A marvellous source of WWII colour photographs

[Leif Ohlsson]

For several years now I have been sitting on this little gem, hoping and wanting to make some good use of it modelingwise. It seems this isn't happening, so now at last I would at least like to share my little treasure.

It is the Library of Congress collection of more than 1600 colour slides from war-time USA. They depict every facet of life - farming, factories, rural areas, urban areas - and quite a few of the photos are from the aircraft industry, including women's part in the war effort there.

In the two galleries of 16 images each I have collected here so far, almost all the images in the original collection about production of the C87 transport version of the B24 Liberator bomber are included. You will find them here, in the gallery of this site:

• C87 transport aircraft, Fort Worth Texas
• The women who made the C87 at Forth Worth

And here's a taste of what you can use them for:



This is just a small sample from the centre of the first real image in the collection here (full image immediately below), and it shows the resolution you can expect if you go all-out and download the full non-compressed tiff-versions of the images. These versions weigh in at a staggering 190 MEGAbytes per photo, and will take ages to download. But if you are really interested in details, go for it.

[In fact, the "small" sample above is 1600 x 1200 pixels, more than double the size here. As uploaded, it suffers none of the jpg-compression image artefacts now visible. Unfortunately, the gallery will not show the full, uncompressed size of uploaded images, not even when you click the "view larger mode" option. I have notified Jason about this. Hopefully it might be possible to correct this in the future.]

Note in this image that the C87 version of the Liberator rather surprisingly did not have any wheel-well doors for the front wheel, as distinct from the bomber version. You can confirm this by studying the other images collected of finished and airborne C87s. I have not seen this remarked upon before. Note also the navigator's astrodome, replacing the top gun turret; the small recessed latch to the hinged door of the nose cargo compartment; and the small observation window at the apex of the nose door.

In the image above and those below, you will see that the shape of the nose is slightly different (and longer) compared to the bomber:



This becomes even clearer when we enter the factory at Forth Worth and study the assembly process. Note here the door to the front cargo compartment, about to be mounted on its hinges:



Some other differences are of course the absence of all gunners, necessitating a revised tail-cone, which is shown to advantage here:



There are some images demonstrating the true size of the nose compartment. Note here the covered up hatch for the original astrodome in the nose compartment:



Note also that the C87 cargo version clearly had a section added before the nose cone/cargo door replacing the glazed bombardiers compartment. This will explain the slightly different shape of the nose.



In the original collection there are lots and lots of other haunting images from an era now long gone (including many of aircrafts, such as the B25, the Catalina, and others). In the introductions to the two albums collected here, there are detailed instructions for how to browse the original Library of Congress collection.

• C87 transport aircraft, Fort Worth Texas
• The women who made the C87 at Forth Worth

I could well imagine that diorama builders would find a lot of useful stuff (farms, gas stations, etc.) from the era by browsing the original collection.

Leif

[Gil]

Hi Leif,

Thanks for the heads up. The Library of Congress is one of the World's richest resources and with it now going online and digital I can use the excuse that "I am still researching the subject" indefinitely...,

The library's reading room URL is: http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html for those that are interested.

+Gil

[milenio3]

Thank you!! I was indeed looking something like this for my diorama.
It's going to be a paper model not assembled, and in the background one of these pictures.
I hope this can bring a little life to show how to make paper models.