Productions: D-Day and the Crowd

In 1943, the U.K. government broadcast a radio and print appeal to British citizens, urging that they send any photographs, postcards, and images acquired or taken before the war depicting the coastline of continental Europe. And citizens responded--millions of photographs were mailed and delivered to the Admiralty.

INT researchers recently found this collection lying in thousands of boxes in one of the world's great museums. Seventy years ago, the U.K. government used these images in war-planning for the June 1944 D-Day invasion. This documentary shows how, for “Operation Overlord,” hundreds of servicemen and servicewomen hand-coded and tagged these images with longitude and latitude and other geographical information, effectively taking millions of pieces of information crowd-sourced from the public and turning them into critical intelligence that helped to turn the tide of the war.

Indeed, what the Admiralty collected represented unique access to images of occupied Europe.  While commandos and others collected images of beach approaches from the sea, these tourist’s portfolios provided views outward, from what were to become German defensive positions, and extensive, primary topographical information about dunes, ports, bridges, harbors, quays, and canals.

Culled and tagged with latitude and longitude data by hundreds of British and American war planners, these images of the Normandy beaches and other strategic targets on the coast and inland supported the Allies in their seaborne landings, parachute and glider assaults, and the advance of their armor and mechanized forces inland.

Today the images lie silent, waiting for their moment again in the sun.

Link: http://normandysnaps.org/index.html

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