WWII US Soldier's camera found in foxhole - Or Not...

[mekender]

So this story is making the rounds:
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/07/153090- ... rettyPhoto

And a local gunnie piped up and said:

I have a book that has been with me for a very long time: WWII - a photographic record of the war in Europe from D-Day to V-E Day by Ralph D. Martin and Richard Harrity, published by Fawcett Publications and copyrighted in 1962. In the section of the book covering the Battle of the Bulge there is a picture captioned: "The lonely ones had memories." It is identical, however much clearer, to the picture shown on the web page labeled "Photo 2".

So... It seems that things that may be too good to be true are...

[Aesop]

I'm open to specialist expertise, but I find it somewhat dubious that any exposed film sitting buried in a camera in the woods around Bastogne for 70 years was successfully extracted, developed, and printed.
Actual movies in controlled climates, already exposed, stored in film vaults, fall apart much faster than this.
I suspect this is pure malarkey, aimed to play on sympathies and make a buck or gain someone their fifteen minutes, after they found the hulk of a camera, and thought, "Hey, what if we said..."

[mekender]

So here is the photo in question from the book, taken by a guy on my local gun forum:

[Rod]

All over Facebook and I've said it's pretty much BS. First, the photos I saw were in other places and it's not hard to fake grainy shots. Second, the camera, much less the film, buried in wet soil would have disintegrated by now; the metal and other parts weren't that sturdy.

[mekender]

http://factually.gizmodo.com/discovery- ... 603607082/

[Aesop]

Gizmodo is either too kind, or too lazy, I can't tell which.

Someone perpetrated a hoax, but pointing to merely a lack of subsequent denials, I think that someone is far more likely to be the guy standing in a photo with metal detector and camera hulk in hand, than to try and pin this on "the Internet", standing in electronically for Sumdood.

As it's rather hard to claim that half a book's worth of carefully selected photos photoshopped themselves and miraculously attached themselves to the original story, the silence is deafening, and points to a sense of the culprit's true doucheworthiness, exactly as roundly suspected from the outset.

[scipioafricanus]

Take note that Gizmodo and, its sister site, IO9 love the truth and science so much that they routinely promote "climate change" as fact.

SA