If you’ve bought one of my earlier books (consider that a patriotic duty) you know my forte is photo interpretation (PI) of World War II aerial imagery, which I consider a major and underused primary source for understanding military history. My judgments and comments are based less on secondary sources than on imagery in my hands and my experience as a PI and Combat Intelligence Analyst. In this case I’m looking at the Normandy Invasion just as I would have any imagery-based study assigned when I was on active duty.
Preparing material for what I intended to be my seventh book I realized I had enough material for a separate book on the Normandy Invasion and changed direction.
You may ask what could I publish that would be new and different? The reader has likely seen some aerial views of the Normandy Invasion, but have you really SEEN them? It’s been almost seven decades since the Normandy landings, how can I show you pictures of things you’ve never seen before?
I can because:
• Most historians don’t have the skills necessary to find and understand what you’ll see on these pages - particularly in my enlargements.
• Many of the recon photos in this book were collected when no one could be sure the Normandy Invasion would succeed, but by dark, certainly by mid-day on 7 June, troops were pushing inland expanding the beachheads and failure was no longer a possibility. On 6 and 7 June 1944 there was no incentive to expend scarce PI resources searching images of where the troops had been. PIs were searching farther inland to spot things the troops were going to encounter - and elsewhere to find the threatening V-1 launch locations springing up all over coastal France. So many of the images I’ve found were never selected and published, some possibly never looked at.
• PIs in 1944 didn’t have the ability to easily enlarge and scan images like we can today using computers. Photographic enlargement was slow and inflexible, not good for ‘trolling’ through a mission, thus many of the images in my enlargements remained unseen. I didn’t have computer enlargement capacity when I first found these photos so some of the images included here surprised me when I discovered them during research for this book using computer enlargement.
I don’t pretend to know all the details of every event, piece of equipment or subject, nor do I think I’ve seen all of the available imagery, but I will interpret the imagery I’ve found for you. I think you’ll find my USAF photo interpretation training and experience let me see a LOT more than most people writing conventional textual history. Most books on World War II use readily available and easily understood ground photos. Occasionally a book will show an aerial to prove a point or make the narrative more interesting—but without the benefit of photo interpretation. My books use imagery selected to tell the story. For me, text is an adjunct used to identify something, put it into context, or move the story along. In this book you will see well-known events from a different perspective. Don’t think of this as a PowerPoint presentation or lecture series—think of it as the two of us sitting together in my library going through a stack of WW II prints, and I’m telling you what the photos say to me.
If you’ve got any of my earlier books you know how I discovered this imagery. As holders of DoD aerial film archives the unit I was in was under pressure to reduce cost of holdings, some of which had been dormant since the 1940s. Loath to destroy unknown material, I began a screening to see what we had. Missions I found from 6 or 7 June 1944 (and other dates I knew were significant) were sent to the U.S. National Archives to keep them safe. I’ve been told there was originally more aerial film but some was dumped in the ocean to save cost of shipping it back to America after the war. I’ve also been told by ‘old timers’, but couldn’t confirm, that much of low altitude, oblique coverage was destroyed by the Cartography community (who were the first post-war recipients of the original roll film negatives) because it had no value for mapping.
I found only selected cut negative copies of British imagery. We assumed (hoped) all the original British-source material was in England.1
Clearly little of the designated material still had any Intelligence value in the 1980s but I began to find images I KNEW were historic and created over one hundred 30″ x 40″ display boards for our halls to create interest in the material. People cleared to enter our secure precincts were soon commenting favorably on photos of famous bombing raids, the building of the Pentagon, Pearl Harbor before 7 December 1941 …and D-Day.2
When I collected these photos I had no thought of someday writing a book on the Normandy Invasion. I just knew the photos were important and interesting. Sorting what I had, assembling chapters for this book three decades later, I wish I’d looked harder and kept more – and used entire missions to plot locations of specific photos. I made heavy use of Google Earth maps to match fields and roads but you must bear with me when I can’t always tell you a precise location. It also explains why some landing beaches have more coverage than others. It isn’t because I consider any assault site lesser for any reason. It’s simply because I didn’t find, or didn’t recognize, more material covering them.
Everyone has seen ground shots of the invasion. Those are individual photos, often unconnected in time and space. Aerial photoreconnaissance looks at war differently. PR aircraft take series of overlapping images. You often see the same ground on three or four consecutive frames. If you can recognize it, you can observe a place on different missions and analyze changes. From overhead, you see fixed and mobile targets that have been bombed (or attempted to be bombed). You see buildings destroyed by air or ground fire, usually accompanied by smoke. You’ll see enemy strong points and tracks where armored vehicles have passed. If you’re lucky sometimes PR lets you see the vehicles themselves. You sometimes see an actual explosion or fire, but photo recce immediately above and parallel to, the FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area) is about the most risky thing a pilot can do – both sides are likely to shoot at the plane. Therefore it is extremely rare to see the instant of men crashing against a strong point or an anti-tank gun working its destruction, but you’ll even see some of that in these pages.
The greatest advantage of PR over ground imagery is its scope - miles instead of feet. Aerial photos are invaluable in seeing an overall context of a situation or assessing capability of an enemy force. You will see for yourself that aerial photos are also particularly effective tools for understanding the lines of communication and logistics of these events – the sheer weight pushing on shore in June 1944.
Note: To make reading easier, where possible vertical photos in this book are presented with north up. Obliques are shown as the camera pointed regardless of direction.
A final word on Photo Interpretation and Photo Interpreters. Three words are important. If a PI isn’t sure, he says ‘possible’. Pretty sure but not positive is ‘probable’. If there is no caveat, it is highly likely something IS what he says it is (though I once read a report referring to ‘probably a possible unidentified installation’).
1. Later I was told, but couldn’t confirm, that some RAF film had been destroyed in the 1960s because of its dangerously flammable nitrate base (USAAF used Safety Film after 1941).
2. Roll film could be pulled from the stacks for screening using date or location but the cut-negatives weren’t indexed in any way so discovery of that material was completely random. Enthusiasm for the treasures I was finding encouraged me to write my first book in 1981 – and six others.