[Larry Hickey]

Hello,

For the EoE Project, we've finished our map templates for all the countries involved in the European air war during 1939-40, so that we have reliable, computerized maps current as of 1939-40, that are both copyrightable and instantly scalable from which to work. This is a critical component of the EoE Project, as we've probably got in the neighborhood of 1000 hand-drawn maps with the Heinrich Weiss manuscript to enable us to lay out with great accuracy the aerial operations on all sides during the 16-month period from 01.09.39 to 31.12.40, right down to plotting the individual mission tracks of many of the recon sorties. We have spent a great deal of thought trying to see what is the best way to present this material. The scope of the Weiss maps and the work he did to generate them is beyond belief and we want to do this material justice, even though publishing all 1000 of them in our EoE book series is not practical. We may end up eventually putting many of these on our website so that they will be available in the future to historians and researchers. I doubt if the efforts that Heinrich put into this will ever be duplicated again and it would be a shame for all of this material to not be available to historians. Since the Weiss Coastal War Manuscript also covers the war in the west from 01.01.41 to July, 1941, and the EoE Project only currently is planned to cover to the end of 1940, postings accessible on the internet for the period not covered may well be the only reasonable way to do this. eBooks might also be a possibility.

That said, our next step is to put an overlay on our map bases for the movement of the ground force front lines for each day of the entire 16-month period, so that the subsequently plotted daily air mission tracks can be related to what is taking place on the ground. We've got the daily movements of the front lines plotted for the Polish Campaign of 9.39, but I need comparable daily maps for the Norwegian Campaign and the same for the Western Campaign--the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg (overrun in a day?) and France, for the period 09.04.40 through the end of June, 1940, or later if necessary for Norway. I'm sure that this information already exists in the military histories of those countries, and I'm looking for sources from each Campaign that we can use to create these daily front lines on our map bases for each country. What I'm looking for is something similar to the front lines as plotted on the maps in the JFV Volumes by Dr. Prien, et.al, only on a daily basis, rather than every few days.

Who can provide us with references to the most reliable sources for this critical mapping information?

For those who have been curious where we are in translating the Weiss manuscripts (there are two of them) from German into English, we are now complete with the original manuscript translation from 01.09.39 thru 31.10.39 and from 10.05.40 through 09.07.1940 (which is as far as it goes), and with what we call the "Coastal War Manuscript" (entirely includes the Battle of Britain) from 01.09.39 thru 31.10.40. This is many, many thousands of pages of material. We are also nearing completion of a massive compilation on a daily basis of the air war in Poland during 09.39, which was not covered in the Weiss Manuscripts (he only did the war in the west). Thousands of pages of FB, KTBs, diaries, publications, etc. have also been translated to support and supplement these materials. What we have yet to go is the Original Manuscript from 01.11.39 through 09.05.40 (however, the volume covering 18.04.40 to 09.05.40 is missing), and the Coastal War Manuscript from 01.11.40 to 31.12.40. Unresolved is what to do with the first seven months of 1941, as our translators will probably have fried brains by the time they get to the end of 1940. Just what we already plan to translate may come to well over 7000 typewritten pages.

Regards,

Larry Hickey
EoE Project Coordinator