New photos show 'flower power' in WWI

Photographs taken by pioneering pilots during the First World War are showing a different side of life on the Western Front.

Members of the Royal Flying Corps, which later became the RAF, took hundreds of thousands of pictures which were used to help plan the war effort.

Some of them have been transformed using 3D technology to offer a glimpse of the war as it was seen from the skies and will feature in a BBC1 documentary The First World War From Above.

Director Mark Radice said: "Even though they're nearly a century old, the resolution on these aerial photographs is so good, that we were able to turn them into 3D images that we could fly around."

The pictures, taken in Belgium, show a German barracks camouflaged under trees. But the soldiers planted flower-beds which gave away their position to the spotters in the sky and later pictures show the aftermath of a British attack.

The First World War From Above is on BBC1 at 9pm on Sunday November 7.