Maps of the Pacific War and the War in Asia, 1937–1945

Battlefield composite map of Okinawa, 1945

The Maps of World War II · Chapter 4 of 9 · An ocean of islands

The Pacific & Asia

The Pacific War was fought across a third of the globe, often on charts drawn by nineteenth-century survey ships. Mapping it took submarines, aircraft, former planters and a great deal of guesswork.

Mapping an ocean

When the United States went to war in December 1941, many of the islands it would have to take were known only from old Admiralty and Navy charts, some of them based on surveys from the age of sail. Depths over the reefs, the height of the tide, the slope of the beaches and the ground inland were unknown. Planners filled the gaps however they could. Submarines photographed coastlines through their periscopes; the USS Nautilus spent weeks off the Gilbert Islands in the autumn of 1943 doing exactly that. Aircraft flew photographic missions over every target. Former residents, from plantation managers to traders and missionaries, were interviewed about tides and reefs. At Tarawa in November 1943 the guesswork about the tide over the reef cost lives, and the lesson changed how every later landing was mapped.

Invasion maps and track charts

The maps that came out of this effort are some of the most striking of the war: landing maps with color-coded beaches, assault boat lanes and phase lines, and enlarged photo-maps stitched from hundreds of aerial frames. At sea, every task force kept a track chart, a plotted record of its course hour by hour. The operational track charts of the carrier USS Essex in this gallery trace her strikes across the western Pacific in 1945 the way a pilot’s logbook traces a single flight.

From Guadalcanal to Okinawa

The gallery follows the campaign’s arc: the defensive battles of 1942 at Wake, Bataan and Midway; Guadalcanal and the long climb up the Solomons and New Guinea in 1943, including Operation Cartwheel, the encirclement of the Japanese base at Rabaul; the Central Pacific drive through the Gilberts, Marshalls and Marianas; the return to the Philippines; and the final battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945. The Okinawa maps in this chapter show the battle the way the men fighting it saw it, as a grid of ridges, villages and numbered hills.

China, Burma and India

For China the war began in July 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge, and maps of the China theater cover eight years of fighting across a country that neither side had mapped completely. Allied maps of Burma and India were built on the work of the Survey of India, while the airlift over the Himalayas, “the Hump,” depended on aeronautical charts with large blank areas marked simply as unsurveyed. Japanese military maps of China, captured after the war, are covered in Chapter 5.

Maps of the Pacific and Asia

Filter by theater, type and year. Tap any map to open it full screen and zoom. 149 maps in 4 groups: Pacific, Across the Pacific War, China, Burma & India, Eastern Front.

Pacific (1 of 3) 31 maps

Pacific (2 of 3) 34 maps

Pacific (3 of 3) 33 maps

Across the Pacific War 28 maps

China, Burma & India 19 maps

Eastern Front 4 maps