Over the Top is a famous Canadian photograph from the First World War which features Canadian soldiers, climbing over a trench, guns at the ready as they head out into the field of battle against Germans.
It is an impactful photograph.
It is also fake.
The photograph was not taken on the battlefield but during training and away from the front lines.
The soldiers held rifles that had practice covers over them, and one soldier was thumbing his nose, in the finished product, the covers were removed, and the thumb was altered.
The photograph ran in newspapers with stories stating every man was killed soon after and praised the bravery of the photographer who took it.
That photo was a fake but Canadian war photographers during the First World War did put their lives on the line to capture beautiful and haunting images I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx, and today I’m sharing some of those stories.
At a second-story window of his country house in Le Gras, France, inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, placed a camera obscura, loaded with a polished, light-sensitive, bitumen-coated, pewter plate, and aimed it toward the view outside. He then uncovered the lens. The result: the earliest surviving photograph from a camera.
Called Titled View from the Window at Le Gras, it dates back to 1826 and although the image is grainy and depicts a roof and some buildings it marked a milestone in a new medium.
Twelve years later Louis Daguerre took the earliest known photograph containing people in 1838’s View of the Boulevard du Temple where you’ll see a man getting his boots shined in the bottom left corner.
It would take less than a decade for this new art form to make its way to the battle front.
(beat)
War is an ever-present part of human history, and in 1847 an unknown photographer captured the first images of combat during the Mexican American War in 1847.
These early war photographs could not capture moving subjects. They focused on portraits of soldiers, the land before and after a battle, fortifications, and anything else sedentary.
During the Crimean War, the first official attempts at war photography were made by the British government. They commissioned photographer Gilbert Elliott in March 1854 to capture photographs of Russian fortifications along the coast of the Baltic Sea.
Roger Fenton was also commissioned by the British government to provide photographic coverage of the war. The war was unpopular with the British public, and it was hoped Fenton’s photographs could swing public opinion.
But it wasn’t until the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 that war photography reached a new level of sophistication.
Photographers like Haley Sims and Alexander Gardner rearranged bodies of dead soldiers during the war to create better compositions and capture atrocities in battle.
These photos showed the horrific reality of the Civil War to the public, even if they were a bit fabricated.
Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, war photography grew in scope as both governments and news organizations sent photographers to the front lines.
Then, in 1914 the First World War began, and war photography was about to enter a new age.
At the start of the war, in July 1914, the Canadian government made no efforts to capture the war through official photographs.
It was generally accepted by both leaders and troops that the war would be over by Christmas.
That was not the case as both the Allies and the Germans became entrenched in a long and bloody stalemate.
By this point in history, cameras were smaller and cheaper, so the art of war photography fell into the hands of the soldiers themselves.
This worried Command as they believed photographs taken on the front line could jeopardize battle plans.
Troops were banned from taking photographs with their own cameras.
But that didn’t stop Jack Turner.
Born in Canada in 1889, he was a soldier with the Second Canadian Siege Battery.
While at the front lines, he smuggled in a German-built camera that was two inches by three inches. To get film, he sent coded letters to his parents. When he wrote that he wanted cigarettes, that was code for a roll of film.
He developed many of the 99 photographs he took of the war in the corner of a bombed-out building he happened to live in while stationed near the front lines in 1917.
But some of his photos remained undeveloped until the 1970s.
As the war raged on, the number of casualties increased, and Turner’s photos provided a unique glimpse into the war without censoring or fabrication.
Meanwhile back at home front there was a need to build more support for the war. Enter into the picture, pardon the pun, Max Aitken.
Aitken was born in 1879 in Maple, Ontario. He was one of ten children to Willian and Jane Aitken who moved the family to New Brunswick when Max was a year old. At the age of 13, he started up his own newspaper, The Leader, beginning a long relationship with print media.
Throughout the early-1900s, he made a name for himself. He invested in the Montreal Herald, founded the Montreal Engineering Company, and oversaw the construction of the Horseshoe Falls hydro station.
By the time he moved to Britain in 1910, he was a multi-millionaire thanks to his business acumen.
But it’s important to note that his departure from Canada was hastened by accusations of underwriting stocks to earn extra profits and allegations of price-gouging and poor management in his cement plants.
The same year he arrived in Britain, he was elected to the British Parliament where he became close friends with Bonar Law, future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and a fellow Canadian.
In 1911, Aitken was knighted by King George V and for the next few years, he invested heavily in newspapers in the United Kingdom.
After the First World War began, Aitken campaigned for a cabinet post in the British government but was unsuccessful.
Looking for something more substantial to do during the war, he turned to Canada and his friends Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden and Sir Sam Hughes, the Canadian Minister of Militia.
They appointed him as the Official Eye Witness, a new title that didn’t really have much power behind it.
He was also made an honorary Lt. Colonel.
Taking his new title, Aitken wrote articles from the Western Front about Canadian troops, which were published in many newspapers he owned in the United Kingdom and Canada.
In mid-1915, he became the Canadian Records Officer.
Seeing the need for support on the Home Front, he argued that photographs could help connect people at home with the conflict, while boosting the profile of Canadian soldiers.
Provided with a $25,000 government grant, he established the Canadian War Records Office.
One of the first things he did was hire an official war photographer.
That photographer was Capt. Harry Edward Knobel.
Born in 1871 in England, Knobel enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force on Aug. 27, 1914, only three weeks after the war began.
While serving with the Second Canadian Brigade, he quickly moved up the ranks, going from private to captain in the span of only one year.
He was made Canada’s official war photographer on May 11, 1916.
Many of the images Knobel took were not of the battlefront instead he captured the farewell dinner of British General Louis Lipsett on June 28, 1916, and of a kitten born in the trenches taking a drink from a coffee cup.
Unfortunately, his time at the front lines took its toll and he developed PTSD. His hands developed tremors, making it difficult to take photographs.
The last war photograph he took was of three swans in a lake near the Ypres battlefield.
After time in hospital, he returned to Canada.
In August 1916, he was replaced by Ivor Castle who had 20 years of experience photographing international conflicts.
He was highly skilled but also not against staging photographs to tell a story which Aitken allowed.
Four of the first photographs Castle took are arguably the most famous, but also some of the most doctored.
The first photograph in the four-photograph series was called Fixing Bayonets Previous To A Charge By Canadians On The Somme.
The troops in the image were not charging into battle, but in training.
After the photograph was taken, Castle removed the rifle covers using techniques he had learned over the years.
The second image in the series I mentioned at the beginning of this episode featured troops going over the top of the trench into battle.
However, as you know by now, it too was faked.
Shells bursting in the sky were added in the background later, and the man thumbing his nose had his hand removed from the photo… you could even say… he fixed it in post.
The third photograph, The Last Over The Top, also had practice covers from the rifles removed from the photo and only one copy of the photograph was printed in Illustrated War News with one rifle featuring its cover.
This error was cropped out in later reproductions.
The last photograph in the series was called Canadians Charging On The Somme and first appeared in British newspapers in October 1916. But it wasn’t described as showing the 20th Canadian Infantry Battalion at the Battle of Courcelette.
By December 1916, 150 photographs by Castle, including those four I mentioned and images of a variety of things from the war including ruined villages and prisoners of war, were shown at Grafton Galleries in London.
The show was opened by Sir George Perley, Canada’s Minister of Overseas Military Force, his wife Lady Perley, Princess Patricia, and Max Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook.
The four photographs that I highlighted had stories added to them that were far from true, as they were taken away from the battlefield.
Castle leaned into the fabrication himself by saying,
“Taking photographs of the men going over the parapet is quite exciting. Nothing, of course, can be arranged.”
Regardless, the exhibit was a massive success as over 80,000 visitors saw the photographs over the course of six weeks.
The Daily Mirror stated,
“The exhibition constitutes a record in war photography. Nothing like it has been seen before.”
When newspapers needed an image from the front lines, they often used Castle’s photographs even if they had nothing to do with the story.
On April 11, 1917, the Daily Mirror printed Over the Top in a report on Vimy Ridge, five days before Castle’s photos of that battle reached the newspapers.
The caption stated the photograph was of Canadians at the Somme.
Some of Castle’s actual Vimy Ridge photographs were also altered with dead bodies and shell bursts added after the fact.
Soon after the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, Castle’s photo exhibit traveled to Canada for a series of shows.
The exhibit was joined by Major Maurice Boehm.
Major Boehm sailed to England in October 1916, then joined the War Records Office in February 1917.
He went back to Canada in April 1917 and traveled with the exhibit sharing fantastic tales relating to the photographs even though he had seen little, if any combat.
Around this same time, William Rider-Rider was hired as Castle’s assistant. He eventually replaced Castle as official photographer sometime in the summer of 1917. There are claims that Castle had developed PTSD, but I was unable to verify this.
Castle may have been gone from the front lines, but his old photos were still being used in newspapers battle reports.
In an article on the Battle of Passchendaele, which occurred from July to November 1917, the Glasgow Daily Record used the photographs Fixing Bayonets Previous To A Charge and Canadians Charging On the Somme from a year earlier.
On Nov. 18, 1917, Le Mirror used Over the Top with a caption stating the image was from the beginning of the attack at Passchendaele.
With each publication, it seemed that the stories in the photographs became more fantastic.
Often captions stated that every man in the photo had been killed just after the photo was taken, while Castle was half-buried in a shell blast.
On Aug. 30, 1918, another wild fabrication as the picture was included in Amateur Photographs Weekly and the article stated,
“It will be noted that all the men in it are smiling except one. This is said to be typical of the men as they go over. The unsmiling one had a grouch, because having managed to get some booze the night before, he had received not only punishment but also a big head. Curiously enough, he was one of the three to come back alive.”
Castle’s photographs went on a tour of the United States in the hopes that it would bolster American support for the war.
And also raised money for the Canadian War Memorials Fund.
The New York Mail wrote Over The Top and its photographer,
“It spattered his helmet and left him unharmed but when he lifted his eyes, not a man in the group he had just snapped was standing.”
While Castle’s successor William Rider-Rider remained as the official war photographer for the rest of the war, it was not easy on him.
By the end of the war, Canada’s war photographers had captured 6,500 photographs.
While some may have been fabricated, many were not.
They give us a glimpse of the war from the eyes of the soldier, from the trenches to the shelled landscape of No Man’s Land.
After the war was over, William Rider-Rider was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, while Ivor Castle was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
The art of war photography continued on from World War One and gave those away from the conflict incredible insights on the impact of battle.
Joining me today is Carla-Jean Stokes, an expert in Canadian war photography who earned her Master of History from Wilfrid Laurier University and has a Masters of Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University.
