Some chilling reminders of the reality of war!
Britain has a National Collection of Aerial Photography. It is held within the offices of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland – perfectly logical!
A summary of the different collections is listed here, many of them wartime photographs that bring a multitude of emotions to the surface: incredible bravery of the pilots; photographic standards of 70 years ago, man’s inhumanity to man; and so on.
I pondered a bit about writing this Post because, well ….. well…, see what you make of it!
Being born in England in the early part of November, 1944, World War 2 still resonates within me.
Early home in an industrial part of West London meant that my mother and father had a ring-side view of the German V1 and V2 rockets that were being visited on London at that time.
My mother, 90, still recounts her enormous sense of relief when VE Day was announced (May 8th, 1945) because she then thought that her son’s future life was more or less assured.
So back to these aerial photographs held in those collections.
Here’s a picture of the visitation of war on the beautiful French town of Caen.
Linger a while and look at the damage, mostly to private homes. The photograph was taken just slightly more than a month before I was born.
So where’s this Post leading to….?
It sometimes feels as though the present economic crisis, which is far, far from being over, is a product of too many years of terrible politics, greed, the priority of wealth over the protection of our habitat (in the broadest sense of the meaning), etc. etc.
Or maybe I’m just getting old!
Ultimately what is this crazy world all about? I searched long and hard for an image that conveys the answer to that question. Today I found it – as below
It doesn’t require any other caption than Mother and Child – to me it is symbolic of what life is all about.
Back to those wartime photos.
Look at this picture below. It is the bomb release camera on a British bomber showing a stick of bombs falling on Berck-sur-Mer, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France.
Only a very small amount of imagination is required to think of the last few seconds that some innocent people had before these bombs struck home.
Back to present times.
The present difficulties that so many nations are going through needs all of us to seek real representative government. Representative in the sense of representing the long-term interests of mankind, which must include the interests of the child and those yet to be born.
Otherwise, a world of increasing scarcities may mean the increasing probability of another bomb-strike.
By Paul Handover
Note: the two military B&W photographs in this Post are published on the basis of: No Commercial Use or Sale, No Public Distribution [eg by hand, email, web].
Learning from Dogs 