Still Pictures Aerial Photography in Record Group 337: Records of Headquarters Army Ground Forces

Photographs Documenting the Allied Air Support for the Invasion of Europe, ca. 1944 - ca. 1945 (337-AV)

This series of black and white mainly aerial photographs depict the Allied air support given to the ground forces during the cross-channel invasion of Northwest Europe (D-Day), June 6, 1944, and the subsequent drive by the Allies into Germany. These photographs, which were originally placed in an album, were presented to Major General Robert W. Crawford of the G-4 (Supply) arm of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) by the Air Staff section of SHAEF. Included in this series are photographs of the landing at Vierville, France, after action photographs of the bombing of the railway cites of Vaires, France; Maline, Belgium; Metz, France; Stralsund, Germany; and Konz/Karthaus, Germany; bombing of the Rozitz Oil Refinery by the 8th Air Force, August 1944; bombing of the Homburg Synthetic Oil Plant, Germany; action shots of the various landings and aircraft used in the initial phases of the Normandy Invasion as well as the push through France, Holland, and Belgium. The majority of the photographs show the results of some of the bombing missions carried out by joint forces of British and American air crews on the industrial centers controlled by the Germans, i.e., Dresden, Bremen, and, Leipzig, Germany, Rotterdam, Holland, and Brest, France. The photographs show the tremendous amount of destruction that the Allied bombers did to the German industrial complex late in the war. Many of the photographs have captions giving the subject, geographic location, and in some instances the date. Initially, the photographs were in an album and the pages were numbered 1 through 75. For preservation reasons, the photographs were taken out of their original album, at which point it was discovered that pages 16 and 50 were missing. Also, there are numerous pages with multiple images, each one of which was given a separate letter designation.