New online archive puts 223,575 wartime photographs and maps in one place

The Wartime Archive has opened at wartimearchive.com with 219,834 photographs, 3,741 maps and 4,977 military documents, from before the First World War to Korea. The material comes from German, Russian, American, British, French, Canadian, Italian, Japanese and Commonwealth sources, official and press alike, and every picture can be searched by unit, aircraft, ship, place, date or name.

The German holdings include 16,732 photographs from the German press house in occupied Poland, the photographs the German army issued of its pursuit squadrons and anti-aircraft batteries in the First World War, and 2,699 situation maps drawn by German staffs at the time, one set for each campaign from 1939 to 1945. From the Allied side there are 35,293 photographs taken by the American air forces, 16,587 from the US Army Signal Corps, the 12th Army Group's daily situation maps from Normandy to July 1945, and photographs of the RAF, the Royal Navy and the Eighth Army. Tanks, ships, airfields, nose art, propaganda posters, postcards, insignia, target charts and aerial reconnaissance photographs are all there.

The documents run to 577,607 pages, each one a complete PDF. They include the histories and after-action reports of divisions, regiments, battalions and squadrons, field manuals, and the finding guides to the German military records captured at the end of the war. 112 are free to download.

Any picture can be ordered as a print, cropped the way the buyer wants it. The buyer draws the crop on the picture and picks a size, and each size is marked for how well it will print. Photographic prints start at USD 6, with fine art prints on Hahnemühle paper and framed prints in eight frame colours, shipped to 51 countries.

Pictures can also be licensed for books, magazines and video and downloaded at full resolution. Schools can take the whole archive for GBP 180 a year, with a thirty-day free trial.

More photographs, maps and documents are being added, and wartime film footage will follow.

Paul Fearn, who runs the archive, said: "A lot of this material was spread around and hard to find. I wanted it in one place where anyone can search it and download it straight away."

The original photographs are in the public domain. What the archive sells is its reproduction of each one and the research attached to it.

NOTES TO EDITORS
The Wartime Archive is run by PL Photography Limited trading as Piemags, Wales (company 10803986).
Images for coverage of the archive are free on request.
Contact: Paul Fearn, info@wartimearchive.com, 07397 868762
wartimearchive.com