OT--Ghost Images from WWII...

[Hauksbee 103]

http://news.yahoo.co...tory-slideshow/

 

Found this on Yahoo! A photographer is taking WWII photos and ghosting them over the same locations in modern Europe.

[Crossbones 1]

Awesome. Good find.

[Lazarus1177 164]

Now we know what combat trauma feels like.Good pics.

[Olham 164]

A spooky find, Hauksbee - I have been at many places in northern France,

and I imagined scenes like these at some places. It's not too long ago, and

yet many a place looks like it never happened.

 

Good point, Lazarus!

[Olham 164]

By the way - many traces of the war can still be found in Berlin. Entrance ways and perfect window

positions for machine gun nests are still framed by hundreds of bullet holes.

The hole in the iron railway bridge pylon was most likely caused by a German 8.8 Flak gun, which

was used against tanks with great success in the Battle of Berlin.

 

Edited October 20, 2012 by Olham

[JimAttrill 24]

Our war museum here in Joburg has what looks like a brand-new Flak 88. All the dials and even the leather straps are perfect. It is pointing at Russian tanks across the courtyard - no T34s but a T52 and other stuff from the war in Angola.

 

And close to the Flak 88 are a Me!09, a Fw190A and a Me262 night fighter 2 seater - the only one in the world. The yanks had one once but lost it somehow.

 

The british main anti-aircraft gun was a 3.5" (88.9mm) but for some reason they never thought of using it as an anti-tank weapon. Strange when they could see how good it would be. Maybe no AP ammo?

[Hauksbee 103]

...and a Me262 night fighter 2 seater - the only one in the world. The yanks had one once but lost it somehow.

Which leads one to wonder, how do you go about losing a Me-262? Did they just come to work one morning and it was gone?

[Typhoon 5]

I bet it was stolen and ended up in a private collection somewhere!

[Flyby PC 23]

It's funny, but there's a uk program called Time Team, where archaeologists excavate sites over 3 days and compile the story of a site. To watch it, sometimes you think the only thing the romans and saxons ever did was run around the country smashing pottery everywhere they went.

 

I wonder in the decades and centuries to follow how our time will be defined, - not by our pottery but maybe by our shrapnel.

[Hauksbee 103]

A spooky find, Hauksbee -

No spookier than imagining some poor soldier trying to man a MG in one of those windows, in the face of the s**t-storm happening right outside.

[Flyby PC 23]

Is Berlin left like that deliberately Olham? A lot of that masonry is repairable.

[Olham 164]

No, I don't think so. It was just not done on some houses.

[HouseHobbit 2]

When I went to berlin, during the height of the cold war(1975), there were Many buildings that showed damage from the war..

I was very surprised that 30 years after the war, the Soviets had not repaired many of these..

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Many London Buildings are similarly pockmarked with Shrapnel etc too

[von Baur 54]

Is that throughout the city, Olham? I'd heard that West Berlin was cleaned up and repaired after the war but that the Soviets left most of the damage in the east as kind of a message.

 

 

...The yanks had one once but lost it somehow....

 

Ya gotta be careful where ya park things. It did, however, lead to the popular cable program "Bait Jet".

[Hauksbee 103]

I was very surprised that 30 years after the war, the Soviets had not repaired many of these..

The agents of the People's Socialist Paradise did not, as a rule, undertake to repair bullet holes (which they had made) in the property of those whom they had been formerly shooting at.

[Hauksbee 103]

Many London Buildings are similarly pockmarked with Shrapnel etc too

Even in some American towns (Concord and Lexington come to mind) some of the very oldest houses have bullet holes that date from the revolution. These are carefully tended and pointed to with great pride

[Olham 164]

Von Baur, most of these traces are in former East Berlin.

But the 8.8 hole in the bridge pylon is in West Berlin.

[Flyby PC 23]

I heard many years ago that importing Russian timber was considered too risky because it was too common to find embedded shrapnel which would wreck the modern equipment in sawmills. I don't know if that's true, but certainly could be.

 

I'm in two minds whether I like these 'reminders', but I'm a little biased because I don't like distressed stonework. I actually think those blended photographs are much more poigniant merger between the past and the present, but then again, seeing such things in real life is often quite different again. Like seeing how small tanks are if you remember a previous thread.

 

As for that jet going missing, it possibly had very good urban camouflage and they forgot where they parked it. (Sorry, derivative of a corny joke I heard when I bought an ex MOD landrover many moons ago).