Photographs offer 3D view of World War I

Photographs taken by pioneering pilots during the World War I are showing a different side of life on the Western Front.

Members of the Royal Flying Corps, which later became the RAF, took hundreds of thousands of pictures which were used to help plan the war effort.

Some of them have been transformed using 3D technology to offer a glimpse of the war as it was seen from the skies and will feature in a BBC1 documentary The World War I From Above.

Its director Mark Radice said: “Even though they’re nearly a century old, the resolution on these aerial photographs is so good, that we were able to turn them into three-dimensional images that we could fly around.”

The pictures, taken over Diksmuide in Belgium, show a German barracks camouflaged under some trees.

But the green-fingered soldiers had planted flowerbeds which gave away their position to the spotters in the sky and later pictures show the aftermath of a British attack.

Belgian archaeologist Birger Stichelbaut said: “The act of making flowerbeds really drove the attention towards the site.

“This is actually what happened a couple of months later, the landscape is already peppered with shell holes, and a lot of the barracks have already been destroyed.”

The World War I From Above is on BBC1 at 9 p.m. on Sunday.