Aerial Photographs Find Unexploded Bombs
2 April 2013
Wartime imagery from the RCAHMS National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) is being used to provide German bomb-disposal teams with clues to where hundreds of thousands of unexploded devices still lie.
During the Second World War, millions of tonnes of bombs were dropped by the Allies, and estimates are that between 10 and 15 per cent failed to explode. Today, many of them are still present underground or underwater and pose a significant risk. Around five thousand are disarmed each year, and barely a day goes by without a live bomb being discovered somewhere in Germany. It costs each of the country’s 16 states around €10 million a year to dispose of them
The analysis of aerial reconnaissance photographs held by NCAP is an essential process in locating unexploded ordnance - allowing specialists to excavate, make safe and then remove and destroy bombs that were dropped over 60 years ago. NCAP holds millions of pre-raid reconnaissance and post-raid damage assessment photographs taken by the RAF during the Second World War. NCAP also houses the reconnaissance-sortie plot maps on which every photographic frame taken was marked in black ink, numbered and dated. The archive represents the legacy of a top secret wartime photographic interpretation unit that was based at RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire – known as the Central Interpretation Unit (CIU). The NCAP team are now analysing the images to help German clients – from housing companies to motorway constructors – scope out the land where they plan to build, as part of a legally-required risk assessment process.
Lesley Ferguson, Head of Collections at RCAHMS, said “The material held by NCAP can be used in so many different ways, from researching untold stories from the Second World War, to monitoring how landscapes have changed over the past half century. The collection’s involvement in bomb disposal work is particularly fascinating. Classified imagery that once identified military targets – and checked on their post-raid destruction – is now of crucial importance to the German construction industry. With these very same photographs NCAP is now helping to locate and destroy a huge legacy of unexploded ordnance.”
Only a small percentage of NCAP's millions of images have so far been catalogued and digitised – the photographs are held on thousands of canisters of film and over 14,000 boxes of microfilm. The long term conservation plan for NCAP includes further research and progressive digitisation of the photography for display online, as well as storing, preserving and interpreting the original photography for public accessibility.
