Long before the days of Google Earth, highly skilled airmen who took [these pictures] flew alone, by day and night, in unarmed Spitfires relying on their wits as they risked their lives to capture the images on their plane-mounted cameras. Sometimes their planes were painted pink, as the unusual colour proved very good at hiding the aircraft against a background of low cloud. For high altitude missions, the planes were painted a dark shade of blue.

But often they still found themselves targeted by anti-aircraft missiles. Hundreds of them never returned home. Those that did brought with them photos vital to the war effort.

Expert photographic interpreters studied the pictures using optical instruments such as stereoscopes to view them in 3D to build up detailed information for intelligence reports and models used in military planning for operations such as the D-Day landings. The ‘detective’ teams, who were headquartered in a stately home in Buckinghamshire at RAF Medmenham - MI4’s Allied Central Interpretation Unit - included Oxbridge academics, geographers and archaeologists.

Around 4,000 images from the archive [are available for viewing online] at aerial.rcahms.gov.uk, with more to be added.

Images and text sourced from Daily Mail.

The final Allied push towards the German border began on October 17, 1918. As the British, French and American armies advanced, the alliance between the Central Powers began to collapse. Turkey signed an armistice at the end of October, Austria-Hungary followed on November 3.

Germany began to crumble from within. Faced with the prospect of returning to sea, the sailors of the High Seas Fleet stationed at Kiel mutinied on October 29. Within a few days, the entire city was in their control and the revolution spread throughout the country. On November 9 the Kaiser abdicated; slipping across the border into the Netherlands and exile. A German Republic was declared and peace feelers extended to the Allies. At 5 AM on the morning of November 11 an armistice was signed in a railroad car parked in a French forest near the front lines.

The terms of the agreement called for the cessation of fighting along the entire Western Front to begin at precisely 11 AM that morning. After over four years of bloody conflict, the Great War was at an end.

Text sourced from EyeWitness to History. Images from Life.

As a child, I feared darkness. My imagination would run wild, shadows would lurk behind me. I was afraid of ghosts - of the mysterious dead nothingness. I was afraid of being dragged into the bowels of the unknown, never to see the light of day again. But my fears were not warranted, as they are mere fragments of my imagination. As I came across these photographs by Jehad Nga today, those distant fears flooded back into my conscience. These people live in fear. The threat of the shadow is real. Very real. It could pierce through your heart with its cold steely finger nails, embedding each blow into your heart and draining all your limbs of life. It could even hurl its fist and throw you into the air, coughing up dirt, powder and blood. Swift and sly.

To view more of Jehad Nga’s work, please go to his site.

I am lucky to never have experienced the devastation brought on by war, natural disasters or nuclear accidents. I never want to. But I admit I am curious. I am afraid of feeling that eerie emptiness typically left behind in affected areas, yet part of me wonders what it must feel like… And here is an artist who does just that. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger is a scientific illustrator who has collected more than 16,000 insects near nuclear plants and fallout sites, searching for the effects of low-level radiation.

In terms of locations, I’ve visited 25, from Chernobyl to Three Mile Island to Cape de la Hague. I have collected a total of 16,367 insects. I started in 1968 in Zürich but at that time I collected very few true bugs, only the ones I intended to paint.

I first drew and painted malformed flies, Drosophila subobscura, during my work as a scientific illustrator at the scientific department of the Zoological Museum at the University of Zürich in 1967. The flies were mutated by adding the “poison” EMS to their food… I knew from then on what it meant to look at a deformed insect. I also knew what humans were capable of doing to nature.

In 1990, I had the chance to travel with a group of journalists and parliamentarians to Chernobyl. The visit to Polesskoje, 30 kilometers west of the exclusion zone, was impressive because it showed me what it means for people to be victims of such a disaster… The town gave a very depressing impression. No one had any flowers growing. The streets were washed with water twice a day. The quietness of the town… was frightening. There were no birds, no insects… We looked into the windows where things were left behind — tables full of food, dolls, books. The whole experience was for everybody very touching, very unnerving. We all knew that radioactivity made by man is one of the most evil and destructive inventions ever created.

Text sourced from The Morning News.

I am simply not able to understand war. I understand conflict, and I acknowledge that conflict is the sapling that would eventually bloom into war. But why can we not resolve our conflicts in a peaceful manner? Why must we attempt to solve it with salvos of missiles? Why do we think that destruction can assuage anger? Every time I hear of death of yet another soldier, or groups of innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time, my faith in man wears thinner. It is further eroded when I see images of the destruction wreaked on innocent people - that ghostly presence of scars in abandoned structure left behind by ammunition; that atmosphere reeking of fear, terror and panic. Is this the price we pay for that “noble” mission? Did it appease the anger?

Afghanistan is unique, utterly unlike any other war-ravaged landscape. In Bosnia, Dresden or the Somme for example, the devastation appears to have taken place within one peiod, inflicted by a small gamut of weaponry. However, the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan, pushing on towards its 30th year, means that the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other. There are places near Bagram Air Base or Shomali Plain where the front line has passed back and forth eight or nine times - each leaving a deadly flotsam of destroyed homes and fields seeded with landmines.

The land has a different appearance where there was fighting in the early 90’s. In this instance the tidy, picked-clean skeletons of buildings are seperated by smooth, hard earth where de-mining teams have ’swept’ the area. In places destroyed in the recent US and British aerial bombardment, the buildings are twisted metal and charred roof timbers (the presence of unexploded bombs deters all but the most destitute scavenfers,) giving the place a war, chewed-up appearance… A building destroyed by the cataclysm of an American 15000lb bomb creates a different historical record to a structure gradually reduced to its concrete ‘bones’ by thousands and thousands of small Kalashnikov bullets.

Maybe one day we will learn to live together…

Additional text sourced from artist’s statement. Please visit Simon Norfolk’s site to view more of this work.

… President Truman warned that if Japan still refused to surrender unconditionally, as demanded by the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, the United States would attack additional targets with equally devastating results. Two days later, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria, ending American hopes that the war would end before Russian entry into the Pacific theater.

By August 9th, American aircraft were showering leaflets all over Japan informing its people that “We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assureyou it is grimly accurate. We have just begun to to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.” Meanwhile, Colonel Paul Tibbets’s bomber group was simply waiting for the weather to clear in order to drop its next bomb, the plutonium weapon nicknamed “Fat Man” that was destined for the city of Nagasaki.

Text sourced from US Department of Energy.

In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and headed north by northwest toward Japan. The bomber’s primary target was the city of Hiroshima, located on the deltas of southwestern Honshu Island facing the Inland Sea. Hiroshima had a civilian population of almost 300,000 and was an important military center, containing about 43,000 soldiers.

The bomber, piloted by the commander of the 509th Composite Group, Colonel Paul Tibbets, flew at low altitude on automatic pilot before climbing to 31,000 feet as it neared the target area. At approximately 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time the Enola Gay released “Little Boy,” its 9,700-pound uranium bomb, over the city. Tibbets immediately dove away to avoid the anticipated shock wave. Forty-three seconds later, a huge explosion lit the morning sky as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city, directly over a parade field where soldiers of the Japanese Second Army were doing calisthenics. Though already eleven and a half miles away, the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 15 kilotons (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT).

On the ground moments before the blast… the city was alive with activity — soldiers doing their morning calisthenics, commuters on foot or on bicycles, groups of women and children working outside to clear firebreaks. Those closest to the explosion died instantly, their bodies turned to black char. Nearby birds burst into flames in mid-air, and dry, combustible materials such as paper instantly ignited as far away as 6,400 feet from ground zero. The white light acted as a giant flashbulb, burning the dark patterns of clothing onto skin and the shadows of bodies onto walls. Survivors outdoors close to the blast generally describe a literally blinding light combined with a sudden and overwhelming wave of heat… Those that were indoors were usually spared the flash burns, but flying glass from broken windows filled most rooms, and all but the very strongest structures collapsed. One boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street as the house collapsed behind him. Within minutes, 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead.

Text sourced from US Department of Energy. Images sourced from US National Archives.

Charley Fox was born February 1920, in Guelph, Ontario. His career with the R.C.A.F. commenced in the spring of 1940. He soon became a flight instructor at Dunnville, Ontario where he taught from October 1941 to May 1943. After instructing he went to an Operational Training Unit at Bagotville, Quebec. While there, on June 1st, he had a narrow escape when a Hurricane collided in mid-air with the Harvard he was flying. Although injured, he was able to bail out safely.

In August 1943, Charley went overseas and was checked out on Spitfires. In January 1944, he began his tour with 412 Squadron. Charley served continuously on operations until January 1945. His duties included escort, armed recce and dive-bombing. On D-Day, Charley flew three times.

“I got into photography because my mother was upset that I never remembered the trips we made as a family. That said, I really didn’t get into photography until I accepted an internship with the local newspaper in Hong Kong called the, South China Morning Post. I have always been attracted to news and history, which is why I became a photographer. I believe that I am shooting for history rather than for current themes.”

Nahr characterizes his photography as falling into “the realm between documentary and photojournalism, because I am a very particular with what I shoot. I follow my instincts when it comes to who and what I want to photograph. I find that I have the ability to understand situations and see shades of gray, rather than black or white. My photographs are heavy with symbolism, because I want to illustrate the egalitarian nature of man. In my personal work, I am not interested in specifically defining the story of the present, but more so simply looking at how people deal with the pressures that have been placed upon them. I try to place myself into the situation, while including my insight of an outsider in the pictures.”

“There are so many aspects of photography that interest me, which is why it will never let go of me. It’s the search for explanations to situations and emotions through the use of the visual language and the recording of moments that define human relationships and define me, as a photographer, to the subjects I photograph.”

Interview by Gwen Norman.

The sun was just coming up over the Normandy coast at about 5 a.m. on June 6, 1944 – D-Day.

The Allied navies – Canadian, British, American – had brought a huge invasion fleet from England to France in total darkness. For men on the ships, first light showed the black shapes of other nearby vessels. For the Germans on shore, the dawn revealed a vast armada poised to invade occupied France.

The military planners had given Canada a major role on D-Day: to take one of the five designated beaches where Allied forces were to land to begin the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany. The Americans had Utah and Omaha beaches in the west, then came the British at Gold, then the Canadians at Juno Beach and finally the British at Sword on the east.

The greatest seaborne invasion in history was aimed at 80 kilometres of mostly flat, sandy beach along the Normandy coast, west of the Seine River, east of the jutting Cotentin Peninsula. Canada’s objective was right in the middle.

There were about 155,000 soldiers, 5,000 ships and landing craft, 50,000 vehicles and 11,000 planes set for the coming battle. For Canada, 14,000 soldiers were to land on the beaches; another 450 were to drop behind enemy lines by parachute or glider. The Royal Canadian Navy supplied ships and about 10,000 sailors. Lancaster bombers and Spitfire fighters from the Royal Canadian Air Force supported the invasion.

The Canadians who landed on Juno Beach were part of Britain’s Second Army, under the command of British Lt. General Miles Dempsey, who had served in North Africa and Italy with the overall British commander, Bernard Montgomery. The Canadian assault forces were the Third Canadian Infantry Division, commanded by Major General R. F. Keller and the Second Canadian Armoured Brigade, with Brigadier R.A. Wyman in charge.

The units were from across the country; from east to west, from the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, to the Canadian Scottish from Victoria.

The bombardment of the beaches began at 6 a.m. Within an hour the lead landing craft were away from the ships. Two hours later, the German defences at Juno Beach had been shattered and Canada had established the beachhead.

Sourced from Canada At War.