Tokyo Bay Flyover 1945

[mike13]

This picture has been in at least two issues of "Tailhook " magazine. Sometime it's known as "Halsey's Whimsey". Over 1200 aircraft were involved from 15 air groups. No mention of B-29s but then it is a Navy magazine. Of course the ship in the foreground is the USS Missouri.
Mike13

[BigGrey]

Well Kevin, you better contact the National Archives and tell them it appears someone photoshopped the pics they've had for years.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/even ... /js-8i.htm

Les

_________________

Am I to understand that there are no fakes in the National Archives?

Faked mass-flyovers were quite the fashion in those days. The magic of the darkroom was as good as photoshopping today.

I still see repeated patterns, sometimes reversed, in this photo. The reversed finger-four formations present a question -- did the Navy pilots do it "either way"? My guess is that someone took the original picture and then "multiplied" portions of it to increase the effect. That the resulting image wound up in the Archives does not make it true.

Kevin,
.

I'm sorry, I just don't see the reversed or multiplied formations. The spacing on the different formations is not the same. I don't see exact multiples of anything in the photo.
I won't argue over whether there are fakes in the archives or not. I don't have proof either way, do you?

Les

[Jerry O'Neill]

I work with photoshop everyday and I don't think this pic was faked. The old school of "retouching" photos from WWII was not nearly as good as what we have now. I can tell almost all photos from that era that were "retouched" or added to.

This photo doesn't have repeats or image flopping at all. The spacing is different and unique on all the similar formations and the perspective is accurate for the angle of the photo. Perspective is one of the harder things to do and make it look right when you copy images to add to an existing one. All these aircraft have a unique perspective to the camera. The minute you try to multiply and flip images, the perspective from the camera's viewpoint changes, hence you'd have aircraft that looked as though they are flying away to the left or right, depending upon where you placed the "copied" image.

Not a fake IMHO!
Jerry

[Warbird Kid]

Im gonna chalk this one up to NOT being fake as well. I also work with Photoshop, but do not consider myself a" know it all" by any means.

just looking at what's presented in front of me.

[Obergrafeter]

Well my friend was really taken in by all the fakerery. He thought he looked up and saw mass formation after mass formation. I guess the federal archive guys were out there with mirrors and smoke. He says that there were shlt loads of airplanes and they didn't need no photoshop.

[Bluedharma]

Interesting read from someone who was there.

**** article link here ******

Komisarek also participated in a massive flyover during the formal surrender of Japanese forces aboard the USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945. Leonard's son, Greg,
said his father felt honored to participate in the flyover but regarded it as the most dangerous flying he experienced during the war,
since so many planes were clogging the skies over the destroyer.

There must have been "a few" aircraft!

[kenlyco]

If you fast forward to the last 10 sec. of this vid. they got some footage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcnH_kF1 ... re=related

[dors]

Interesting read from someone who was there.

I think that article is a fake... just kidding

[TAdan]

The thousands of eye witness accounts are good enough to convince me.

[Bluedharma]

I still would be interested to hear the average Japanese point of view.

I can only imagine… here are the Americans.
Their “god” had spoken to them for the first time saying they must endure the unendurable.
Propaganda has told them that Americans rape women and eat children.

They look up to the sky that had rained bombs days before… to see this flyby.
I can not imagine the fear they must have felt.
Or did they feel something else?

[n5151ts]

Interesting read from someone who was there.

I think that article is a fake... just kidding

what if someone claiming to be you is posting this and you(they) are the impostor...........
ow...my brain huts now......

[JDK]

Interesting thread.

It was quite common for photographs of real events to be adjusted / combined /remade from multiple images to illustrate that image for the news.

A manipulated images isn't a faked one - nor does a manipulated image mean what it depicts didn't happen, just that a news-quality picture wasn't available for the press, so they created one.

While I agree with Jerry that an experienced person can spot a faked image, I don't agree that all retouchers were amateurs compared to today's PhotoShop wizards - then, as now, there were some people who were very good.

In most cases, most published images of W.W.II that were printed in the news media of the time were retouched to some degree; from hiding 'secret' aerials on shops and aircraft, 'confidential' scenery in the background, and just the everyday cleaning up images by 'duffing out' extraneous material.

There are certainly thousands of retouched / manipulated images in the National Archives. As they are mostly fair interpretations of what they depict, I'd not suggest they are 'faked' but little was published without some work - sometimes a lot. Often it's possible to find a retouched version and an unretouched version of the same subject.

I don't know that the image under discussion is un-manipulated; as Gerry says, there's enough differences in the discernible aircraft that they aren't doublings; and his explanation, I agree with too - but I'd be wary of being dogmatic that there's nothing extra (for 'news effect') added in the background, from such a low quality late generation image.