Source/Archive record SCH5167 - Luftwaffe Aerial Photographs

This dataset is compiled from rare wartime aerial photographs taken by a reconnaissance aircraft of the Luftwaffe's Airfleet 2 at the height of the Battle of Britain, on September 4th 1940. Having made its made its way round the Lizard and up the Irish Sea the German plane crossed the English coast and snapped its three Zeiss Reihenbilder cameras on just north of Liverpool. After recording the town the aircraft continued on up the Mersey, recording a swathe of Cheshire from Ellesmere Port in the north to Whitchurch in the south before passing out of the County in the direction of Cheltenhem, where it finally it switched off its three cameras, and turned for France. Unusually the imagery of sortie GB 1060 was not destroyed at the end of the war, but was among other photographs captured by American forces in May 1945 and sent to America. While working in US Archives Chris Going from Cities Revealed Historic saw in a flight catalogue the route of the imagery over Cheshire and ordered them up for inspection out of curiosity. Chris was inspired by what he saw to tell the Cheshire Council representatives of his findings, and the result is this georectified digital mosaic with a pixel resolution of 50c m -not bad when the photos were taken from roughly the height of Everest. US National Archive Record Group 243; digitised and georeferenced by the GeoInformation Group in 2009.