More than five million detailed aerial photographs from World War II went online [maybe down due to overloading] this week, giving the public their first views of some of the most dramatic and grisly moments of the conflict. From the smoke billowing from the incinerator of the Auschwitz concentration camp in which millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis, to the U.S. landings on Omaha beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, the pictures tell dramatic stories. "These images allow us to see the real war at first hand," project head Allan William said. "It is like a live action replay." "They were declassified years ago, but it takes days to find an individual image. Now they have been digitized and will be on the Internet, it takes seconds," he told Reuters. Wartime planners depended heavily on aerial photography -- and in particular the specialist photographic interpreters who spent hours after each sortie pouring over the pictures seeking evidence and clues -- to pick their targets. "The pictures were vital to the war effort. For example for years before the final choice of beaches was made for the D-Day landings, photographic interpreters had been watching the whole shoreline of northern France," Williams said. The pilots who took the highly detailed pictures were some of the most daring in the skies, flying unarmed, unprotected and alone often at very low level to fulfil their missions. Hundreds never returned from their perilous missions. In the Auschwitz pictures, prisoners can be seen queuing up for roll call, and in the D-Day pictures bodies can be seen floating in the sea. Apart from these gripping images -- some of more than 40 million taken over the years and lodged in the National Archives -- there are also pictures of the German battleship Bismarck hiding in a Norwegian fjord. Check them out for yourself here: www.evidenceincamera.co.uk Source Reuters