Pointe du Hoc Battlefield Survey

[the_historian]

I meant to post this a few days ago-

Many of the CAIRN members that attended the last two FOC conferences will be aware of the survey work we are doing at the D-Day site of Pointe du Hoc in Normandy. We will be continuing our survey work from March 10-20 and if any CAIRN members are in the area and would like to visit us please feel free to visit. We will be doing some geo-physical work, laser scanning and some low level aerial photography work.

One of the things I am particularly interested in is identifying individual bomb and shell craters and tying them to a particular air-raid and size of bomb. The aerial photography record is not complete and only about 25% of the craters can be attributed to a particular raid. I am going to investigate if there is a way to identify a crater by analysis of its physical dimensions and I would be interested to know if any CAIRN members are aware of any similar work in this area.

Richard


Dr. Richard Burt, MRICS
Associate Professor & Associate Department Head
Department of Construction Science
Texas A&M University
TX, 77843-3137

979-845-0994

*******************

Richard and Peter: There is a formal process for crater analysis, although it may not give you ordnance size specifically. The references I have are:

U.S. War Dept. Technical Manual TM E9-1901 - Identification of Japanese Shells and shell Fragments; Location of Enemy Batteries dated 1945 (This is the intro to Crater Analysis).

United Nations
2003 Crater Analysis. School for Peace Support Operations Training Manual, New York. I have a copy - this is a color spiral bound piece meant to go with a power point based training session.

The two together provide the basis of large ordnance crater analysis. The TM should be findable by interlibrary loan. The UN one, I am not so sure, but try ILL. If you don't turn it up, let me know and I will copy what I have.

Doug Scott