Internet History: Google Earth's WWII aerial images
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Independent Minds
IN pictures: WWII aerial photographs
Aerial photographs of European cities during World War II have been made available on Google Earth, giving internet users a real glimpse of the smashed-up landscape of war.
Taken between 1935 and 1945, the snaps record a series of chilling views: Warsaw’s ghetto and bombed-out old town; the decimated Renaissance bridge in Florence; and bomb craters in Berlin.
The Royal Air Force and United States Air Force took the photographs, primarily for reconnaissance but also for post-bombing damage assessment, and the images were then stitched together by hand and kept as a record of the devastation.
Images of the 39 cities can now be compared with modern day Google Earth pictures, charting what a spokesperson for the Historic Centre of Warsaw described as “a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to th 20th Century”.
“[The images] remind us all of the devastating impact of war on the people in those cities and also the remarkable way in which urban environments are reconstructed and regenerated over time,” remarked Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist.
You can access the images by downloading Google Earth. Or you can look at a selection of stills of the cities with accompanying modern day images by clicking on the image or the link below.
Click here or on the image to view
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Comments
http://www.ovimapsexplorer.com/europe/b
It won't be long before veterans of WWII are gone too. Anything that helps us remember not to forget is worthy of praise, IMO.
I cant help thinking that assuming I had still been born, my life might not be that different now, after all the war was 70 years ago Hitler would now be long gone leaving a strong socialist government behind and it's hard to believe his successors could be nearly quite as bad. After all how come we've knocked Germany off its pedestal twice and yet it has still managed to clamber back up to become one of the most liberal and greatest industrial power houses in europe and exports more in monetary terms than even China?
We have to remember that we didn't think much to the ethnic cleansing and slave driving of the barbarous Romans 2000 years ago but now admire and joke about the many things they did for us.
It is preached in schools and on many documentaries that we should respect and be grateful for the soldiers that fought and died for us in WWII but the truth is, brave as they were, they weren't fighting for us but for themselves, their families and their political beliefs and although it may sound awful I personally don't have much to thank them for since they did no more than anyone else would do in the same situation. Don't get me wrong I'm not going to start urinating up war memorials but I think people need to look at the world post WWII and realise it's no bed of roses and that there isn't many people who deserve much thanks for it.
Although in Britain we live in a "democracy" I find it hard to differentiate between any of the parties on offer, surely democracy is in part to do with choice.
One thing is for sure if germany had won the war we the British public wouldn't still be propping up a selfish, racist out of date (German) monarchy.
I can imagine anyone reading this might naively assume I'm a BNP supporter or Nazi but this couldn't be further from the truth I'm just a realist with a questioning mind and maybe a political atheist.
If Germany had won the war, it's likely that all Jews would have been eliminated within Europe. Bearing in mind Hitler's beliefs, other non-white races would probably have been targeted next. So by now, the UK would be a whites-only country. Perhaps that is what you wish had happened?
The deliberate bombing of civilian areas with the intention of breaking the country's moral was carried out by both sides.
"We" were much more successful at it than they were.
For much of 1944 and early '45 we bombed them night and day - far more than they ever bombed us. If you want to talk about proportionality then we are the bigger monsters.
Much of what we found out at the end of the war was not known during the war and cannot be claimed as retrospective justification.
The desire to see Germany utterly destroyed was around before 1939. It goes back to at least 1933 (and this is documented and thus is no wild claim).
Simply not true.
Indeed the ULTRA incercepts of long lists of obviously Jewish names so obviously pointed to what was happening that the Allied leadership were faced with an obvious conundrum, what the hell should/could they do about it? Furthermore the ethnic cleansing by the Nazis of enormous tracts of W Russia and millions of peasants was also known about but then, they weren't real people they were Commies.
Indeed the Nazis sowed their own wind and, like the Japanese, they got in return a hurricane. Whether in an ideal world where everybody on our side is a saint that should have happened is a separate issue. Unfortunately that ideal world has yet to come to pass.
A brief search seems to reveal that, yes, we did decrypt some broadcasts which did indeed refer to deaths at various camps - but they were ascribed to various causes, but were low in number (apart from Auschwitz were there was a typhus outbreak at one point that killed thousands).
Those who say Churchill knew and turned a blind eye
Those who say Churchill knew but could do nothing
Those who say Churchill didn't know and MI6 kept it secret
Those who can't understand the question, but know an answer.
Fundamentally the issue gets more complex when you remember that prior to the outbreak of war a significant number of the British aristocracy & establishment sympathised with Hitler & Fascism and were anti Semitic to a breathtaking degree.
I think it would be fairly straightforward to build a case that Churchill knew (strongly suspected?), possibly long before he became PM, but no-one could come up with a coherent plan of action even if Churchill was in a position to undertake any such action. Prior to Churchill the sun shone from Hitler's bum as far as the govt. was concerned and any criticism was derided - including little things like "we should stop him invading Checkoslovakia" and details like that.
You would have to find a way of convincing people who didn't want to hear the truth, and what's more would have divulged any hint of the source of any intelligence to Hitler at a moment's notice.
War is awful, and if their electorate are not immediately affected or directly threatened by them Governments should keep their noses out.
Unfortunately there is still too much babble about "they started it" or "we needed to win the war". The truth is that, had Britain not won the war, its leaders - most obviously Churchill - would have been hanged for war crimes just like the Germans who were tried in the kangaroo court at Nuremberg.
In the case of Dresden the city - which had no strategic value whatsoever, and which was one of the architectural jewels of Europe - was also teeming with about 70,000 refugees. This act or barbarity alone should have sent Churchill to the gallows.
A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq [*]
Mark Selden
Telford Taylor, chief counsel for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, made the point with specific reference to the bombing of cities a quarter century later: [8]
"For whatever they (the allies) didn't bomb, we used concrete"
Looking at the pics you'll find quite some totaly damaged houses restored, while many more less damaged got replaced by rather uggly constructions.
Why are they all enemy towns and cities, the ones that WE bombed? Where is London? Manchester? Glasgow? Coventry?
Retrospection is all very good and self-satisfying but why can't we just say "It happened," and learn the lessons? As one contributor stated, at least we can see this as the victors, if Hitler HAD succeeded, what would we be thinking now?
I have to say that on the ground the street patterns were not all that easily discerned. And what the photographs don't give is any concept of the stench, which only got worse as time rolled by.
They used to daub black crosses on the walls (if there were any) where it was expected that there were still bodies buried, and you make a real effort to avoid those because you could soon tell if they crosses were accurate. The bricks and wreckage of which the buildings were made piled up in the road, so what had been a thoroughfare became a ruined track. And this wasn't just some areas, in Hamburg the burned out buildings went on for mile after mile.
I was told the odour of Hamburg was like the stink of Belsen. Once you'd smelled it, it followed you for life.
The Yank and British mass murders from the air were a result of the allied weakness on the ground, and not of the effectiveness per se of such indiscriminate terror-bombing. When the Yanks and Brits who landed at Normandy got locked in by a handful of second-rate German troops for months, they resorted in desperation to terror-bombing, wiping out entire French cities and their inhabitants with no military effect whatsoever. In fact the bombing merely made the cities that much more impassable, filling the streets with rubble and giving the defenders convenient hidinbg places.
Strategic bombing was the brainchild of Bomber Harris, who found there a handy tool with which to subdue Iraqi insurgents enraged by Britain's betrayal of its promise to grant them independence. Hitler made good use of terror-bombing in Guernica but found it to have little use against an industrialized foe like Britain. Yanks and Brits never came to that realization.
Had any of you hand wringers been alive at that time, I doubt that you would have felt sorry for the Germans
Hindsight is pointless