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Abstract
In March 1942, the Director of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey made a public appeal via the BBC Radio. Godfrey requested listeners to send in holiday photographs and postcards of Europe, particularly places of potential military interest. Over 80,000 people responded with holiday snaps forming a comprehensive library that by 1944 totaled ten million images. Relevant photographs garnered from the public for Operation Overlord were incorporated into military briefing materials, along with maps and zero-elevation aerial photographs, then issued to assault troops in preparation for the invasion of France in June 1944. While the material was largely returned to the British public, over 750,000 images were reproduced and remain in British archives. Over seventy years later, German photographer Simon Menner accessed the Imperial War Museum archive to digitize part of the collection for a photographic project that was not fully realized. This article considers Menner’s engagement with these records as a means by which this obscure national achievement has come to light beyond military history research. It also foregrounds the tension between political conflict surrounding digitization of declassified state and vernacular material, and Menner’s photographic intervention as a protagonist in the ongoing efforts to access formerly secret or confidential government material.
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the kind assistance of Helen Mavin, Head of Photographs; Andrew Webb, Media Sales & Licensing Executive, Imperial War Museum, and the artist Simon Menner, Berlin. This article was commissioned by Gil Pasternak, guest editor of this special issue of Photography & Culture, as a contribution to his research project Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts – DigiCONFLICT (2018–2021), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage, grant agreement number 699523), implemented in the United Kingdom by the Arts and Humanities Research Council – AHRC, Project Ref AH/S000119/1.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Godfrey was Ian Fleming’s direct supervisor in Naval Intelligence. The British Library states that prior to the early-1950s most programming was transmitted live and only pre-recorded inserts are likely to have survived. https://www.bl.uk/help/search-the-catalogues-for-radio-recordings
2 As part of the subterfuge the War Office made it appear to the Germans that they were likely to invade at Calais whilst secretly planning a Normandy destination.
3 Set up under the former Times journalist Donald McLachlan liaising with Ian Fleming (Rankin, 306).
4 Records also exist in the National Archives, Kew and the National Archives, Washington DC. See for example, National Archives, UK records, Photographic Intelligence for Operation "Overlord", AIR 40/1959 and Operation Overlord, Volumes 1 and 2: Prior to the Operation, with annexures and photographs, 1944 June 01–1944 June 06 WO 219/5331. As British archives were either closed or copying services suspended during the writing of this paper due to the 2020 pandemic, it was not possible to determine any individuals who submitted photographs or postcards, nor trace any letters or oral records related this event.
5 I was unable to clarify the reasons for the retraction of the offer by IWM.
6 Under United Kingdom copyright legislation, a work for which a copyright owner is either unknown or cannot be located is referred to as an orphan work. A licensing scheme was introduced in 2014 under which a user can apply for a licence to use such works. The administrative and financial burden of applying this exemption to a mass image archive is both unwieldy and economically unviable.
7 It is unclear if this was during the same broadcast by Godfrey or an additional announcement.
8 Odette Sansom was a French-British citizen who heard the broadcast by Slessor in spring 1942. She went on to work as an agent in France for the British Government. Jerrard Tickell wrote a book about her life as a spy titled Odette the Story of a British Agent, 1950.
9 Operation Biting also known as the Bruneval Raid took place on the 27–28 February 1942.
10 Admiralty Photographic Library [nid 11]/Joint Intelligence Bureau Library. IWM Collection metadata for PC1878. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205001872. Thanks to Simon Menner for information on the archive.
11 IWM is a legal place of deposit for particular government records, notably photographs and film produced by the Ministry of Defence. This is a relationship that pre-dates the Public Records Act 1958. Official photographs and film were deposited by the War Office, Admiralty, Air Ministry, and Ministry of Information for example after the First and Second World Wars including those of the Admiralty Photographic Library. Correspondence with Helen Mavin, Head of Photographs, Imperial War Museum, 2 October 2020.
12 Photographs were also published in or accompanied other publications including The English Channel Handbook, published by the Hydrographic Department, Admiralty, London, 1943; and the Neptune Monograph, prepared by Commander Task Force 122, April 1944. The latter was classified BIGOT, the highest security classification standing for British Invasion of German Occupied Territory. Operation Neptune referred to the assault phase of Operation Overlord on June 6.
13 Georges Seurat, Port-en-Bessin at High Tide, 1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. According to the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, this postcard may also have accompanied the booklet Small Ports on the Normandy Coast.
14 I.S.I.S. (Inter-Service Intelligence Service) Report on France Volume 2 Normandy West of the Seine, C.B. 4096 J, published by the Inter-Service Topographical Department January 1943. The volume consisted of a total of six pamphlets bound together with cord. The volumes of interest here are Part VIII (A) Photographs of Part V (A) Coast, Beaches, and Exits, C.B. 4096 J (20) April 1943 (113 photographs); and Part VIII (A) (continued), supplementary photographs of Part V (A) Coast, Beaches, and Exits, B.R. 876 J (20) (A), March 1944. 1943–1944 (74 photographs).
15 Halftone is a reprographic technique that simulates continuous-tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size or in spacing, therefore generating a gradient-like effect for mechanical printing and patented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1852.
16 For recent scholarship on the snapshot and family photographs see Zuromskis (Citation2013) and Phu, Brown, and Dewan (Citation2017).
17 Reproduced in Caddick-Adams (Citation2019, 351). The postcard included here is from the author’s collection as the copy in the IWM has not been digitized by the museum.
18 For a comprehensive overview of the importance of weather forecasting for the June 6 invasion see Caddick-Adams (Citation2019, 339–352).
19 The regularity of storms along this section of the French coast caused the Americans to build two artificial harbors called Mulberry A off Omaha Beach and Mulberry B at Gold Beach near the French village of Arromanches along with a man-made reef to protect the invasion troops. See War Cabinet Chiefs of Staff Committee Minutes of Meeting, September 16, 1943, point 6., Artificial Harbours (C.O.S. (43)524(0)), 4.
20 Reproduced in the I.S.I.S. report and Paul Winter, D-Day Documents, 82.
21 Information supplied by Simon Menner from a photograph of the handwritten notes on the verso of the IWM image. Sincere thanks to friends for assistance including Victoria Souliman-Sura, Benoît Deney, Martine Antle, and Lachlan Warner.
22 After 1941, Germany, under Adolf Hitler, built a coastal defense system comprising concrete bunkers and barriers incorporated into natural cliffs along the coastline between the North Sea and the Atlantic Coast spanning over 6000 kilometres. This wall transformed Nazi-occupied Europe into an impregnable fortress.
23 See Schwartz (2020) for an elaborated discussion on photographs in archives and the history of archival guidelines.
24 An anonymous member of the public uploaded to the BBC/British Museum ‘A History of the World’ a photograph of a holiday album belonging to his father. The album had been sent into the Admiralty after the 1942 appeal and featured photographs of the Rhine Valley and Black Forest. The album was returned to the family in July 1945. www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/Xz3kaIAiRBCqVj3Hg-q9xQ
25 The IWM image library was unfortunately unable to provide the location of the photographs because the image inscriptions were not on the collection record.
26 For example, in addition to general collection and privacy policies the Imperial War Museum includes those concerning access, copyright and re-use, and social media. It is also subject to government legislation such as the UK Government’s Licensing Framework, Crown Copyright, Re-Use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015, The Imperial War Museum Acts 1920 and 1955, relevant Statutory Instruments, the Museums and Galleries Act 1992, The Public Records Act 1958 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000. See John Tagg on photographic records, institutional and state power (1988, 60–65). See Pennell (Citation2019) concerning the political implications of digitizing state records after conflict.
27 The Act was amended in 1989, which removed section 2 of the public interest defense from the 1911 amendments.
28 Sassoon frames her discussion of digitizing collections with Walter Benjamin’s iconic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935. These arguments need not be reiterated here. See also John Tagg (Citation1988).
29 In 2013 Volodymyr Viatrovych, historian and former Director of the Security Services of Ukraine Special State Archive Department, discussed how Ukraine’s future as an independent country and democratic society rests on the proposition that restoring the nation’s historical memory is a critically important precondition to overcome Ukraine’s Soviet past and to bring about national reconciliation. D-Archives: How Digitizing Declassified Documents Can Restore Ukraine’s National Memory and Build an Independent, Democratic Country. April 16, 2013. Woodrow Wilson Center. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/d-archives-how-digitizing-declassified-documents-can-restore-ukraines-national-memory-and
30 Such as Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings, 2005. On artists and archives see Enwezor (Citation2008) and Foster (2004).
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Donna West Brett
Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); and co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019). Her recent research has been published in Photography & Culture, Photographies, and Passagen des Exils, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch. Brett is a recipient of the 2017 Australian Academy of the Humanities, Ernst and Rosemarie Keller Award, Research Leader for the Photographic Cultures Research Group, and Editorial Member of the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury.