Forbidden WW1 photos

[sherree]

I looked too far and searched too much.

I stumbled upon the Forbidden WW1 photos on the Heritage of the Great war site.

These are unofficial photos probably taken by the men who illegally took their own cameras with them. Must have been difficult to hide them as they were probably quite sizeable. Even more astonishing is the fact that any of the photos saw the light of day and are now online.

I looked and I got burnt.

I knew war was a gruesome slaughter but I think I prefer Frank Hurley's romanticised and no doubt censored WW1 photos.

But I am not happy with that blinkered contradiction that I have become a party to.

It was as if I was frollicking through a time in history, unaware of something, unaware that I was indeed blinkered in my approach.

Well the blinkers are now off.

But as my 18 year old daughter says 'War's not like that anymore'

[Guest]

But as my 18 year old daughter says 'War's not like that anymore'

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Was is exactly like that still. It is bodies in pieces, some else's brains splattered across your face, the smell of burning flesh and people shitting themselves from fear. It is pain and suffering.

It is people having the same bad dreams, ten, twenty, thirty years later.

What did you imagine war was like?

[Max Poilu]

These are unofficial photos probably taken by the men who illegally took their own cameras with them.  Must have been difficult to hide them as they were probably quite sizeable.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

As an aside to this: The cameras used by official photographers were indeed sizable and cumbersome 10 x 8 plate cameras but the most popular camera with soldiers was the Kodak Vest Pocket - as it's name suggests a very small and concealable folding bellows type camera using roll film. Comparable in size to a cigarette packet or a modern compact digital. Here is a picture of a wartime example next to my mobile phone for scale:

[Max Poilu]

And ready for use:

[sherree]

Angie

I thought WW1 was walk in the park just like all the Australian men that volunteered to go thought it would be! A boat ride, shoot off a few rounds, have a few beers, shoot off a few more rounds and then go home.

I always suspected that it may have been about heads being blown off and bodies being blown to smithereens etc etc etc. I thought that there may be a bit of senseless death involved, a smidgen of agression, a wee bit of fear, some terror, a tiny bit of horror and a quagmire resembling a seething shitty hell on earth!

Maybe even a few tears thrown in. A scream here and there. A shout of 'mother! sounded out at regular intervals would have been the icing on the cake I reckon.

I am glad you confirmed my suspicions for me. Thanks.

War in the new millenium has changed a bit though. I mean a death by violence will always stay the same, innocent adults and children are gruesomely murdered in our peaceful neighbourhoods everyday. Shock horror! But the actual institution called war and the strategies of it and the game and the rules or lack of them have changed immensly since WW1. But all change is good!

The forbidden photos were one step too far for me. But I will warm to them, I am sure of that. It was the photos of men hanging their own men, men executing their own soldiers as examples to the rest of their forces and ofcourse the masses of dismembered and skinless skeletons that lay strewn across the fields as they rotted slowly to the beat of a sensless echo 'you'll never learn, you'll never learn'.

Corpses flung up in dead and broken tree branches and others caught in barbwire, faces adorned with a screaming death grimace, not to mention the close up of the blue and mouldy penis. I wasn't expecting that. On film that is.

[sherree]

Thanks for the photos of the Vest pocket camera, I had seen that mentioned, but it is informative to actually see it. Thank you. Ican't believe that I may possibly run back into the house to grab my camera as I was walking out the door to go to war, but I suppose some soldiers thought they'd take some landscape photos to show the kids back home.

[truthergw]

Thanks for the photos of the Vest pocket camera, I had seen that mentioned, but it is informative to actually see it.  Thank you.  Ican't believe that I may possibly  run back into the house to grab my camera as I was walking out the door to go to war, but I suppose some soldiers thought they'd take some landscape photos to show the kids back home.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There was an established tradition of ' detective cameras ' long before WW1. These could be concealed under clothing and took pictures through button holes etc.

[Guest]

Here is a picture of a wartime example next to my mobile phone for scale:

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

As I remember it, my uncle had a camera very much like that, which he continued to use into the 1950s. Took quite good family snaps as I recall.

[De Petrowski Alexander]

Thanks for the photos of the Vest pocket camera, I had seen that mentioned, but it is informative to actually see it.  Thank you.  Ican't believe that I may possibly  run back into the house to grab my camera as I was walking out the door to go to war, but I suppose some soldiers thought they'd take some landscape photos to show the kids back home.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

WW I was also a war from the pre-television era, there was some existing camera technology as shown by the Vest pocket camera, but its still a far cry from the latter conflict of WW II or later. It gives some explanation for the somewhat "clean Image" of the Great War. Just think of the many paintings and drawings depicting events, dating from especcially the first year of the war.

There is a saying in Dutch that says "a picture can tell more than 100 000 words "

[Landsturm]

Check these out:

http://www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/index.htm#13

[Dave Phillips]

Landstrum

What a fantastic site.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

All the best

Dave

[healdav]

You can still buy these cameras in second hand shops. I'm told they are worth about £40, there are so many of them.

I have one still in a very battered leather case that has come down through the family somehow (no WW1 connectionas far as I know).

[Simon R]

I got one of those exact cameras with the effects of a WWI RE Rail Operating Coy. soldier - they seem to have been very widely used. Photos (supposedly) taken with it in collection too - pretty decent.

[healdav]

They were widely used and were made of steel, so survived. That's why they are cheap!

[Rob B]

The glamour of war goes as the first shots are fired and as an old soldier said to me years ago "War is Hell".

Angie graphically described what happend when metal and flesh mix and nerves go to pieces and bowels turn to water those are some of the symptoms of war.

Rob

[the gunners dream]

Although it mentions on the heritage site that these are forbidden photos, many of them have been printed in books etc.

My introduction as to how WWI etc was like came at 13 when I was given a copy of the book mentioned on that site. It was called 'Covenants with Death'. A very shocking thought provoking book from the 1930s designed to show people what the reality of war was like. Since then, I have seen the real horrors of war for myself, especially in 2003 when I served in Macedonia with NATO.

We are all so comfortable here, sitting at our PCs discussing this in a very matter of fact way. I feel we must remember that people are dieing on a daily basis in those horrible ways in places such as Iraq. Even in the clinical way we watch smart bombs take out a target, we must know that that bomb is not just a video screen. It is a thousand pounds of explosive that is going to do a lot of damage to a human body, even having the ability to make a body become mist. The same can be said for the grainy images of things like the Hawthorn Ridge Crater being blown on the 1st July 1916.

I feel that if the media could actually show what war does to the human body the civilian population would actually stop the damn thing happening!

Steve

[sherree]

I read about that book with the gruesome photos in it, that is amazing that you actually read it as a 13 year old. It didn't turn us (collective humanity)off war though did it? Well actually it did turn 'us' off war but it hasn't stopped the Leaders of the Countries starting wars for many soldiers and civilians to suffer through. It should have but it didn't, how do you explain that? It's like as if you can show a person photographs of the most intense pain and suffering, yet politicians can convince a person to run straight out to risk that very suffering and pain shown in the photos. Included with the knowledge that they may die and never see their loved ones again.

Why is it that men of power can use the masses as cannon fodder like that? Why would they want to? Why does a man of power choose the path of sacrifice for his masses that mean so much to him at voting time and are so dispensible at war time? To save a bit of land I suppose, to maintain lifestyles perhaps?

I believe that countries at war are behaving akin to that of local street gangs fighting and schoolyard bullying, we condemn both of the latter. But we see war between countries as necessary and honourable. Why in the hell is that?

[the gunners dream]

It is a difficult subject isn't it?

Are wars honourable, should they be fought? In certain cases, yes they had to be. WWII is a prime example, without detracting that this is WWI site! But no war is honourable.

Should WWI have been fought? Looking back it is exactly how you have put it in your final lines. I believe that it was a waste of what historians have coined an 'Ill used generation'.

When I first read CWD, and I still have the original copy, it had a deep and lasting impact on me, it still has the ability to shock me now. Yes, it ddn't stop WWII and wars being fought now, but it has the ability to even now make people stop and think. We have to keep doing that in order that one day we can stop war.

I joined the services too, I saw and did a lot of things. I witnessed terrible things and still do as a police officer. But it has taught me many things about my own immortality and that we have to live for today as you never know what will be coming round the corner.

Most of all it has taught me to show people the sacrifice others made for what we have, for better or worse.

The one poem I think that reflects all this is the poem I use at the bottom of my signature and I have provided the full version below for everyone to inwardly digest:

If you are able

save for them a place

inside of you.

And save one backward glance

when you are leaving

for the places they can

no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say

you loved them,

though you may

or may not have always.

Take what they have taught you

with their dying,

and keep it with your own.

And in that time

when men decide and feel safe

to call war insane,

take one moment to embrace

those gentle heroes

you left behind.

Steve

[marina]

The one poem I think that reflects all this is the poem I use at the bottom of my signature and I have provided the full version below for everyone to inwardly digest:

Steve

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Who wrote it, Steve?

Marina

[Terry_Reeves]

On a more gentler note, I have always been struck by the boxes of photo's found and postcard and antique fair's, of WW1 servicemen and women. It is the anonynimity that makes them so poigniant; somebody's father , son or daughter consigned to a cardboard box and forgotten about - the image of their youth rarely betraying what they may have seen on the battlefield.

The following poem appeared anonymously in the Punch magazine, 1868

You see yourself within this frame,

And, in a looking glass the same.

The glass, though, must refect your eyes,

Or straight the charming image flies;

But fixed you have your shadow here

So that it cannot disappear.

This portrait as it will last

And when some twice ten years have past,

Will show you what you were;

How elegant, how fresh, how fair.

I wonder what the mirror will,

Compared with it, exhibit still!

The shadows of those who witnessed such scenes, bear witness to the folly of war.

Terry Reeves

[birkettm]

When I first started collecting militaria and becoming interested in WW1 in particular, i was offered the wallet of an MGC officer stuffed full of pics taken in gallipoli. They were the real deal showing collecting up of the bodies and the grouping together of different extremities. One in particular was a mass of forearm bones the what beyond the edges of the picture.

I declined to buy them (and regret it still) but i have never been fooled as to the realities of war.

[the gunners dream]

Who wrote it, Steve?

Marina

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi Marina,

It was written by Major Michael Davis O'Donnell who was himself killed in another pointless conflict on the 1st January 1970 at Dak To in Vietnam.

Steve

[marina]

Thanks, Steve - I thought it was a very simple and moving poem. All the more so now that i know his fate. Thanks for that.

Marina

[sherree]

Excellent poem Steve, thanks for sharing the poem in its entirety with us.

[Justin Moretti]

Interesting.

I am a trainee pathologist, which means that I have seen (and dissected) people who had been disrupted, decapitated, dismembered, burned, flayed and otherwise traumatized unto death by everything from gunshots to trains to house fires, and that includes little kids. So if I come across as a bit blase, you can understand why without having a go at me.

So the pictures did not really disturb me. From the forensic viewpoint, the pics of the dead soldiers, particularly, were quite educational.

Full marks to the people (no doubt all long dead of old age, if nothing else) who had the guts and the foresight to take them.