A Spitfire’s eye-view of history flies home

Published on Tuesday 17 June 2008 22:07

IT IS remembered as a photograph that sank a battleship. In May 1941, Pilot Officer Michael Suckling, with an aerial reconnaissance Spitfire squadron flying from Wick, spotted and photographed a large vessel lying in a Norwegian fjord.

With the film still wet from the darkroom, the interpretation team at Wick provisionally identified it as a German battleship. Suckling then flew the photograph south to Coastal Command, running out of fuel in Nottingham before delivering it by hand.

The relentless hunt for the Bismarck, which would claim the British flagship HMS Hood, was under way in earnest.

The Bismarck aerial image is one of more than ten million photographs in The Aerial Reconnaissance Achives (Tara) being shipped to Scotland yesterday in a fleet of lorries from Keele University, their home for the past 45 years.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) is adding Tara’s archives, with over 100,000 canisters of film and boxes of prints, to its own collection of aerial photography.

The commission already holds RAF, Ordnance Survey and Luftwaffe imagery of Scotland. The move is part of a joint deal with RCAHMS, the National Archives and Keele University to preserve the collection.

The Tara photographs date mostly to the Second World War and do not cover the British Isles. Images include wartime Amsterdam, with Anne Frank’s house, and Auschwitz, seen from the air with clouds of smoke rising, thought to be from burning bodies in mass burial pits.

They also show Omaha Beach on the morning of D-Day, 6 June, 1944, as the battle happens, and the Mostar Bridge, in the former Yugoslavia, destroyed by Bosnian Croat artillery in 1993.

RAF reconnaissance aircraft flew without armament, to increase their speed and range, and were camouflaged in colours theoretically less visible in the sky.

But casualties were high. PO Suckling failed to return from a photo reconnaissance mission over France a month after he took the Bismarck photograph.

Tara includes RAF, USAF and Luftwaffe images seized by the allies. Its biggest commercial clients are from the bomb disposal industry, said Allan Williams, the operations manager.

Construction firms in Germany, Holland and parts of Italy use photographs taken before and after bombing runs to identify where unexploded ordnance could lie.

The new material that will come to the Scottish collection covers post-war campaigns involving British forces, from Palestine to the Cod Wars. “The whole archive is photographed in stereo,” said Mr Williams.

“Seen through a stereoscope, they show the ground in 3D. It’s an internationally important collection.”

The RAF recently released 1960s and 1970s photography of the Clyde, showing the shipyards in their heyday. “We will be able to map and see clearly on the ground how the whole landscape has changed,” he said.

BACKGROUND

THE Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (Tara) will be kept mostly in storage facilities near Glasgow. Within a month, it is hoped a basic search facility will be up and running at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland’s offices in Edinburgh.

Tracking down a single image will still be a slow and complicated process, however. When the search room is running, visitors can look for a place, such as a town in France, and trace where every mission in that area took photographs. A reference number leads to photographs on microfilm.

A few can be seen now on the Royal Commission’s website, rcahms.gov.uk.

“Our key aim is to get the basic website up within the next month, linked though the Royal Commission website, and take things from there,” said Allan Williams, Tara’s operations manager.