Mapping for the EOE Research Project (1939-40)

[Larry Hickey]

Hello,

The EOE 1939-40 airwar research project requires hundreds of both general and detailed maps for Europe for all the countries involved.

We've completed the mapping template for Poland, and are in the process of doing the one for the Netherlands, for which we've got excellent reference material thanks to Wim de Meester.

This semester, we have an intern helping us from the Geography Dept. at the nearby University of Colorado (USA), and she's got access to the most sophisticated and modern commercial geographic mapping software available to help us build our base maps. One of my key staff members is also a recent graduate from that program. I want to finish all the template base maps while we have access to this program software.

In order to make the mapping practical, we've got to highly automate this project, building base map templates that accurately show 1939-40 political boundaries, all coastlines and rivers, and 1939-40 (or slightly earlier) highway and railroad lines. Our templates will be scalable. The basic map for Poland that we've done is 1:3,000,000, but we can enlarge it for any area of the country needed. We've located a really good map for rendering Germany for that time period. However, I need similar and reasonably accurate maps from the 1935-40 period for Norway (and adjacent areas of Sweden), Denmark, Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and related parts of Italy. There is computer software that can greatly enhance our speed in creating these maps as long as we have reasonably accurate source maps to work from.

From the computerized templates, we can then generate an unlimited number of maps laid out with the population centers, airfields, military front lines, aircraft mission tracks and a/c crash locations, among other details.

Who can help us locate the appropriate reference maps for each of the countries I mention here? I'm not looking for Michelin 1939 highway maps, or the British 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey maps, but more general maps that show a whole country. The key thing is that they must be reliable for the 1939-40 time period.

As a further note on the subject, one of the really great accomplishments of Heinrich Weiss before he died several years ago was creating hundreds of maps, some of them hand-drawn in considerable detail of the various air search zones, air battle locations and mission flight tracks. Since I've acquired these with his archive, which is being translated, we're trying to utilize as much of the information on his maps as possible to help explain the air war for our period.

Regards,