Aerial Maps and World War One
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios

Defined Tag: 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.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, Amazon, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.