Historic Aerial Photo Resources

It looks like it might be the complete collection of airfield dossiers as the other nations dossiers are not available online. There must be more relating city, factory and transportation targets though. RCAHMS published a booklet some years ago giving coverage of the Luftwaffe sourced photos of Scotland. I wonder if Historic England have some in their collection, although they have never come up in a search request even for the south east airfields.

I think the NARA collection was the one that held the original photos used in these dossiers as many of those on the NARA website appear as clean frames on NCAP. I suspect there are more to come on the NCAP site but whether there will be more UK ones I don't know as they only give vague press quality answers to my questions.

I assume that NARA will not be posting those original frames that appear on NCAP as the latter can only be zoomed in on for an annual subscription and it would be odd if the donor (NARA) showed them for free!

I take it you have read this

Home » About NCAP » History of the Collection


ncap.org.uk/about-ncap/history-of-the-collection History of the Collection

ncap.org.uk/about-ncap/history-of-the-collection


And
ncap.org.uk/GAF

As a joint asset, the imagery was duplicated and shared between the UK and USA, and American holdings now reside at the US National Archives and Records Administration (both NARA- and NCAP-held German Air Force imagery is available on the NCAP website).

"At the end of the Second World War, the British and Americans discovered a mass of German aerial reconnaissance photographs, maps, target dossiers and photomosaics hidden in several locations.

Project TURBAN was the code-name for the handling of all the material found. Much material came from Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, Germany, and was code-named DICK TRACY, while other large collections were found in Vienna (code-named ORWELL), Oslo (code-named MONTHLY) and Berlin (code-named TENANhttps://ncap.org.uk/GAFT), among others.

In June 1945, the material was packaged in crates and flown back to the Allied Central Interpretation Unit at RAF Medmenham, and a joint UK-US sorting and exploitation project began."

from
ncap.org.uk/GAF

At the bottom of the GAF link page is a link to the GAF frame, all 45,649 of them. The map helps but you have to figure out how to filter out the other frame, most of which are awaiting images.

The NARA/NCAP selection has included a number of USAAF sorties over England and a lot over Europe plus a few RAF England ones in the HLA series. This confused me when I found them as I didn't think USAAF frames would be included from NARA, happy they did though. It is also confusing as Historic England posses USAAF frames and I'm sure those of the HLA RAF series that are on NCAP.

I have to add that I bought copies of some of the photos available in the NARA dossier folders online some years back from the same source as the books called "Adolf Hitler's Holiday Snaps". The quality was poor so at least I can see clearer versions. I wonder when copies of the NARA ones will be available online as prints? It seems someone did this with the American Air Museum aerial photos?

One to watch

www.cam.ac.uk/aerialphotography

"The first 1,500 photographs from a vast archive of almost half a million images went live online this morning (Feb 22), showing not only our ancient landscapes, but also how the UK’s built environment underwent radical change: from the bomb-scarred post-war period, right through to the first decade of the 21st century.

For decades, former RAF pilots – some decorated war heroes – took to the skies of Britain at the instruction of legendary Cambridge archaeologist JK St Joseph in a unique project to map the changing face of the UK via the university’s remarkable Committee for Aerial Photography.

The photographs, covering almost every corner of the UK, bring back to life a disappeared Britain and capture the loss of our industrial heritage, the destruction of ridge and furrow landscapes unchanged for centuries, and the emergence of motorways, skyscrapers and modern cityscapes."

Etc

cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/landscapehistories/1

Or

www.cambridgeairphotos.com/

Am I missing something, the link takes me to the 174 pages of frames that were put online about 4 years ago. They said at the time more would appear but regular checks reveal it hasn't changed since then.

Peter wrote:

Am I missing something, the link takes me to the 174 pages of frames that were put online about 4 years ago. They said at the time more would appear but regular checks reveal it hasn't changed since then.

Maybe it wasnt Feb22 this year?

And certainly the focus is on archaelogical finds rather than our stuff

but the map interface on

www.cambridgeairphotos.com/

is better and you can fiter out those locations which dont have a photo uploaded yet

www.cambridgeairphotos.com/map/


(Brown vertical, Blue oblique)

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