Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read compiles some previous posts featuring maps we have found to be interesting, useful, or just plain cool. The history of military affairs would be incomprehensible without maps. Without them, it would be impossible to convey the temporal and geographical character of warfare or the situational awareness of the combatants. Of course, maps are susceptible to the same methodological distortions, fallacies, inaccuracies, and errors in interpretation to be found in any historical work. As with any historical resource, they need to be regarded with respectful skepticism.
As an added bonus, here are two more links of interest. The first describes the famous map based on 1860 U.S. Census data that Abraham Lincoln used to understand the geographical distribution of slavery in the Southern states.
The second shows the potential of maps to provide new insights into history. It is an animated, interactive depiction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade derived from a database covering 315 years and 20,528 slave ship transits. It is simultaneously fascinating and sobering.
Moore’s paper and accompanying blog posts cover aspects of military cartography from mapping enemy trench lines, layouts of minefields, naval blockade zones, interpreting aerial photography, and more. The information is interesting and the maps are fascinating. Take a look.
Map from “Cartographies of Time” courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press.
We at the The Dupuy Institute love infoporn, those amazing, information-laden graphics that at once render dense, complex topics instantly understandable to the masses. Wired,Jalopnik, and Gizmodohave tags dedicated to sharing the best examples of it. Wiktionary defines infoporn as “Information which does not serve a purpose other than to hold the attention of its audience; information for information’s sake.” Perhaps so, but we at TDI feel that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Betsey Mason, a co-author of National Geographic‘s All Over The Map blog, has a profile of one of the greatest purveyors of infoporn, Charles Minard. Minard created what is considered by many to be the iconic work of information graphics, “Napoleon’s March,” or “the Minard graphic.” Created in 1869, Minard’s map depicts Imperial France’s doomed 1812-13 invasion of Russia. It traces the advance and catastrophic retreat of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armee, while simultaneously showing its gradually dwindling manpower. At age 88, Minard conveyed an essential understanding of the subject with an imaginative combination of spacial and quantitative information that continues to resonate and astonish nearly a century and a half later.
As Mason writes,
Today Minard is revered in the data-visualization world, commonly mentioned alongside other greats such as John Snow, Florence Nightingale, and William Playfair. But Minard’s legacy has been almost completely dominated by his best-known work. In fact, it may be more accurate to say that Napoleon’s March is his only widely known work. Many fans of the March have likely never even seen the graphic that Minard originally paired it with: a visualization of Hannibal’s famous military campaign in 218 BC, as seen in the image [above].
Go check out the full article and marvel at the power of infoporn.
The situation in Army Group Center’s sector of the Eastern Front on 6 December 1941. [National Archives]
The Special Media Archives Services Division of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. announced on it’s blog, The Unwritten Record, the recent opening of two new series in Record Group 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized. The new series are German Situation Maps of the Western Front, 1944-1945 (NAID 40432392) and Various German World War II Maps, 1939-1945 (NAID 40480105).
The collections contain photographic reproductions of a full map of Germany including how many states in Germany existed at the time, as well as reproductions of various daily situation report maps created by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Armed Forces High Command) and Oberkommando des Heeres (Army High Command) to brief Adolph Hitler and senior German leaders. They show friendly (blue) and enemy (red) forces down to the division and detachment level. The original maps were captured by U.S. forces, which were later duplicated and then returned to the Germans.
Maps. Beautiful Maps
The NARA blog post includes several wonderful, high-quality digital scans in JPG format, although a quick check of the online NARA catalogue shows that these digital maps have yet to be posted online. As the existence of the images in the post show, however, this cannot be too far behind.
The maps themselves are priceless historical records containing truly amazing amounts of information. A portion of the Lage Ost (Situation East) map for 6 December 1941, above, is particularly notable. It depicts the military situation at what can be argued as the high tide of German fortunes in World War II, with its forces closing in on Moscow. However, 6 December was also the beginning of the great Soviet winter counteroffensive that would drive the German Army permanently away from Moscow.
A Map Is Worth At Least A Thousand Words
Several details immediately jump out. The northern prong of the German offensive, led by the Third Panzer Group and Forth Panzer Group, and the southern thrust by the Second Panzer Army can be clearly seen. While Second Panzer Army’s divisions are concentrated for the push from Tula northward, the army’s eastern flank is merely screened by elements of the 10th and 25th Motorized Infantry divisions, the 112th Infantry Division, and a detachment of the 18th Panzer Division. Large-scale, abstract maps of the war on the Eastern Front often depict the battle lines as solid, when in fact, they were thinly-held or gapped.
This is significant because of what this map does not depict: the several dozen divisions the Soviets had amassed around Moscow for their counter-offensive. In fact, the first Red Army counterattacks had started on 5 December, against the LVI Panzer Corps, north of Moscow (at the top of image above). Soviet maskirovka, or military deception efforts, had successfully hidden the build-up from German intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets. Soviet troops infiltrated these gaps, forcing the Germans to halt their attack and then withdraw to avoid encirclement.
This is only a fraction of the story contained in these maps. Hopefully, NARA is diligently digitizing the rest of the collection and will get them online as soon as possible,
Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read compiles some previous posts featuring maps we have found to be interesting, useful, or just plain cool. The history of military affairs would be incomprehensible without maps. Without them, it would be impossible to convey the temporal and geographical character of warfare or the situational awareness of the combatants. Of course, maps are susceptible to the same methodological distortions, fallacies, inaccuracies, and errors in interpretation to be found in any historical work. As with any historical resource, they need to be regarded with respectful skepticism.
