I’ve seen photos of the streets of Caen and several other Normandy towns from the 1930’s featured in history books as examples of unchanged medieval architecture. Long since gone, gone with the wind.
In Italy, the Tower of Pisa almost got exploded to get rid of a German sniper. Luckily, he beat a retreat when he could do no more to stop the advance. The Eremitani Church in Italy was photographed not too many months or years (i forget) before it wound up getting destroyed by allied bombing in 1944.