French Ministry of Defence Photo Archive - Indochina (Vietnam)

http://www.ecpad.fr/tag/fonds-guerre-dindochine

An interesting set of photographs of French operations in Indochina in the early to mid 1950s. I hope they are of interest to forum members.

A recommended read to accompany the photos would be Martin Windrow's 'The Last Valley'.

Note: the ecpad site also contains a lot of sets of German PK photographs - a random check in the 'photos' tab today found a good set of photos of Fallschirmjager ops in Italy in 1943!

 

This is a great site indeed. They are currently digitizing thousands of pictures which are progressively released to the public. I recommend going there from time to time and see the "new" pictures

 

Agreed. The PK stuff is very good as, to readers of english-language books, the photographs are generally unfamiliar. I think After the Battle uses ECPAD alot and that's always a good read.

 

I've been enjoying many great videos there. If you type "1944" in the history section, you'll get both some great German pictures and some French videos about the 1st free French armored Division during the battle of Montbeliard, Belfort and Mulhouse.

 

Thanks for the info skipper. I've mainly been looking at the Indochina stuff so I might have missed that.

Looking at the ECPAD stuff reminds me of reading about some lorries full of PK photos that were sent out from Berlin in April 1945; the German Govt. decided to destroy the PK photos from all fronts. An officer disagreed and sent some lorries full of PK negatives westwards. The lorry carrying the Ostfront PK negatives just vanished. It's intruiging to think about what might have happened to lorry; it would be an amazing 'barn find'!

 

Some really interesting pics in there, thanks for posting.

 

Here is one of the Liberation of Corsica . Not many people know this region was liberated as early as 1943

http://www.ecpad.fr/la-liberation-de-la-corse-9-septembre-4-octobre-1943

 

Some great photos there. Thanks for posting.
I was very interested in the Italian ones!

Lesley

 

Hi Lesley, then you should try key words like "italien" , "Italie" , "Monte Cassino", "Mont Cassin", "Sicile", "Anzio", "Ligne Gothique" etc...

 

Lou with an automatic translation option suggested by Google on top of the page, it's quite easy.