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Aerial Maps
Despite the fact that World War One was a global
conflict that firmly established the balance of power of democratic,
capitalist nations, The Great War has been greatly ignored by
historians and commentators these days. While images such from World
War Two and Vietnam are commonplace in the media these days, footage
from World War One is conspicuously absent, although, in fairness,
there is far less surviving footage from the era still in existence
today.
World War One was also the first war to stress aerial warfare to a
significant degree. While most air warfare from the era is
associated with ‘dogfights’ and ‘flying aces,’ there was still a
great deal of emphasis placed on aerial bombardment based on the
coordination of aerial maps.
Believe it or not, the early days of using aerial maps for World War
One purposes were not designed to guide fighter planes, but for the
usage of ‘balloon warfare.’ Despite the presence of tremendous
aerial maps, the balloons generally did not hit their mark all that
often because, well, balloons are hardly a stable transport for
aerial bombardment.
Sadly, aerial maps designed to guide bombers in aerial bombardments
(relying on aerial maps) were utilized to coordinate the first ever
wide scale bombing of civilian targets a practice that was as
equally disturbing as the use of mustard gas in the trench warfare
that existed on the ground. In January of 1915, German Zeppelins
dropped bombs on the United Kingdom and although the civilian death
toll was relatively small, the first bombing led to a dangerous
precedent as the German military would go on to continually bomb the
United Kingdom leading to more civilian casualties and the
eventually expansion of targeting civilians, a practice that was
used to an extreme significant degree by all sides in World War Two
and continued through every conflict in the world up to the present
day.
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