeks leading up to the Normandy invasion the Allies lost 1,000 craft and 10,000 airmen in strategic bombing campaigns.

[slampoet]

6. I have seen one of the cameras they used. It's about the size of a 30 pound turkey.

and they shot from very high in the air also. The vet who had the camera showed me the fur Parka he also wore when flying up high in the cold air.