Map Art of World War II: Newsmaps, Pictorial Maps and Propaganda

Newsmap for Monday, 12 June 1944, with the Normandy beachhead

The Maps of World War II · Chapter 8 of 9 · Maps for the public

Map art, Newsmaps & propaganda

The Second World War made millions of people into map readers. Newspapers, magazines, newsreels and the Army itself taught a generation to follow the war on maps, and some of those maps were works of art.

Newsmap

Every week from 1942 until after the war, the U.S. Army produced a large poster called Newsmap for posting on bulletin boards in barracks, mess halls and offices. Its front carried a map of the week’s fighting with a summary of the news from every front; its back often carried training posters, identification charts or pictures of the enemy. Newsmap was part of the Army’s orientation program, built on the idea that soldiers who understood why and where they were fighting would fight better. The issues in this gallery track the war week by week, from the long retreat of 1942 to the Normandy beachhead in June 1944.

Teaching the home front to read maps

Civilians learned too. Newspapers printed daily war maps; magazines such as Fortune and Life commissioned striking perspective maps that showed the world from unusual angles, from over the North Pole or looking west across the Pacific, to teach Americans that oceans no longer protected them. Department stores and oil companies gave away war maps so families could follow sons and husbands overseas. Many of those commercial maps remain under copyright; the government-made maps in this gallery are free to use.

Persuasion

Maps persuade quietly. A map that colors an enemy’s conquests in black, or draws arrows reaching toward your coast, argues without seeming to. The U.S. government’s prewar posters on the dangers of fascism, Allied maps of Axis aggression, and German and Japanese maps of encirclement and destiny all used the authority of the map to make a case. Read them as arguments.

Maps in training

Even a pamphlet about malaria could be a map. The U.S. Army’s 1943 booklet This Is Ann, written to teach soldiers about the Anopheles mosquito and illustrated by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, sits in this gallery beside identification charts and orientation maps that taught soldiers where they were going and what they would find there.

Map art, Newsmaps and propaganda

Newsmaps, pictorial and orientation maps and propaganda maps. Filter by type and year. 100 maps in 5 groups: Newsmaps, Propaganda and posters, General maps, Historical maps, More maps.

Newsmaps (1 of 2) 25 maps

Newsmaps (2 of 2) 8 maps

Propaganda and posters (1 of 2) 29 maps

Propaganda and posters (2 of 2) 1 map

General maps 16 maps

Historical maps 12 maps

More maps 9 maps