Amazing aerial images taken by daring Allied pilots on secret missions during World War II

The detail is astonishing. At first it looks like just another castle surrounded by tiny houses and neat fields. But zooming in on the courtyard one can see figures milling around.

They are in fact Allied officers being held in the notorious German PoW camp of Colditz and the photograph is one from an archive of aerial photographs taken by airmen - sometimes flying as low as 50ft - during secret reconnaissance missions in World War II.

Until now the pictures have been kept behind closed doors. But they are revealed to the public for the first time today via the internet amid a painstaking cataloguing process.

In another image, precise as a hole punch through a sheet of paper, craters surround a Nazi doodlebug factory in an extraordinary photograph showing the devastation wreaked by an Allied bombing raid.

The date is September 2, 1944 and the place Peenemunde, a village on the Baltic, where the terrifying weapons Adolf Hitler hoped would win the war for Germany were designed and tested.

Others in the collection convey the human suffering experienced amid the fighting, including rare shots of a Nazi slave labour camp and of the landings on D-Day.

Alan Williams, manager of the National Collection of Aerial Photography which houses the photos, said: 'The archive literally shows the world at war.'

Long before the days of Google Earth, the highly skilled airmen who took them flew alone, by day and night, in unarmed Spitfires relying on their wits as they risked their lives to capture the images on their plane-mounted cameras.

Sometimes their planes were painted pink, as the unusual colour proved very good at hiding the aircraft against a background of low cloud. For high altitude missions, the planes were painted a dark shade of blue.

But often they still found themselves targeted by anti-aircraft missiles. Hundreds of them never returned home.

Those that did brought with them photos vital to the war effort.

Expert photographic interpreters studied the pictures using optical instruments such as stereoscopes to view them in 3D to build up detailed information for intelligence reports and models used in military planning for operations such as the D-Day landings.

The 'detective' teams, who were headquartered in a stately home in Buckinghamshire at RAF Medmenham - MI4's Allied Central Interpretation Unit - included Oxbridge academics, geographers and archaeologists.

Continue Reading Here

British War Hero Peter Lake snubbed by French

Showdown brewing over plans to finally pardon Billy The Kid

Zombie George Washington