[HN Gopher] Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (2019)
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       Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (2019)
        
       Author : omnibrain
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2022-02-06 09:34 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | Though I am uninterested in Capa, much less what stories he might
       | have told, but was fascinated by the process described by the
       | author to try to figure out what really happened. It was like a
       | write up of diagnosing a tricky bug from logs and core dumps, or
       | of tracking an intruder or other computer security issue.
        
         | beerandt wrote:
         | Clicking through to the more detailed blogs was quite the
         | unexpected rabbithole.
        
       | jihadjihad wrote:
       | A fascinating read. I was unfamiliar with the story of Capa, and
       | found this Wikipedia article [0] on the "surviving" photographs
       | to be interesting in that it mentions the fact that recent
       | research has called into question the legitimacy of the overall
       | story.
       | 
       | 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Eleven
        
       | thenaturalist wrote:
       | Fantastic read, thank you for sharing!
        
       | tialaramex wrote:
       | "In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of
       | which appears to be black from here some of the time."
       | 
       | It would be practically impossible in the 1940s to have faked the
       | _photographs_ but it 's not difficult at all to misrepresent what
       | they are photographs of, the circumstances in which they were
       | taken, and how they came to be available.
       | 
       | Facts are true, and we should rightly ridicule people who insist
       | otherwise, but the _interpretation_ of those facts is subtle and
       | subject to much mischief.
       | 
       | Most of the WW2 photographs I've spent time looking at were
       | subject to an altogether more scientific consideration of this
       | problem. They're aerial reconnaissance photos, so, _hopefully_
       | they 're pictures of something the enemy doesn't want you to know
       | about, captured at great risk by expert pilots in unarmed
       | aeroplanes (a camera plus film goes where the guns would
       | otherwise fit in the plane). But in this case the answer to the
       | question "What is actually captured in this photograph?" is known
       | only to the enemy who've no intention of telling you, so you have
       | to guess and you'd better guess right.
       | 
       | For example, suppose you've never seen a modern rocket. You've
       | seen the powder-filled devices of course - still popular today as
       | fireworks and sometimes for simple amateur rocketry (for
       | beginners or children) but never a liquid fuelled rocket. Now,
       | somebody shows you a photo with scale of a prototype German V-2
       | rocket and they propose this is a rocket, one of Hitler's
       | vengeance weapons, with a range of perhaps 200 miles. It'd be so
       | fast you can't hope to intercept or avoid it, once launched it is
       | unstoppable. We must do everything possible to destroy them
       | first, right? But on the other hand, whoever heard of a rocket
       | with such ludicrous range - maybe it's a hoax, intended to do
       | nothing more than divert Allied bombing away from valuable fuel
       | and real military targets...
        
       | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-07 23:01 UTC)