The mysterious disappearance of the Great War Island in 1941

IN HUNGARIAN

It happened on the same day, when German battleship, Bismarck sunk Hood, the pride of the British fleet at coasts of Greenland. On May 24th, 1941, the Royal Hungarian 1./3. TF flying squadron conducted aerial photography over the recently occupied Serbian capital, Beograd. With these pictures the Hungarian High Command wanted to refresh the outdated sections of the Third Military Survey (made before 1914.) The photographed area overstreched the current borders of Hungary, they flew over Serbia, western Romania and Southern Transylvania. It was very likely that these countries were forgotten to inform about this action.

This is how the Serbian capital looked like from a bird’s eye view on may 24th, 1941. According to the shadows on this picture we can tell that the photos was taken early in the morning, from which the cartographers later joined this 6065/3 section. We still see traces of war, even from this height. The middle of the railway bridge, overarching the Danube towards the Banat is missing. The bridge I. Alexander leading to Zemun is also disappeared, probably sunken in the Sava river.

Fig. 1. Section 6065/3 Beograd. Archives of the Hungarian Military Museum

Spiritual landscape of the Danube in 1941

In year 1941, Hungary regained most of its old parts, like southern Slovakia, Subcarpathia, northern Transylvania and Vojvodina. The Hungarian High Commands took efforts to revise the old maps of these territories. This country-wide mapping project started with aerial photography of Hungary. These images were assembled into orthophotos and also received labels and geographic coordinate system. You can see the result here, although many prints have been destroyed during the second world war. The surviving prints can be found at the Institute and Museum of Military History, Budapest. Recently these maps were digitised, as a member of this project I found many traces of long lost danubian branches in these black and white images.

section 4859_2 A new lake will be born.