WW2 USAAF aerial reconnaissance photography available to the public for the first time

[BDennis]

I just saw this on the BBC News site.

Historic England now have a collection of over 20,000 aerial photos from the USAAF taken over England between 1943 and 1944.

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/photographs/usaaf-collection/

The photos of my local area I've explored have been digitised to quite a high resolution and you can zoom right in to see details.

For example this one shows the dispersal of B-17 bombers from Bassingbourn airfield across the road to be concealed in an avenue of trees on the Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire

https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/archive/collections/aerial-photos/record/US_7PH_GP_LOC125_V_5005

Bill

[wanderer]

I used to work with RCAHMS (now part of Historic Scotland) in Edinburgh who have the RAF and Luftwaffe collections. The Americans , obviously, have kept their own. These collections are massive, in millions.
At a lecture about the collections, it transpired that whilst there was good conservation and regular use here (think where is that unexploded bomb) in the US it was one elderly guy in charge of in excess of 50 million images! This sounds as if they are slowly getting their act together. These collections are a massive and useful resource. Most APs were shot on 8"(20cm) negs or larger. Often as stereo pairs and when looked at through a viewer the detail is astonishing. Now they can be correlated with GPS and can be very precisely placed.