New Online Archive Puts 223,575 Wartime Photographs and Maps in One Place

A helmeted US soldier leans on a stone balustrade and looks through binoculars across the bay at smoke rising over Manila in February 1945.

A US soldier watches Manila burn from the beach at Parañaque, 8 February 1945. US Army Signal Corps photograph, the Wartime Archive.

The Wartime Archive holds 219,834 photographs, 3,741 maps and 4,977 military documents from before World War I through Korea, to download, license or print.

A lot of this material was spread around and hard to find. I wanted it in one place where anyone can search it and download it straight away.”

— Paul Fearn, The Wartime Archive

WALES, October 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Wartime Archive has opened at wartimearchive.com with 219,834 photographs, 3,741 maps and 4,977 military documents, from before World War I through Korea. Every picture can be searched by unit, aircraft, ship, place, date or name.

The American material includes 35,293 photographs taken by the American air forces, filed by theater from England and Italy to Burma, China and the Pacific, among them 4,960 of the B-17 Flying Fortress and 2,280 of the B-24 Liberator. Another 16,587 come from the US Army Signal Corps, filed by division and place: the armored and airborne divisions, the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam. The 12th Army Group's daily situation maps run from Normandy in June 1944 to July 1945.

From the other side of the line there are 16,732 photographs from the German press house in occupied Poland and 2,699 German situation maps drawn by the staffs at the time, one set for each campaign from 1939 to 1945, including Stalingrad. British, French, Canadian, Italian, Japanese and Russian sources fill out the rest: tanks, ships, airfields, nose art, propaganda posters, insignia and aerial reconnaissance photographs.

The documents run to 577,607 pages, each one a complete PDF. They include the histories and after-action reports of divisions, regiments, battalions and squadrons, field manuals, and the finding guides to the German military records captured at the end of the war. 112 are free to download.

Any picture can be ordered as a print, cropped the way the buyer wants it. The buyer draws the crop on the picture and picks a size, and each size is marked for how well it will print. Photographic prints start at $6, with fine art prints on Hahnemühle paper and framed prints, shipped to the United States and 50 other countries.

Personal-use downloads start at $12.99, and pictures can be licensed for books, magazines and video at full resolution. Schools and universities can subscribe to the whole archive by the year.

More photographs, maps and documents are being added, and wartime film footage will follow.

Paul Fearn, who runs the archive, said: "A lot of this material was spread around and hard to find. I wanted it in one place where anyone can search it and download it straight away."

The original photographs are in the public domain. What the archive sells is its reproduction of each one and the research attached to it.

About the Wartime Archive
The Wartime Archive is run by PL Photography Limited trading as Piemags, Wales, United Kingdom (company 10803986). Images for coverage of the archive are free on request.

Paul Fearn
The Wartime Archive
+44 7397 868762
info@wartimearchive.com
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