The Eagles Over Europe (EOE) Project

[Larry Hickey]

Ed,

Thanks for the encouragement. I just hope this isn't different than "last time."

Another point that I want to make about the EOE DB. One of the efforts upon which we are expending a lot of resources is locating and matching photography of every aircraft damage/crash that we possibly can and integrating this "photo intelligence" into both our loss data base and captions for our photo collection. We have matched up a very large number of crash photos with the specifics of the incidents and added many a/c codes, W.Nr.s and details of what happened to the aircraft, particularly in the case of shoot downs from either flak or fighters, to our DB. This has only become remotely feasible due to the huge number of crash photos that have appeared in recent years on internet sites such as eBay, where one can see as many new, useful photos in a day as you used to see in the new literature in a year. The owners of several major photo collections have joined our project, and we have been able to acquire a very large number of photos of the aircraft losses, both Allied and Luftwaffe, in this way. The handwritten captions on the back often are invaluable in helping us pinpoint which crash or forced-landing in our data base this photo represents, and since loss info in the Luftwaffe QM reporting is often only the area the plane was last seen, a photo on the ground with a specific location is often as precious as gold to us. I encourage anyone who can help us match crash/damage photos with the Luftwaffe loss reporting, to give us a hand. Even if its for only a single photo for which you have info, or a small number of them. We're not just interested in the "big fish," but the little ones too.

You've seen me ask some questions related to this problem on the TOCH Board, sometimes with marvelous results. So if you have any unique photos and want to share scans of them with us, we'd be glad to hear from you. We're also systematically searching and obtaining photos for our data base from the major "official" collections in Europe and the USA, which we've been scouring for the past three years both for photos and identification info. We may well publish 10,000 or more photos in our various volumes from the 16-month period we're covering, and I assure you that it will be the most comprehensive collection of Luftwaffe photography for our period that has ever been presented. Period.

I also want to thank all of those who've contacted me on the Private Message Board and offered your assistance and support. It is most welcome.

All for now.

Regards,