Pilots from both sides took their aircraft above the battlefield, not just to bombard it or

strife it with machine gun fire, but to photograph it. That unique bird's eye view of the Great War,

what does it tell us, and how does it relate to the landscape of the Western Front today?

The reality of warfare is something that's almost impossible to escape at the moment.

Not just on a daily but almost hourly basis, we see depictions of the battlefield,

particularly from above with shots from drones that bring home just how grim

warfare is. More than a century ago in the Great War, there were no drones, but the aerial depiction

of the battlefield from aerial photographs was very much an important part of both sides' understanding of what the battlefield was,

where it was, and how they could fight over it.

I first came across aerial photographs in some of the earliest books that I read about the First World War,

and then when I began to collect photographs and militaria connected to the Great

War I went to a military show in Surrey one weekend and picked up a pile of German aerial photographs

from the Battle of Verdun in 1916 these were so clear that I could even see human beings on them, columns of Frenchmen marching down a road, the sun glinting off the steel helmets of soldiers in front-line trenches. To me, this was extraordinary. These were not just photographs showing the intelligence makeup of an enemy's defences. much more than that, they depicted the landscape of the Western Front in a way that I hadn't really truly understood.

And when I began to visit it on a regular basis, to connect up what I could see in air photos like this with the landscape as it is today became an important part in my

understanding of what the Western Front was about and indeed any battlefield of the First World War.

Aerial photography was cutting edge technology in the First World War but how did this come about

and how did it become to be such an important part of military intelligence in that conflict?

The first known air photographs were taken from a balloon in France in 1858,

and the first major military use of aerial photography in a war was during the American Civil War in 1862 during the siege of Richmond in Virginia.

A gridded map air photograph was compiled, made from a series of photographs taken from a balloon.

Again, this is pre-aircraft technology, and they were used to direct artillery fire.

The information compiled from the making of the photographs gave the commanders of those

...