‘We are the top dog!’ exclaimed George V with satisfaction on learning of victory in the Great War: a bloodless, narrow summation of the conflict, but to outward appearances not without foundation. The British Empire was about to achieve its greatest territorial extent, through the acquisition of German colonies and former Ottoman territories that were mandated to Britain by the League of Nations as part of the post-war settlement. The USA and fledgling USSR were preoccupied with internal affairs (to all intents and purposes isolationist), and for another generation Britain was able to keep up appearances as the world’s only superpower, a perception shared by contemporary figures such as Lenin and Hitler.
Jerusalem upon your palm. Jerusalem: Commercial Press, c. 1942
Map cover art is an essential component in the marketing of maps. The care and attention devoted to the outer packaging developed as maps became more cheaply and widely available. There are parallels with the evolution of edition-bound books and the introduction of striking and attractively designed dust jackets. Maps, too, needed to stand out from the crowd. This ingenious cover from British Mandate-era Jerusalem was drawn by F. T. Treitel.
However, in 1918 the British world was grieving and sorrow often shaded into anger. Agitation for social and political change had been set aside in the face of a common enemy. Millions had been killed, millions of pounds spent daily to defeat the Central Powers, but in the post-war economic slump Lloyd George’s ‘fit land for heroes to live in’ failed to materialise (see p. 68). In the wider empire, unfulfilled or contradictory wartime promises exacerbated tensions. In Palestine, assurances made to Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers under the Sykes—Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration proved increasingly at odds, as the 1930 Hope Simpson enquiry discovered (see p. 78). In India, post-war reforms fell far short of nationalist expectations, now higher than ever after the 1917 Montagu Declaration had officially sanctioned the principle of self-government, an acknowledgment of India’s contribution to the war effort (see p. 62).
The bloodiest suppression of a demonstration took place in India in 1919, at Amritsar (see p. 62). If there was no second Peterloo to rival Amritsar it may well be an accident of history: the military were routinely called upon to support the civil power in the UK as well as overseas. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ensuing civil war that turned parts of Russia into an abattoir, there were calls to bring troops back for home service as rapidly as possible—although there were also concerns about the loyalty of those troops, and fears about what armed gangs of veterans might achieve if they attempted to overthrow the government. Oppressive wartime emergency legislation was extended indefinitely. Echoing the Rowlatt Act (1919), which had contributed so greatly to unrest in India, the UK’s own Defence of the Realm Act (1914) was transformed into the Emergency Powers Act (1920). During the Liverpool City Police Strike of 1919 tanks, machine guns and cavalry were used to restore order, while a battleship and two destroyers covered the docks. Mobs were dispersed at bayonet point, shots were fired and at least one man was killed.
Soldiers in the UK were often responding to outbreaks of mob violence, at which warning shots were fired, but few people died. However, as our map showing proposed troop dispositions in London for the 1926 general strike illustrates (p. 68), soldiers were mobilised again and again to deal with civil unrest in the UK itself; many of those who applauded events in Amritsar would have condoned in principle the use of lethal force on British subjects in the UK. The miners’ strike of 1919 was broken not so much on the basis of Lloyd George’s vague promise to listen to the miners’ demands, as through the threat of bloodshed, and during the miners’ strike of 1921 machine guns were mounted on pit heads.
It was an age of glamour and prosperity for a fortunate few, as our map of the new luxury hotel at Gleneagles illustrates (see p. 76), but Britain spent most of the interwar period in recession, which was exacerbated in 1929 by the onset of the Great Depression. It was an age of mass unemployment and political extremism. Britons witnessed the triumph of communism in Soviet Russia and the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 (p. 64) presented the world with a cruel foretaste of the consequences of redrawing political boundaries along ethnic lines, and it is tempting to see all roads from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference leading inexorably to the Nuremberg Rallies of the 1930s (p. 84), and the outbreak of war in 1939.
The Second World War was Britain’s fight for survival. Between the fall of France in June 1940 and America’s entry into the war in December 1941, Britain and the empire stood alone against the Axis powers; all of Britain’s remaining resources were committed to the struggle, from the bullion in the Bank of England to the iron railings surrounding public parks and squares that were melted down for scrap. In 1945 Britain emerged on the side of the victors, but close to bankruptcy. There was an unquenchable appetite for political and social change, although the privations of the war years segued almost seamlessly into daily life in ‘austerity’ Britain. Britain’s relationship with its empire was on the cusp of change too, as there remained neither the will nor the means to resist strident calls for independence. Continental Europe, shattered by the war, teetered on the brink of economic and social collapse. 1945 also ushered in a period of national myth-making, as most nations (including Britain) sought to rapidly reassess and justify their wartime roles in the light of the new world order. Before the last shots had been fired it was apparent that it would be dominated by the ideological conflict between America and the Soviet union.
1919: ‘A great moral effect’: the massacre at Amritsar
THIS DRY, OFFICIAL map was created to explain the events surrounding the Amritsar massacre—a defining moment for the Indian independence movement. It is deceptive in its simplicity: every incident leading up to the massacre is identified, but the Jallianwala Bagh, the public space where hundreds of peaceful demonstrators were killed, is not marked. It was published in 1920 by His Majesty’s Stationery Office to illustrate the Hunter Report, the conclusions of the committee of enquiry into the 1919 ‘disturbances in the Punjab’, convened by the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu. Economically overprinted in two colours, symbols denote buildings that had been burnt, destroyed or looted; points where telegraph and telephone wires had been cut; places where people had been murdered and two European women assaulted; and—so crucial in light of what followed—the locations where the commander of the British garrison, General Dyer, had made his proclamation forbidding all public meetings. Every detail leading up to, and suggesting justification for, the events of 13 April 1919 is recorded meticulously. The glaring omission is the Jallianwala Bagh, then a dusty courtyard rather than a garden, a few yards northeast of the Golden Temple.
Punjab’s contribution to the war effort had been disproportionately large; the 1917 Montagu Declaration implicitly promised a measure of self-government in return. Under the Government of India Act (1919), Indian officers received the king’s commission for the first time, Indians were recruited to the elite Indian Civil Service and Indian women gained the vote, a year after women in Britain. The new system of dyarchy offered Indians greater representation in domestic matters but fell far short of their expectations, and the Rowlatt Act (March 1919), which extended wartime anti-terror legislation and allowed the authorities to imprison suspects without trial for two years, fanned discontent into open unrest. Two of the most vocal opponents in Punjab were spirited away to an unknown location, leading to the escalation of violent disorder recorded on our map.
Amritsar in April 1919 was crowded with visitors from the surrounding countryside attending a fair and celebrating Vaisakhi (an important festival for Sikhs and Hindus alike). The streets were quiet, but there was a sense that they could suddenly slide out of control. Dyer’s proclamation banning assemblies was read at various points around the city, but it is uncertain how many people heard it. On learning that a protest was to take place in the Jallianwala Bagh, he set off with a small unit of Gurkha and Baluchi soldiers, fifty of whom were armed with rifles. He also had two armoured cars with mounted machine guns, but the streets were too narrow and he had to abandon them. He had plenty of time to consider what he was about to do, and on arrival in the Bagh Dyer showed no hesitation, ordering his troops to open fire without warning and aim where the crowds were thickest. Approximately 1,650 rounds were fired, most of which hit someone. The official figures reported 387 killed and 1,200 wounded. The actual toll may have been higher: many were crushed to death as they fled through the narrow exits of the Bagh, or took cover in a well. Dyer marched his men back to barracks only when his ammunition was almost exhausted. He made no provision for the wounded: as he told the official enquiry, he did not see it as his job.
In the short term, Dyer achieved his goal: there was no revolution. He claimed to have been seeking to create ‘a great moral effect’, but the effect was instead to harden the stance of formerly moderate Indians, who now sought complete freedom from British rule. Dyer showed no remorse. The Hunter Commission censured every aspect of his conduct, and stated that ‘there was no rebellion which required to be crushed’. British politicians lined up to condemn ‘the butcher of Amritsar’, from Montagu (who labelled Dyer ‘frightful’) to Churchill. The response of the British public was more mixed. The Morning Post collected £26,000 and commissioned a sword of honour for Dyer,50 which doubtless cushioned the blow when he was relieved of his duties.
The racial aspects of the massacre cannot be overlooked. Although the incident was unique in scale it was not an isolated atrocity, as Churchill maintained. The authorities routinely deployed soldiers to suppress unrest in the UK as well as overseas. Violent mobs in Britain were dispersed with negligible casualties, but nevertheless the awful human cost of a peaceful protest in Amritsar has skewed modern understanding of this event, which is frequently regarded as purely colonial. Gandhi concluded that empire had corrupted ordinary Britons who exercised imperial power, but it would be more correct to suggest that Amritsar was the most violent expression of a deeper, all-pervasive fear of revolution after 1917.
1920: Britain, Greater Greece and the Turkification of Asia Minor
THIS ‘MAP OF the New Greater Greece’ was published in London in 1920, during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22. The British were active supporters of the Greeks during the conflict but this map, printed wholly in Greek, was created for the Greek-speaking community in London by the Hesperia Press, which was especially active between 1919 and 1920, publishing political tracts and a weekly Greek-language news-paper Hesperia (‘western land’). Greece as it was in 1910 is yellow; blue represents the expansion of Greece after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, but the point of the map is the additional red territory, the ‘Greater Greece’ of the title.
Greater Greece, the ‘Megali’ idea, is as old as independent Greece: from the 1830s irredentist Greeks had dreamed of recreating the Byzantine Empire by uniting all territories that could be considered ethnically Greek—which would mean annexing great swathes of Ottoman territory including Constantinople itself. However, this was no pipe dream in 1920. Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos had already presided over one phase of Greek expansion at Ottoman expense in 1912–13, and he now hoped to capitalise on the final breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The demands he made at Versailles in 1919 (see p. 11) were heard.
This map shows the territory that was awarded to Greece at the end of the First World War, as agreed between the victorious Allies and the government of the defeated Ottoman sultan by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). British troops in Asia Minor handed over their positions to the Greek army. Rather than accept the complete dissolution of the empire and its Turkish heartland, however, army officer Mustafa Kemal (see p. 50) rebelled, founding a rival government in Ankara and defeating Greek and Allied forces in the field. The Allies were forced back to the negotiating table and in 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne recognised the borders of the Republic of Turkey very much as we know them today. The sultanate was abolished months later and the caliphate followed in 1924, by which time the situation depicted on our map had reverted from an internationally recognised reality to the realm of the impossible, though by now the fantasy had become a nightmare. The Megali idea was extinguished by removing the original justification: the Greek community within Asia Minor had all but been eliminated.
The founders of the Turkish Republic were secular, modernising and nationalist. The sultan had ruled myriad peoples, among them Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Assyrians—an extraordinary ethnic diversity born of a rich history which stretched back to antiquity and which was also reflected in the cosmopolitan make-up of the greatest cities of the Ottoman world, Constantinople and Smyrna. Increasingly seen by Turks as the enemy within, all these peoples had been persecuted with great loss of life during the First World War, but the process of ‘Turkification’ stepped up after 1919. Ethnic and cultural homogeneity was increasingly seen as the cornerstone of a modern Turkish nation state.
For the local Greeks this entailed a murderous scorched-earth policy in the areas shaded red on the map, especially in Thrace and along the shores of the Black Sea and the Aegean. After their army had retreated nearly 750,000 Greeks are estimated to have been killed—approaching half the Greek population of Asia Minor. Some were massacred, but (as had happened already to the Armenians, including those building the Berlin—Baghdad railway: see p. 52) many more died on forced marches—deliberately sent into the barren interior for ‘resettlement’. Most of the remaining Greeks fled or were deported, part of the population exchanges with Greece which also saw ethnically Turkish people expelled from their historic homes in what had once been part of the Ottoman Empire.
For Greeks in London, poring over their map of ‘Greater Greece’, the Megali idea died as Smyrna burned. For us today, this map encapsulates many of the darkest recurring themes of the twentieth century. Even the modest sample of maps in this book bears witness to numerous attempts to partition countries or redraw borders to reflect the ethnicity or religion of a perceived regional majority. Sometimes territorial concessions were not part of the process or were rejected, as here, but the displacement of people on any scale has all too frequently been accompanied by massacres and atrocities as we will see elsewhere in this book. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are two of the ugliest terms coined in the twentieth century, and they have been its constant companions.
1924: A miniature atlas of the British Empire: less is more
QUEEN MARY’S DOLLS’ House was a miniature toy model made for the wife of King George V as a gift from the British people. It was exhibited at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, and is now on display at Windsor Castle. Conceived as a historical snapshot of the British home, and a celebration of British manufacture, culture and elegance, it also offered a light-hearted escapism after the experience of war from which Britain had emerged victorious, but at a price. This incredible object—and the hundreds of accessories made to go in it—does indeed provide a valuable snapshot of how the British monarchy wished to be seen. And although much of it was certainly not ‘everyday’ for the majority of British subjects, it framed the monarchy in an emphatically new and positive light.
The dolls’ house is 1.52 metres high, with over twenty-seven rooms, including a stocked wine cellar, a lift and a strong room for the Crown jewels. It was designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens in the neoclassical style, filled with an array of miniature objects, furniture and artwork that constituted the best of British craftsmanship: a mahogany four-poster bed, a Rolls-Royce car, a bust of Earl Haig, and artwork by John Nash, William Orpen and MacDonald Gill among others. Everyday objects included mops, a Doulton dinner service, a Singer sewing machine and a brass coal scuttle: this latter in the context of imminent miners’ strikes (see p. 68) may have appeared almost presciently empty.51
The library was filled with original works by some of Britain’s greatest authors, a representative collection of literary works that the Dolls’ House Committee worked extremely hard to establish. Each major author, each genre and each subject required representation, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Rudyard Kipling. One of the volumes (bound in leather by Sangorski and Sutcliffe) was a bespoke miniature atlas by Edward Stanford & Co., containing eight maps of parts of the British Empire. Its inclusion confirmed it as the ‘model’ geographical work.
Edward Stanford Ltd was one of the most prolific commercial map publishers in Britain at the time. And like the other ‘brands’, it capitalised on the wonderful publicity gained from showcasing its work in the dolls’ house, publishing a replica for general sale. This example was presented to the national map collection, then in the British Museum, but others would no doubt have been purchased by middle-class parents for their children’s dolls’ houses. This is very significant. Just as the royal family were consciously portrayed through the dolls’ house as closer to their subjects by their alignment with everyday objects, those who purchased the atlas were aspiring to greater things. What was good enough for royalty was certainly good enough for them.
The atlas contributed to the well-developed geographical toy market, which included games, puzzles and cards. But it also functioned as a normal atlas in reinforcing the standard, authoritative world view of the British people as prescribed by the establishment. Its contents fix the British colonial interwar gaze: the World, the British Isles, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, West Africa, East Africa, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the West Indies and the Pacific Islands. British possessions were shown coloured red, and Britishcontrolled islands and ports were underlined in red. Moreover, the tiny maps cleverly encapsulated one of the strongest sources of pride underpinning the British Empire through even tinier comparative inset maps of England and Wales to the same scale. The message was emphatically that the geographically small British Isles, by virtue of its industry, ingenuity and moral superiority, had managed to claim inordinately vast swathes of the world for itself. A similar double meaning in terms of scale, and in class, is present throughout Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House.
1926: A secret map of London: contingency planning for the general strike
ANY SIGNIFICANT INDUSTRIAL dispute today will usually reference the general strike of 3–13 May 1926. This is the national strike by which all others have been measured, huge in scale (involving around 1.5 million workers), with no defined end and, to some, potentially revolutionary in character. The disagreement over pay and working conditions of coal miners led to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) calling out rail and transport workers, as well as those in freight, docks, firefighting and electric power stations. At its root was deep-seated resentment at a lack of social improvement. Trades such as coal mining had been promised better pay and conditions after the sacrifices they had made for the war effort. Returning troops had been promised ‘homes fit for heroes’ that had not been built. The strike lasted nine days, after which the strikers returned to work, their coal-mining comrades no better off. The Trade Unions Act later in 1926 ensured a strike on such a scale would never be repeated.
This map of London was produced by Ordnance Survey in March 1926 at the behest of the War Office. London might appear far from the mining valleys of South Wales or Durham, and was only one of many cities with sporadic violence (in Liverpool warships kept an eye on proceedings from the mouth of the Mersey). But it was key to the crisis because of the symbolic message an unaffected capital city transmitted to the rest of the UK. The slipping of London into complete anarchy was not an option the government wished to entertain.
They took no chances, buying themselves time to prepare, though disagreeing with the desire of Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to arm the police. On 31 July 1925 Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had given the TUC important concessions in the form of a Royal Commission into pay. By the time this commission confirmed the situation of nine months earlier—that miners should take a pay cut—a contingency plan was in place which included an Emergency Committee on Supply and Transport, a framework for attracting volunteers, and the production of aids such as maps. The War Office copy was ‘stamped’ as an accession the day after the commission had sat.
It indicates the seriousness that the government attached to the threat, and how thoroughly they had prepared for it. The most heavily defended areas—those with the most symbols—are the financial, administrative and commercial centres of the city. But, in addition to the explanation of symbols for rail, roads and boundaries, the key provides an explanation of the extra ‘secret information’: the whereabouts of barracks, territorial units, fire stations and ‘vulnerable points’, such as the temporary milk depot to be set up in Hyde Park.
It is important to recognise that over-emphasising the map’s confidentiality (it has been labelled ‘secret’, which was later downgraded to ‘confidential’) reflects not so much the sensitivity of the information as the fears of the government. This caution was manifested in other government preparations.52 Any publicity of the existence of this map would have shown the establishment to be fearful and have had a detrimental effect on morale. In short, it wasn’t the contents of the map, but its very existence, that was most sensitive. It was not commonly known about until 1995.
EH. SHEPARD’S map of the Hundred Acre Wood, first published on the endpapers of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, has introduced generations of children to the concept of cartography. The first edition was printed in 35,000 copies, of which 3,000 were bound in red, blue or green leather for bibliophiles. The first collection of Pooh stories was an instant success with adults and children, and it has never been out of print since.
The setting was inspired by Ashdown Forest in Sussex, near Milne’s home. Milne took his illustrator to explore ‘all the spots where the things happened’.53 Shepard’s map, ostensibly drawn by Christopher Robin (‘and Mr Shepard helpd’) stands within the genre of literary and fantasy maps discussed elsewhere, such as Sleigh’s ‘Mappe of Fairyland’ (p. 58) and Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth (p. 132). However, this is specifically an adult interpretation of a child’s universe. It is an effective guide to the events of the book. The juvenile reader can refer to it to see where the houses of Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Rabbit and Owl stand in relation to one another, not to mention ‘Eeyore’s Gloomy Place, rather Boggy and Sad’. Other key spots are also identified, such as the location of the ‘Pooh Trap for Heffalumps’ and the ‘Bee Tree’. The faux naïf orthography and artfully childish misspellings are supported by the subversion of cartographic conventions: the compass rose, for example, spells out ‘POOH’, as Christopher Robin has no need to know his north from his south.
Milne and Shepard had both contributed to Punch, and in 1924 they had collaborated on Milne’s book of poems for children: When We Were Very Young. Milne recognised that Shepard’s illustrations, including his map, were an integral part of Winnie-the-Pooh’s success, and in an unusual move he arranged for Shepard to have a share of the royalties. Shepard, for his part, ultimately resented his close association with ‘that silly old bear’:54 like Milne’s son, the real Christopher Robin, he came to feel that Pooh had overshadowed his life.
1927: Celestial bodies and holiday traffic: a cartographic guide to the solar eclipse
THE SOLAR ECLIPSE of June 1927 caught the public imagination. It was the first time in 203 years that a total eclipse of the sun was visible to parts of the UK. Media and commercial interest—and the opportunity for a holiday—produced an atmosphere akin to national celebration. The majority stayed at home, since the eclipse would have been at least partially visible to all in the UK. However, those lucky enough to inhabit the zone of totality would have witnessed the moon completely obscuring the sun. In the days leading up to zero hour on 29 June, thousands of people travelled to the strip of Britain stretching from rural north Wales to Lancashire and the Yorkshire Dales. An estimated 200,000 people travelled on trains, including ‘eclipse special’ services chartered to various places including ‘eclipse town’ itself, Southport. Many others travelled by car, and late June 1927 saw the first example of modern holiday traffic congestion.
One of the main ways that people understood the solar eclipse was through maps. Diagrams in public information leaflets and newspapers illustrated the line-of-sight concept. Maps of the UK with a dark diagonal line through north Wales, Lancashire and Yorkshire illustrated the zone of totality. Similarly crude maps were extremely popular in advertising. Town councils, transport and travel companies, hoteliers and manufacturers all smelt the money in such public interest, and adverts for products with maps bearing slogans such as ‘not to be shaded by the eclipse’ and ‘A total eclipse of all others’ proliferated.55 Seizing the opportunity with its new commercial thrust, the Ordnance Survey produced a special souvenir map in early 1926 with the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society. A practical guide and a memento, the ‘eclipse’ map was a fine production and, at 3 shillings, correspondingly expensive. It showed most of Britain around the shaded eclipse zone, at a scale of 10 miles to the inch. The cover bore a dramatic eclipse scene by Ellis Martin.56 The overlaid eclipse data was impressive: a slightly shaded area for the zone, the track of the eclipse with times, and the magnitude and altitude of the sun.
For those driving, the map would have been a useful way-finding tool, though only up to a point. While it showed how to get to the destination of total eclipse, on the evening and night of 28 June, when many travelled, it may have been of less use in finding temporary paid viewing sites not marked.
It may not even have guided some to totality, for in an unfortunate publicity incident for the Ordnance Survey, official observations of the sun in May had altered the track of the eclipse north-west by 1 mile. It also put the OS data four seconds out. Letters and complaints in the local and national press drew the response that ‘on any map showing the zone of totality it would be unwise to trust to the edge of the shadow being right within half a mile’.57 Following the map to the letter, it is easy to feel sorry for those who stationed themselves a few feet within the zone, or looked away a second too early. Although the OS map was far better in terms of accuracy than the poor advertisement and newspaper maps, by its own exacting standards it had been found wanting.
Previously, celestial mechanics had been the preserve of professional scientists and astronomers. But with the advent of mass media, cinema (film crews covered the eclipse), the BBC (10 million Britons owned a wireless) and special public information booklets, everyone was capable of believing themselves proficient in the sciences. In true British fashion, the cloudy weather meant that many did not witness the total eclipse at all. But also in true British fashion, according to recollections and reports in the press, amid the cloud, congestion and rain, everyone gritted their teeth and enjoyed it.
1929: A pictorial chart of English literature for the American tourist
THIS PICTORIAL CHART of English literature was published by the Chicago map-maker Rand McNally for American literary enthusiasts and schoolchildren. England, Wales, and snippets of Ireland and Scotland are shown festooned with the names and portraits of their most famous authors, and the occasional famous scene brought to life. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Robert Burns are placed where they are purported to have lived and worked. For American tourists to Europe, who had for over a century been rediscovering their British heritage and shared culture of common language, this was an itinerary map. But it also acted as a surrogate pilgrimage for those who wouldn’t make the journey across the Atlantic. As such, it presented an altered version of reality, a theme park Britain of the Disneyland mould (see Walt Disney World, p. 206) that fed and nurtured a particularly American view of Britain. This, of course, was entirely consistent with the blend of fiction and reality contained within the pages of literary masterpieces.
That is not to say that the ‘hordes of Americans seeking the romantic experience of literary encounter’ did not have their own home-grown heroes—they were introduced to Britain by them. Washington Irving, for example, had travelled in Britain in the 1820s and described his experiences compellingly. The novels of the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, which were widely read from childhood, also shaped Americans’ perception of Britain. As the heirs to British culture, such affinities between British and Americans were there to be reclaimed.58 Throughout the 1920s we can discern the overwhelming confidence of the United States and its tourist industry, when the dollar was strong and European excursions were common and easy.
Yet this snapshot of the twentieth-century literary landscape does not correspond with our modern impression of the 1920s, which was such an exciting and subversive period in literature. This is a premodern topography, the avant-garde nowhere to be seen. The name of James Joyce, for example, Dublin’s now-favourite son, is noticeably absent alongside Yeats, Shaw and Swift. Joyce was at this point in Paris with America’s lost generation—Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein—today regarded as America’s greatest twentieth-century writers. There is no bearded D. H. Lawrence hidden amid the Nottinghamshire wool mills. Certainly, it is difficult to envisage his obscene 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a school, let alone in the English giftshop alongside the tea and scones of tourist-attracting Britain.
But while the disreputable modern landscape is banished from the literary map, other older ones are admitted: it depicts not simply romantic or Victorian literary Britain, but Anglo-Saxon, medieval and Elizabethan. The Spanish Armada (1588) sails on a trajectory with a Viking longboat (the first Viking raid was in 793). Around the edge of the map are images of British history that could be straight out of the popular 1930 historical satire 1066 and All That (Ella Wall Van Leer’s illustrations contain more than an aesthetic similarity with those of the book’s illustrator John Reynolds). Just as that celebrated school history spoof intentionally blended fact with fiction, the same recipe of real and imaginary is evident in Rand McNally’s chart.
This is literature in its truest form, for the tourist–pilgrim–student user who did not discern fact from fiction. The difference between the two is imperceptible. J. R. R. Tolkien was to claim the same when justifying the authenticity of his created English mythology (see his map of Middle Earth, p. 132). Thomas Hardy created a fictional land called Wessex which was so ostensibly real (and commercially lucrative abroad) that he became its sole historian.59 When, in 1990, the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain added ‘Doone Valley’ into their official mapping of Exmoor in Devon, in homage to R. D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel Lorna Doone, the American Lorna Doone Society objected to its inaccurate positioning, showing just how arbitrary the division between fiction and reality can be under the scrutiny of experts.60
1930: The Gleneagles map of the heart of Scotland
THE GLENEAGLES HOTEL was one of the last great railway hotels. Opened in 1924, it was operated by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company, one of the ‘big four’ British railway companies that emerged from the grouping of the previous year. Railway heraldry is emblazoned on the lower corners of the map, beyond the oviform border.
Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessors, Gleneagles was not located next to a major terminus, though it was served by a small local station. The hotel was a destination in itself, known for its luxurious surroundings and its golf course. In 1930 Vanity Fair enthused: ‘Somebody once called Gleneagles Hotel his “Palace in Scotland”. And what a palace it is! A palace set among the heather and the furze and the hills, where society and business people from both sides of the Atlantic come to take their share of the sport and hospitality of this famous hotel.’
Should the guests tire of golf or shooting, a copy of this map could be purchased for half a crown, mounted on linen and folding into protective covers. This is a map for travelling, showing places of interest within easy reach of the hotel by road or rail. Some of the references are literary: ‘Rob Roy Country’ and ‘Lady of the Lake Country’ are drawn from the works of Sir Walter Scott, and a dotted line marks the ‘probable’ route taken by David Balfour in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886). Others are historical: the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, Glamis Castle and Queen Victoria’s favourite view over Loch Tummel. There are engineering marvels, such as the Forth Bridge, other hotels and hydros, and sites of natural beauty. This is a romantic view of the heart of Scotland for the wealthy tourist, with Gleneagles at its core.
1930: Immigration and land settlement in Mandatory Palestine
THIS IS AN officially produced map showing land purchases by Jewish organisations in British Mandate-era Palestine. The base map is the GSGS (War Office) survey compiled by the Survey of Palestine, and it was appended to the Hope Simpson Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development in Palestine, published by HMSO in 1930. A Royal Commission, chaired by British politician Sir John Hope Simpson, was established in the aftermath of the Palestine riots of 1929, and Jewish immigration was identified as one of the root causes.
The British had captured Palestine from Ottoman Turkey during the First World War (see p. 60), and (in common with a number of other territories that had been controlled by the defeated Central Powers) it was mandated to Britain by the League of Nations, to be administered until such time as it could become self-governing. British rule was legitimised on a temporary but open-ended basis. The Ottoman Empire had been generally hostile to Zionist projects to boost Jewish settlement in the region, and the Jewish population had fallen during the war. The British, on the other hand, had made a public commitment to the creation of a Jewish homeland through the 1917 Balfour Declaration. However, the strength of local Arab feeling against any increased Jewish presence threatened to rouse anti-British feeling across the Muslim world, much of which still lay within the British Empire. The British were themselves deeply divided about which party to support; targeted by Palestinian Arab and Jewish insurgents in turn, they attempted to reconcile the conflicts inherent in the contradictory promises they had made. Mandatory Palestine expired in open warfare. The British exit in May 1948 was more ignominious and scarcely less bloody than the Partition of India a few months before.
Our map shows land purchased by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA) and ‘other’ Jewish land. The issue of land ownership was central to Survey of Palestine mapping activity. These were cadastral rather than topographical maps, created for the purposes of taxation and land registration: ‘the way chosen by the Mandate government to organise its commitments was the early organisation of the land system on a legal system for land ownership’.61 The fairness of the decisions made by the survey teams remains controversial, but the scholarly view is that the Survey benefited from ‘the best the Empire had to offer’.62
Jewish land ownership is better documented than that of the Palestinian Arabs. The purpose of private organisations such as the JNF and PICA, whose activities are indicated on the map, was to purchase land for Jewish use. The Jewish population grew steadily from a relatively low base, perhaps as little as 10 per cent of the total population in 1920 to around one third in the 1930s. The purchase of land, from which the existing Arab agricultural workforce was often excluded, was a highly visible activity that heightened tensions between the communities. Hope Simpson was concerned by the acquisition of the land marked on our map, which he regarded as ‘extra territorial’,63 and he argued that Jewish immigration had to be regulated according to Palestine’s economic capacity to absorb more people. The quota system that emerged from his report pleased no one but was applied for the remainder of the Mandate, against a background of Nazi persecution. From 1933 onwards Jewish refugees made increasingly desperate attempts to enter Palestine illegally, but the majority were intercepted, and interned or deported, even after the war.
1931: A map of New Zealand, Britain’s outlying farm
ACCORDING TO THIS large pictorial map, the most important element of New Zealand is its capacity to produce. New Zealand, the map informs us, is nothing short of an economic powerhouse, capable of feeding, clothing and powering an empire. The map is certainly persuasive, showing the two islands teeming with activity, focusing almost entirely on fish and sheep. Tables provide figures of livestock, crops, fish and minerals. But, above all, it is the stylised, bold and confident artwork that reinforces the positivity and credibility of image and message.
These are hallmarks of the work of the Empire Marketing Board (1926–33), a short-lived but prominent body set up to encourage consumers to buy British Empire goods, thus promoting trade between Britain and her dominions. Many varied posters and a great deal of promotional literature were produced by the organisation, with the purpose of maintaining economic bonds during years of world economic depression which tested those bonds to the limit.
Following the United States’ economic crash and world depression, governments adopted protectionist policies to safeguard their currencies from inflation (see the ‘New Treasure Island Chart’, p. 82). Such policies, however, stifled trade by making tax on goods expensive for the importer, whose government generally returned the favour in their own policies. British politicians’ attempts to solve this crisis included the suggestion of empire free trade—in effect, the establishment of an empire trade zone, which would have provided more amenable trade conditions within the British Empire. But it never happened. Places such as Canada and New Zealand desperately needed to protect their own industries, even from Britain. In New Zealand wool prices fell by 60 per cent in two years.64 An Imperial Economic Conference at Ottawa in 1932 yielded only a series of individual agreements.
Up to 1933 the Empire Marketing Board had played the role of promoting and facilitating economic cooperation. One of their regular artists, MacDonald Gill, who produced many posters for other clients including the London Underground, the United Nations and the International Tea Market Expansion Board, created a world map for the EMB entitled ‘Highways of Empire’. He also designed the board’s logo and this map of Britain’s ‘outlying farm’.65 Such images were not only practical tools for easing economic concessions between the dominions; they served a wider role in maintaining Britain’s empirical ties, propaganda supporting the role of the Royal Navy (see the 1901 Navy League map, p. 20). The map’s message was straightforward (as one would expect from an advertising poster) and deeply colonial.
There were other ways of maintaining bonds. In the same year as Gill’s celebratory poster, the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour’s definition of the Commonwealth as embodying a free association between members was enshrined in the Statute of Westminster. Far from being a dominion on the opposite side of the globe to the British Isles, this ‘outlying farm’ could be anywhere. However, any positive communication, by means of royal visits as much as cartography (see the 1953–4 royal tour, p. 128), was continually encouraged.
1933: Pieces of eight: a satirical cartoon of the world financial crisis
BY THE TIME of the 1929 American stock market crash and the crippling of the world economy, Britain had already endured years of economic stagnation and rising unemployment. The real crisis came in September 1931, when its inability to balance payments and the resultant drain in confidence provoked a run on its currency, the pound. The Labour government fell and was replaced by a national coalition. Among the measures introduced, the abandonment of the gold standard was the most controversial: this safe, protectionist, anti-inflationary policy (whereby only as much money was produced as existed in gold reserves) had been the peacetime bedrock of British economic policy for a century.
Unlike in previous eras, a well-informed, literate and enfranchised public felt entitled to know the business of the Treasury and the Bank of England. Over the 1920s, newspaper readership had increased dramatically, and by 1933 the Daily Express boasted 2 million daily readers. The Express and its rival Daily Mail espoused popular, accessible and sometimes aggressive journalism, and were enlivened by photographs, illustrations and cartoons. It is in such newspapers that we occasionally see the map used as a satirical device. In the Express of Monday 23 January 1933, the cartoonist Sidney ‘George’ Strube’s ‘A Chart of the Financial Main’ was published.
Evoking the famous map from Stevenson’s then fifty-year-old novel Treasure island, the map presented a strong argument against motions by the Bank of England to rejoin the gold standard under pressure from the united States in 1933, by citing examples of wasted British taxpayers’ money and incidents from the previous years. The years after 1931 had not been dramatically better than those before. Unemployment in 1929 had been 8 per cent, but by 1932 the figure had risen to 17 per cent, the worst level since records began.
In fact, the battleground was not between currencies (or their nations), as presented in the cartoon, but between the ideologies of protectionism and free trade. On one side the suave pirate Long John Skinner, persuading the bowler-hatted ‘little man’ (a regular figure in Strube’s cartoons) to sign back on to the gold standard, was the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. Nicknamed Professor Skinner after an incident of mistaken identity by the American press (he used aliases when travelling), it was Norman who had replaced Britain on the gold standard in 1926 after the economic strain of war had necessitated leaving it. On the other side, not illustrated, was Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, Canadian millionaire Daily Express owner and vocal opponent of protectionism, who had fought a local election in 1931 from the position of empire free trade. Trade agreements with the dominions meant not dealing with rival currencies the dollar and the French franc.
In Strube’s cartoon, the solidarity between these wartime allies is gone, the physical distance between them magnified dramatically. The ‘land’ massed around the Atlantic is similarly distorted, yielding the profiles of Uncle Sam and a moustachioed Frenchman (represented by her ‘Gold’ Coast colony). British grievances include resentment at unfair practices by the French and Americans in amassing vast stockpiles of gold, as well as distrust, xenophobia, and bad blood over war debt and reparations—money wasted that could have been put to ‘good’ use. This would have made an impression on the conscientious reader, who would also have read about, or even seen, the hunger marches of 1930 to 1933.
Nobody need have worried: five months later President Roosevelt took the USA off the gold standard too. What at first may appear unthinkable may become normal very quickly. The day after Strube’s cartoon, which had no doubt been feverishly worked up over a weekend with none of the time and consideration that even the ‘Hark! Hark!’ illustrator (see p. 46) may have enjoyed, another cartoon carrying another point went to press. The son of a German-born wine dealer, Strube became one of the most popular political cartoonists of the 1930s; his anti-Nazi cartoons earned him a place on the hit list prepared by the Gestapo for the invasion of Britain.
1936: Hitler’s ‘best Parteitag’: Nuremberg and fascist tourism
THE NUREMBERG RALLIES became one of the sights of 1930s ‘fascist tourism’, attracting various wealthy and well-connected Britons including repeat attenders Diana and Unity Mitford.66 Hitler valued their presence, granting the aristocratic sisters remarkable access to his inner circle. In Diana’s letter to Unity of 17 September we glimpse the 1936 Reichsparteitag through British eyes:
I must tell you how sweet the Führer was. He came into the room and made his beloved surprised face, and then he patted my hand . . . he was so wonderful and really seemed pleased we had gone every day . . . I said we loved the wonderful parades and he said it was the best Parteitag he had ever had because everything had geklappt [worked].67
The Mitfords would have seen (if not used) official maps such as this one. Spare, functional, unencumbered with party slogans and insignia, maps played an essential role in one of the most meticulously orchestrated acts of political theatre of the twentieth century, guiding hundreds of thousands of party functionaries, diplomats and journalists who descended annually on the ancient city of Nuremberg for the Nazi celebration of the power and unity of the Third Reich. The routes picked out in red on the map provided a framework for the set dressing: the banners, searchlights and torchlit parades, still familiar today from the footage shot by Leni Riefenstahl and others, symbolising the public face of National Socialist Germany.
Nuremberg had no particular associations with the earliest years of the Nazi movement and was not especially noted for Nazi sympathies. It was chosen for the first rally in 1927 partly because it was a historic German city—which suited Nazi ideology—but principally because of its convenient central location. Another rally went ahead in 1929, but the town authorities blocked repeat performances in 1930 and 1931, refusing to make suitable venues available. Even after Hitler came to power, he had considerable difficulty in obtaining planning permission for the monumental complex which he envisaged as a suitable backdrop. He got his way on commercial rather than ideological grounds: the rallies brought in a massive amount of business.
Implications for residents—which may explain local scepticism—are there on the map. What remains, essentially, a medieval street plan is dwarfed by the brutal new complex. Parades through Nuremberg’s narrow streets suited the romantic, völkisch visions of Germany’s past that the Nazis were so keen to foster, but daily life ground to a standstill. The scale of the vast new stadium complex outside the city was in proportion to the rallies rather than Nuremberg itself; tens of thousands had to be accommodated in temporary camps around the city, where there were incidents of drunkenness and vandalism. Hitler’s followers were in an especially celebratory mood when they congregated at Nuremberg in 1933, following his appointment as Chancellor, and after the rally the party was faced with a huge clear-up bill for unpaid drinks, stolen beer mugs and cleaning graffiti from public transport; the toilets were left in a particularly foul state. Orders distributed in advance of the 1934 rally were categorical: ‘One thing holds true above all else for this occasion: a National Socialist does not get drunk’.68
Over the course of the 1930s the rallies became more professional but ever more bloated, doubling in length from four to eight days. With an eye on his successors, Hitler also set about the canonisation of what could be termed the liturgy of the event; there was an identifiable underlying quasi-religious element, with Hitler himself officiating over an emotionally charged, communal experience in the role of ‘high priest’.69 Whatever Hitler’s plans were for a Thousand Year Reich, evidence suggests that by the end of the 1930s elements of the party rank and file were nevertheless already bored by the endless assemblies and marches.
1936 was a key year. The Berlin Olympics had run smoothly, without any serious boycotts, and the international community had accepted both the deployment of German troops abroad (the ‘volunteers’ of the Condor Legion) and the re-militarisation of the Rhineland, carried out in flagrant disregard of the 1925 Treaty of Locarno. The mottoes of each rally reflected the situation at the time (the cynical ‘peace’ rally of 1939 was scrapped on the outbreak of war); the 1936 rally was the rally of ‘honour’—reflecting both the restoration of honour to the German people and international acceptance of the Nazi regime. Although Germany was spending far more than either Britain or France on rearmament, only Hitler and his generals knew how weak the Wehrmacht still was, and how ready they had been to abandon the Rhineland again at the first sign of decisive action by the other powers. The rally of 1936, displaying the supposed new military might of Germany for all to see—abroad as well as at home—marked a shift in policy, from concealment to intimidation and bluff. The stage was set for appeasement and a series of effortless victories for Hitler between 1936 and 1939.
1937: A souvenir flag of the coronation of Edward VIII
THIS UNION FLAG is one of a great number mass-produced in 1936 for the coronation of King Edward VIII (1894–1972). Edward had acceded to the throne upon the death of his father, George V, on 20 January 1936, with his state coronation planned for 12 May the following year. Printed on to fabric, the flag has at its centre a half-portrait of the king in between a twin hemisphere world map showing the empire, his dominions, in red. But the coronation of Edward VIII never happened. The king abdicated on 11 December 1936 after less than a year on the British throne, under pressure from a government fearful of public reaction to his plan to marry an American commoner called Wallis Simpson. Mrs Simpson was a divorcee and, as such, was not eligible to be married in a Church of England service, the church of which the king was head.
Edward VIII, it seems, chose love over duty, and for the substantial lobby who would have preferred to keep this erratic character with suspected fascist sympathies out of the way, it was a godsend. Yet among souvenir manufacturers the supposed romance of his decision may not have warmed many hearts. Due to the voluntary secrecy of the British (though not the international) press over the affair, the earliest the public knew of it would have been in October. Flags, along with countless coronation mugs, plates, stationery, images, stamps and medals, became superfluous virtually overnight. However, for these objects, their makers, and everyone else besides, the abdication wasn’t the end of the world. Edward’s brother was crowned George VI on the same day prepared for in May and the outdated souvenirs for Edward’s coronation have today achieved a particular value (though not a high one) as curious collectables.
Looking at the flag and its constituent images of patriotism, it is easy to project on to it a symbolism that presciently matches a fallen king with a crumbling empire. It is doubtful that many, if any, originally saw in it such a thing. The dominions in particular—nations who had fought as empire troops during the First World War—identified very strongly with British patriotism and its royal family. Many identified with the king, who was handsome, charismatic, charming and extremely popular in the dominions. His tour of Canada had been a huge success (he bought a house in Alberta in 1922), and at the end of 1916 he visited Anzac troops freshly evacuated from the Gallipoli Peninsula (see p. 50).
A more accurate reading of the flag is that the positioning of the British monarch at the centre of the hemispheres demonstrates his crucial importance as a lynchpin of the empire. That the pin might become unstuck was certainly the fear of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Consulting with the governments of dominions, and feeling himself a good judge of public opinion (over Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook, who felt the king should have stayed), he doubtless felt, along with many others, that the symbolic power of the monarchy was too important to the togetherness of the British Empire to be put in the hands of Edward VIII. The identity of the king in the portrait was of little consequence to the function of the flag as a patriotic symbol, and of far less importance than the affirming, loyal red of each and every empire dominion.
1938: The Spanish Civil War: British neutrality and poor-quality maps
UNLIKE OTHER EUROPEAN signatories of the non-intervention agreement, Great Britain and France remained neutral in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). But despite the British government’s position, which became more controversial with every reported atrocity against Spain’s civilian population, it retained interest in the course of the war. By the end of 1936 the conflict had widened from a Nationalist military coup against the fragile Republican government into a proxy world war. Germany and Italy supplied troops and weapons to the Nationalist rebels under General Francisco Franco, Russians supplied somewhat less to the defenders. Britain could observe her enemies in action from a distance, but she also had something to lose, being acutely aware that British naval interests in the Mediterranean Sea rested with Gibraltar (as well as Suez, see p. 134). Furthermore, some two thousand British citizens, mostly local Communist Party members, were in Spain, fighting voluntarily for the ‘International Brigade’ against fascism.
Restricting Britain’s gaze was the poor quality of military and topographical mapping of Spain. Not since the Peninsular war of 1808–9 had Britain (or anyone else for that matter) been militarily engaged in Iberia.70 This dearth of intelligence material provided just one of many reasons for non-intervention. Crude, derivative ‘operations room’ maps were produced to illustrate particular battles, including that of Malaga (1937) and the blockade of Bilbao (also 1937, watched by British warships in the Bay of Biscay). But it was only in 1940 that a large-scale topographical map of Spain was accessioned by the War Office and reprinted. The date of the original was 1886.
Map coverage of Spain was not a priority, but any map was better than no map, particularly if the interest was merely that of a bystander. Decades after the end of the war, in 1962, a large lithographic map of Spain was added to the map room inventory of the Directorate of Military Survey in Tolworth. Crudely printed, yet impressive in detail, with lines of communication, the map had been printed in Bilbao in the summer of 1938. It is a Nationalist propaganda map, bearing slogans such as ‘Saludo a Franco’. Colour defines the territorial gains made by the Nationalist army as stages in the conflict. The eastern part of Spain, still in Loyalist hands, is uncoloured, or rather yet to be coloured. Then reaching its final stages, the siege of Madrid had been portrayed with unusual force by a British press unable to decide which out of fascism and communism was the greater evil.
By 1962 the ideological struggle between Right and Left was reaching another peak with the Cuban missile crisis, and the Spanish Civil War was history. Spain enjoyed prosperity, the tourist boom attracting a large number of British holidaymakers to Spain every summer (see the tourist map of Alicante, p. 138). The Ministry of Defence was happy to continue to rely on ephemeral and outdated maps. During the Civil War some British Intelligence officers had been permitted to observe military tactics on the front, as guests of Franco’s army. Their unofficial position was generally in favour of a more stable Nationalist Spain.71 The Nationalist map may well have been acquired at that time and only stamped with an accession date when it was uncovered in the map room, possibly during a search for Spanish mapping, decades later.
1940: Blitzed London: a Luftwaffe map of ‘Mayfair Square’ and the London County Council ‘bomb damage’ maps
FROM 7 SEPTEMBER 1940 over three thousand sorties, mostly at night, were flown by the Luftwaffe against London. This was the Blitz, the aerial bombing campaign upon London and other industrial and cultural British urban centres, which reduced many to rubble.
Here we compare two sets of maps, both based on the Ordnance Survey. The map of ‘Mayfair Square’ is an extract from Ordnance Survey’s 6-inch map of London, originally published in 1921. This example was reprinted for the Luftwaffe: marked ‘secret’ (‘geheim’), labelled ‘Lft. Kdo. 2’ (for the squadrons of Luftflotte 2) and dated September 1940, it was used by the unit that carried out the first raids, by day and night, in what became one of the most terrifying and destructive episodes in London’s history. Throughout that campaign, the 1937 Ordnance Survey 5-foot scale maps of Greater London were hand-coloured by staff in the Architect’s Department of London County Council to record the damage, building by building, ranging from superficial to total destruction. Updates from 1944 onwards included the impact sites of V-1 and V-2 rockets. After the war the maps were used to inform demolition and reconstruction, and they are still in demand today from surveyors: subsidence in modern London is not always caused by tree roots.
The Luftfahrtministerium made great use of Ordnance Survey mapping in identifying strategic military and utility targets, reproducing them in Sonderfolgen (special instruction manuals) for the use of bombing crews. Having been photographically transferred, our map was overprinted in red to provide data and target outlines. Alongside aerial photographs and instructions, copies would have been used for training and possibly for navigation on board one of the hundreds of bombers flying from bases in Belgium and France. The map marks what to avoid, as well as what to destroy, and makes use of landmarks for tracking—such as the distinctive shape of Broad Street, below New Oxford Street. It reflects optimistic early assessments of the level of precision bombing that was possible, even by daylight.
From August 1940, after the Dunkirk evacuation, the Luftwaffe attempted to nullify the threat of the Royal Air Force in order to achieve the air superiority necessary for a German amphibious invasion of England (Operation Sea Lion), first by destroying British radar stations and then Fighter Command’s airfields. On both occasions the Luftwaffe changed tactics when on the brink of success. The switch in September from RAF facilities to urban strategic utility targets, such as power and pumping stations, gasworks, railway depots and ‘choke points’, was designed to distress and demoralise the civilian population. Destructive though it was, it cost the Luftwaffe the battle, if not the war.
The identity of the Mayfair targets reveals that in September 1940 this switch had still not taken place altogether. The War Office and Admiralty, together with Somerset House (which contained some Admiralty staff), are joined by the large building to the south-east of Berkeley Square. This is the vast Air Ministry Building, which was only completed in 1938 and thus not present on the 1937 LCC Bomb Damage map. The building on the Luftwaffe map is also the earlier, demolished structure.
A large area of Belgravia populated by embassies, including that of the United States, is labelled Neutrale Botschaften. Bombing here would not have been diplomatic—there was still every possibility that a strong isolationist lobby might keep America out of the war—yet the bomb damage map section shows that over the following four years this area sustained more damage than any of the targets of ‘Mayfair Square’ except the War Office and Admiralty.
Within a month daylight raids had all but ceased: Luftwaffe losses proved unsustainable. However, Britain’s night air defences also improved rapidly. As airborne radar fitted to night-fighters and ground-based radar directing anti-aircraft guns became more effective, bombers were forced to abandon individual targets in favour of area bombing. After November 1940 precision bombing was accompanied by the tactic of terror bombing upon civilian targets, which had by its nature even less need of specific red overprinting.
Operation Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely in mid-September. British cities suffered a terrible punishment after the Luftwaffe’s change of strategy, but they absorbed it. Britain would become the embarkation point for the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe, and lessons learned in the Blitz would be devastatingly applied—with technology and tactics advanced by years of war—to German cities in 1944–5.
1940: Occupied Paris: a tourist map for German troops
THIS GERMAN-LANGUAGE TOURIST map of Paris was presented with the compliments of the military governor (Kommandant) of occupied Paris to German troops on leave. It is dated October 1940, a matter of months after the fall of France and Hitler’s own sightseeing tour of the city, when he posed for photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower.
The contrast with the two preceding maps of blitzed London could hardly be greater. The speed of the German victory surprised everyone, including the Germans. Paris was declared an open city by the French government on 10 June 1940, and German troops entered Paris unopposed on 14 June. Last-ditch negotiations to continue the war via a full Franco-British union were rejected (Marshal Pétain, about to assume the role of head of the Vichy state, likened the proposals to being chained to a corpse) and an armistice with Germany was signed on 22 June. Central Paris was not bombed by the Allies as it was not an industrial centre, and the last Kommandant allegedly ignored Hitler’s orders to destroy the historic city as the Germans retreated. The fabric of Paris survived the war largely unscathed.
The complexity of the relationship between the French people, the Vichy regime, the occupying forces and their erstwhile allies, the British, is explored more fully on p. 100 (a Vichy propaganda poster). However, in the context of this map it is worth noting that the nature of the German presence was very different to that in other occupied territories, especially in Eastern Europe. A German soldier in Paris could savour victory, but also escape the horrors of the war elsewhere.
This is reflected in our map. It is an economical piece of twocolour printing, produced locally by Parisian firm Mouillier & Dermont. It appears to be newly commissioned, which is significant as it is a simple tourist map. No sites associated with the occupation are marked: the buildings shown in relief are, more or less, the traditional attractions. The ornate gothic script is a sufficient statement of control.
The same holds true of the guide stapled to the cover of the map. There is no résumé of rules and regulations concerning fraternisation, or how the civilian population should be treated. That is not to say that the selection of places of interest is entirely without nuance. The Parisian version of the Lion of Belfort commemorates a French victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The children and grandchildren of veterans of that conflict were serving in the German military of 1940. The inclusion of the monument may have been inspired by sentiments similar to those that led Hitler to choose, for the site of the French surrender of 1940, the same railway carriage near Compiègne where the Armistice of 1918 had been signed. The defeats of the past had been expunged by the decisive victory in the present.
The Paris Mosque was also singled out as a place of interest. Completed in the 1920s, a tribute to the many thousands of Muslim troops in the French army killed during the First World War, it was a relatively new building. Nevertheless, the guide extols the mosaics and the fine carvings in Moroccan cedarwood. We have explored the German relationship with the Islamic world earlier in the twentieth century on p. 52 (the Berlin—Baghdad railway) and the inclusion of this mosque here could be seen as an extension of that sentiment. However, the Paris Mosque ultimately served as a refuge for Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust. The influential imam of the mosque, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, saved as many as a hundred by providing them with certificates of Muslim identity.
1941: A spy map for the Japanese submarine attack upon Pearl Harbor
THIS MAP WAS apparently discovered in one of the Japanese Ko-Hyoteki ‘midget’ submarines that attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. It is a map of the Hawaiian harbour, probably derived from a United States survey chart, overwritten in Japanese and extensively annotated to assist the navigation of the submarines and to identify targets. Straight lines and angles mark, with timings, the paths of Japanese aircraft attacking from above. The submarines were to enter the harbour from bottom left, then travel anticlockwise around Ford Island past ‘Battleship Row’, where the might of the American Navy was then moored. Instructions written on it include ‘sink an American ship’.
The surprise attack upon the US Pacific naval base by Japanese torpedo planes, bombers and submarines damaged or destroyed seven battleships and killed over two thousand people. It paralysed the US Navy, though only temporarily. The extent of this ‘surprise’ has been the subject of debate for over half a century. Although worsening Japanese—American relations meant that an attack was likely, there were many possible targets besides Pearl Harbor. For the United States, the presence of her fleet in Pearl Harbor was a threat to Japan in the Pacific; to the imperial Japanese Air Force, the fleet was a sitting duck.
Despite the apparent inadequacy of the harbour’s defences, which Lord Mountbatten, admiral of the British fleet, had noted during a visit earlier in 1941, a Japanese attack required information on what they were attacking. Maps of military bases have historically been closely guarded by their occupants. The paucity of maps in the British Library of Pearl Harbor after 1898 (when the peaceful lagoon harbour first became a US naval base) attests to that.72 Much of the incredibly precise intelligence included on the Pearl Harbor map may have been supplied by a single Japanese spy in Honolulu named Takeo Yoshikawa, who compiled weekly ‘ships in harbour’ reports.
In the event, this map was not required since the midget submarine in which it was found ran aground outside the harbour and was captured. But what it showed that Japan knew of Pearl Harbor caused acute embarrassment to the US military, and it mysteriously disappeared from FBI custody, apparently ‘purloined by a souvenir hunter’.73 The map is known today only through a photograph in the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, which crops the image on at least one side.
After capture, the submarine and its surviving operator Kazuo Sakamaki (the first Japanese prisoner of war) were displayed before the US public as evidence of aggression and provocation. The US declared war on Japan, and the fellow signatories of Japan’s 1940 Tripartite Pact, Italy and Germany, declared war on the US. Britain, exhausted and isolated as it was by late 1941, was thrown a lifeline.
1942: Vichy and the Churchillian octopus
THIS BLOATED CHURCHILLIAN octopus represents the official view from Vichy France of Britain’s decision to carry on the war alone. Its anti-English sentiment does not automatically mean that it would have been regarded (or reviled) by its intended French audience as Nazi propaganda—the nature of support for the Vichy regime was more complex than that.
A tradition of cartographic cephalopods stretches back to Fred W. Rose’s ‘serio-comic war map’ of 1877, satirising the Great Eastern Crisis. The octopus serves to dehumanise the enemy, and its tentacles are a convenient and sinister metaphor for territorial ambitions on an international scale, reaching across borders or oceans to choke the life from some other hapless nation. This poster urges the reader to have faith—the tentacles are being severed ‘methodically’. Healthy tentacles still reach out towards North America, South Africa, Aden and India, but elsewhere they have been bloodily truncated by the Axis powers. Norway, Libya and British Somaliland refer to German and Italian campaigns, but the other names would have resonated directly with a French audience. These do not necessarily commemorate Vichy French victories, but insofar as the loss of French lives made recruiting for de Gaulle’s Free French even more difficult, these events of 1940–1 could certainly be regarded as wounds on the octopus.
Taking these wounds one at a time, the refusal to scuttle or surrender the mighty French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in French Algeria, or sail it to a neutral American port, culminated in a bombardment by the Royal Navy that killed 1,297 French sailors, causing great shock and resentment. The French felt perfectly capable of keeping their fleet out of German hands, and they needed it to protect their colonies; the British decided that they could not risk the French losing control. The raid on Dakar was a fiasco, memorably fictionalised in Men at Arms (1952) by novelist Evelyn Waugh (who was there). In 1941 British, Indian, Australian and Free French troops invaded Syria to secure the Allied flank, particularly after the Luftwaffe had used Syrian bases to attack Iraq. Vichy resistance was stiff, stoked by old rivalries in the Middle East and with an eye to the post-war balance of power in the region.
The viciousness of the poster may surprise the modern reader, but that would be a misreading of contemporary French politics. While many resisted the German occupation, support for the Vichy regime was far more widespread than it was expedient to admit after 1945.74 As our unidentified artist ‘S. P. K.’ makes no reference to the British invasion of Vichy-controlled Madagascar, it seems likely that the image was created in the first part of 1942. At that time the agreement negotiated by Marshal Pétain’s government after the fall of France in 1940 still held. Pétain, the hero of Verdun, was the last premier of the Third Republic and his new administration, based in the spa town of Vichy, held nominal authority over the whole of France. In the north, the ‘occupied zone’, this was very much at the discretion of the German forces, but the south remained a free zone until November 1942 and France’s colonies were also left in Vichy hands. Vichy represented a significant measure of sovereignty.
Most of the French soldiers rescued from Narvik and the beaches at Dunkirk elected to be repatriated to France after the French surrender rather than join de Gaulle’s Free French, and attempts to sequester French vessels in British ports were often fiercely resisted. It was a pattern repeated again and again where Allied troops came into conflict with Vichy forces. Some were committed to seeing France play a leading role in Hitler’s New Europe, while others, separated from their families in France, simply wanted to play no further part in the war if they could avoid it. However, for the majority, it may simply have been that Pétain and his regime were seen as the legitimate government of France in contrast to de Gaulle, a lofty upstart without a mandate of any kind.
The campaigns and battles commemorated on the poster do not trip off the tongue: Mers-el-Kebir, Dakar and Syria were not extensively featured in British propaganda or celebrated since. There was little appetite for killing one’s allies of a few months before, though there was anger at a perceived waste of lives. France came perilously close to civil war and in the immediate post-war era was keen to construct a myth of widespread national resistance. Our contemporary poster strips that away to reveal the divisions and uncertainties of the early 1940s.
1943: Blake’s Battle of the Atlantic
THIS 1943 BRITISH propaganda poster, The Battle of the Atlantic, by Frederick Donald Blake (1908–97),75 is most commonly encountered with English text. However, Blake’s posters were part of a series produced for distribution abroad in various languages, including French, Dutch, Portuguese and—as here—Arabic, bringing the Allied message to the widest possible audience. This poster could easily have been destined for Egypt, Iraq, or any other region within the empire where Arabic was widely spoken. The text appears to be a faithful rendering of the English original and not tweaked or reworked for a particular audience, perhaps because the message is so very simple: the Allies have won the Battle of the Atlantic.
Britain is, effectively, Orwell’s ‘Airstrip One’: nothing but factories, shipyards and gigantic concrete runways. Far from being enclosed by a U-boat ring of steel, waves of Allied aircraft radiate out. With air supremacy comes protection for the convoys steaming in from North America and those steaming out—the Arctic convoys bound for the USSR and convoys bound for the Mediterranean. In the mid-Atlantic U-boats are scattered and destroyed, and Hitler’s Fortress Europe is under constant attack, with aircraft and parachute mines battering strategic targets such as railways, docks and submarine pens.
As propaganda, Blake’s 1943 poster is not necessarily constrained by reality, but successful propaganda often manipulates a perceived truth and the Battle of the Atlantic really had turned decisively in the Allies’ favour in the spring of that year. In March 1943 the U-boat ‘wolf packs’ came as close as they ever did to cutting Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, and supplies of fuel and other vital resources reached critical levels. The situation was reversed within two months: Allied resources were freed from other theatres, and new long-range aircraft—which could now be fitted with sea-scanning radar and airborne depth charges—closed the mid-Atlantic gap. The wolf packs were harried out of existence and losses to Allied shipping were negligible in comparison with what had gone before. In May (dubbed ‘Black May’ by the U-boat crews) the Germans lost thirty-four U-boats in the Atlantic—an unsustainable one submarine for each Allied ship sunk. One lucky convoy (SC 130) escaped entirely unscathed, while between three and five of the attacking U-boats were destroyed. The German naval commander Karl Dönitz conceded defeat. As in the Great War a generation earlier, unrestricted submarine warfare failed to deliver a knockout blow before America entered the war, or before the build-up of men and materiel from America could prove decisive. One-sided as Blake’s vision is, it still reflects the changed strategic situation.
Here is the English version of the text:
A ceaseless battle is raging in the Atlantic. The Axis U-boats’ intention is to isolate and starve Britain. But as the U-boat offensive mounts so too do Britain’s protective measures. More and more vessels are safeguarding convoys. The U-boat’s Atlantic bases are being pounded by the Allied Air Forces and the entrances to their harbours are being mined from the air. The factories where they are built are being crippled by bombs. All these measures enabled Mr Churchill to say, when reviewing the U-boat campaign in May 1943: ‘Our killings of the U-boats . . . greatly exceeded all previous experience and the last three months, and particularly the last three weeks, have yielded record results.’
1944: On leave in New York: a subway map for British sailors
THIS NEW YORK City Subway map is a ‘special’, commissioned by the Union Jack Club to show the location of its premises in New York. It was printed by George J. Nostrand in the style of the Hagstrom map, the official map of the system in the 1940s. Prior to 1940, New York’s subway system had been operated by three private companies, each of which issued their own maps that gave priority to their own lines (in contrast to London, where independent companies engaged in joint branding from the Edwardian period onwards: see How to Get There, p. 36). Hagstrom’s commercially produced map was the only one to give equal weighting throughout the system, and when the lines were merged under public ownership it was chosen as the official map.
Hagstrom disliked Beck’s diagrammatic approach to the London Underground and, although there are some distortions, his map of New York City is more or less geographically accurate, retaining features of surface topography such as Central Park and the Statue of Liberty. Nostrand’s map, with its distinctive red edges, is so similar that one can only speculate as to why Hagstrom appears to have taken no action against the rival publisher. However, while the origins of both maps remain obscure, it is impossible to be certain about who was copying whom.
This particular example was posted by the Union Jack Club to a British sailor in March 1944, care of the British Naval Liaison Officer at the Navy Yard, Charleston, South Carolina. The club had arranged accommodation with a hospitable American family for part of his leave, and the map was accompanied by travel and contact information so that he could reach his hosts in New Rochelle, just to the north of New York City.
The original Union Jack Club was opened in London in the aftermath of the Boer War, catering for both serving and former servicemen of non-commissioned rank. The New York branch was opened before Pearl Harbor brought America into the Second World War (see p. 98). It was based in a three-storey building rented from the prestigious Algonquin Hotel by the British War Relief Society—a US charity that coordinated vast fund-raising drives to provide non-military aid for Britain. The Duke of Windsor (suspected of pro-fascist sympathies and appointed Governor of the Bahamas in the hope that he could do the minimum damage to the war effort from the other side of the Atlantic: see p. 88) visited the club when he travelled to New York in October 1941. An early piece by the respected journalist Daniel Lang, published in the New Yorker in September 1941, described the club as a place where seamen could ‘drop in to drink beer, play darts, catch a snooze, or discuss girls, battles and the state of their commander’s disposition’.
Lang expected anything between a dozen and twenty Royal Navy personnel to be present, sailors whose ships had put into neutral American ports for repair or refuelling. However, once America entered the war, thousands of uniformed servicemen and women could be seen on the streets (and in the bars, theatres and clubs) of New York—much as in London—many more of whom were from Britain and the Commonwealth. New York was a major port of embarkation for the European and Pacific theatres of war, but it was also a chance to sample the pleasures of civilian life. New York’s entertainment industry enjoyed a boom period.
1944: A secret map of occupied Alderney
ALDERNEY IS THE northernmost of the large Channel Islands, which also include Guernsey and Jersey. For islands in some of the world’s most heavily shipped waters, better mapped than most other places on earth, they occupy a curiously isolated position in British culture, far closer to France than to England, with a mixed heritage and naturally self-governing, insular attitude. They were also the only occupied part of the British Isles during the Second World War, seized by German troops in June 1940 following the evacuation of the British Army at Dunkirk on 3 June that year.
The symbolic significance of their occupation and the humiliation of Britain was capitalised upon by the German propaganda machine. Virtually the entire resident population was evacuated from Alderney prior to German landings, and from late 1941 the German army heavily fortified it for long-term occupation as part of Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’. But what wasn’t fully understood in Britain until 1945 was the system of concentration and labour camps built there, subsidiaries of the larger Neuengamme camp near Hamburg. It was occupied by prisoners including Jews and many from Eastern Europe.
One of the darkest chapters of the war to have happened upon British soil, just beyond the sight of Channel Islanders, the wartime events on Alderney have proven highly controversial. Allegations of mass murder were investigated after the end of the war, but there was virtually no remaining resident population to corroborate the claims. It was only in January 1981 that this ‘secret’ military sheet of Alderney was stamped as declassified. It is a 1943 revision of an older map, overprinted with details accurate up to 1 August 1944. Nothing about prisoners is mentioned, suggesting that up to this date exactly what was occurring on the island was unknown even to the British military.
The map shows massive fortifications: trenches, shelters, bunkers, obstacles, guns, minefields, radar stations and dumps leave a bewildering pattern across the island. These have been added to the map by cartographers working from detailed photographs taken during RAF sorties over the island during August 1944, but aerial surveillance can only show so much. Ditches, foliage and roofs may hide a great deal from the sky; bunkers can obscure as well as protect. All four of the camps later discovered—lagers Sylt, Borkum, Helgoland and Norderney (this latter is the large encircled area in the north-east, Sylt is directly below the red area)—are marked along with others as merely ‘H’ hutted camps.
The fact that Alderney was not a major target for recapture, or a point from which Germany could launch an assault upon the British mainland, may explain the tactic of mere close observation by British forces. Morale-boosting recapturing operations were contemplated, but never enacted. The fall of Alderney would not have altered the outcome of the war, but it would have diverted resources away from the Allied landings on 6 June (see D-Day, p. 108). Nevertheless, reference to beach reports and potential airfields (in red) on the map proves that plans were in place.
The island was blockaded by the Royal Navy, though reports of starvation were communicated even before. The German army evacuated in May 1945, but it was not until seven months later that the population was permitted to return.
1944: D-Day and the Battle for Caen
THIS IS A GSGS British military map of Caen, the historic Norman city that was once William the Conqueror’s seat of power. Less than 10 miles from the coast, Caen was an Anglo-Canadian objective for D-Day. The symbolism was not lost on contemporaries: the largest seaborne invasion in history took the route of the last successful invasion of England—but in reverse. In the event, failure to punch through to Caen on 6 June allowed the Germans time to bring up reinforcements. The bloody two-month struggle that ensued cost thousands of lives—including those of French civilians. It also led to the destruction of much of Caen itself, bombed by the RAF (thus inadvertently providing cover for the German defenders) and later shelled by the Germans as they retreated. While Caen was in German hands it was impossible for the Allies to break out of their beach heads—it was difficult even to bring over sufficient reinforcements from the UK as there was simply no room for them; parts of Normandy resembled a giant military car park.
The competence of British and Canadian troops and their commanders—including the overall commander of Allied ground forces, General Montgomery—was called into question, and Montgomery’s self-assurance tested Anglo-American relations to breaking point. Montgomery’s caution was legendary, but the concentration of elite SS Panzer divisions he faced (upon a very narrow front) was seen nowhere else in the west. The Germans threw everything they had at Caen and fighting was ferocious. The Canadians and the Panzer Division Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) both stopped taking prisoners.76
This map was revised in March 1944 and printed in April, a matter of weeks prior to the invasion. Most military maps were printed in full colour, but this example is simply printed in black, red and blue, which made it more legible in the half-light of dawn. No military information at all is offered, despite months of intensive aerial reconnaissance (though the modern reader might be struck by the appearance of Beaulieu Prison, scene of a massacre of French Resistance fighters). Maps detailing the geology (critical in airfield construction, for example) and natural and military obstacles had been created by and for a tiny group of individuals with the top security clearance ‘BIGOT’ (a wry acronym, probably for British Invasion of German Occupied Territory). This version of the map offers as much help as a pre-war tourist map, and was carried by an officer with a vital role to play. Later editions show the German defences in detail: attempts had been made to plot every observation post, pillbox, anti-aircraft gun, mortar, flamethrower, minefield and roadblock. A month’s heavy fighting produced maps reminiscent of the trench maps of the Great War (see pp. 50 and 56).
The map is printed on thin paper—if Caen was captured on the first day it could be discarded soon enough—and it has been roughly folded. Carrying an item like this in Normandy was a danger in itself: German snipers seeking to pick off officers and NCO’s became adept at spotting the gleam of sunlight off the perspex covers of map cases. One panel of this map is grubby, as though it has been stuffed in the map pocket of the owner’s battledress. This particular example was found with items belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Jack Norris, who was responsible for the Royal Artillery element of the 6th Airborne on D-Day. The division was tasked with securing the British left flank. Landing by parachute and glider just to the north of Caen, the rivers Orne and Dives provided natural defences to the west and east, and the lightly armed paratroopers could concentrate their firepower to the south, facing an expected counter-attack from 21st Panzer Division. Norris’s anti-tank guns were a critical element of the plan; the commanding officer of 6th Airborne, Major General Richard ‘Windy’ Gale, paid tribute to ‘the architect of so much of my artillery defence with all its peculiarities due to our airborne limitations’. Norris landed with the first wave, but the all-important guns were due later in the day. Norris was watching them arrive when he was badly wounded. In Gale’s words:
The closing incident for this great day was the fly-in of the 6th Airlanding Brigade . . . hundreds of aircraft and gliders: the sky was filled with them . . . It is impossible to say with what relief we watched this reinforcement arrive. The German reaction was quick . . . Unfortunately at my headquarters poor Jack Norris . . . received a terrible throat wound; none of us thought that he could possibly survive, but he did. His loss to us out there was great.77
Norris’s part in the landings was over but the plan was a success, thanks to the tenacity of the airborne troops.
1945: Isotype maps and women in the workplace
THIS IS AN Isotype map from Women and Work, a 1945 publication in the New Democracy series by economist Gertrude Williams.78 The maps by the Isotype Institute are integral to the book, given prominence on both title page and dust jacket. The New Democracy series reflected the mood of a nation that swept a socialist government into office in the landslide Labour victory of 1945. There was a perception—spelled out in the preface to this book—that many of the promises of 1914–18, including ‘homes fit for heroes’, had gone unfulfilled and that a second awful conflict had been the result: ‘this time the democracies must not only win the war, they must win the peace’. The key to that, according to Williams, was active citizenship: full—and fully informed—participation in the decision-making process by every individual.
Isotype (International System Of TYpographic Picture Education) had been developed to meet just such a challenge. Established in 1920s Vienna by economist, social scientist and socialist Otto Neurath, and the artist Gerd Arntz, Istoype came to Britain via the Netherlands, as its creators sought to stay beyond the reach of Nazi persecution. ‘Words divide, pictures unite’ was one of Neurath’s catchphrases. Isotype offers a visually memorable and accurate alternative to columns of statistics and dense exposition that are only comprehensible to the specialist reader. One of the basic tenets of Isotype design is that quantities are expressed through rows of identical symbols, rather than by enlarging or diminishing the size of a single symbol, making it easier to compare them with precision.
That is exactly what can be seen here. The figures are derived from the 1931 census, the most recent available as no census was taken in 1941, even though dramatic changes had taken place during the war. The caption explains: ‘Each woman symbol represents 1 in 20 women in the coloured areas’. Symbols shaded black represent ‘occupied’; those in outline, ‘not occupied’. The colour coding represents the major industries of each region, including textiles, shipbuilding, agriculture, tourism and government. This is supported through use of simple symbols, such as a pithead (mining), a cog wheel (engineering), a stocking (hosiery) and Big Ben. The language of the map, for all its statistical basis, is nuanced: the shaded figures are positive, while the empty ones represent unfulfilled potential. The iconography of the symbols is timeless, remaining clear after seventy years.
The First World War had brought more women into the workplace than ever before, and in ways that would have been all but unimaginable a few years earlier (employed as police officers, for example). By 1939 the proportion of women in the workforce hadn’t changed appreciably (roughly one third in London) and most women were once again employed in female-dominated sectors, some of which, such as nursing, were relatively traditional. However, there had been an enormous shift away from domestic service and into the factories, despite resentment that cheap female labour undercut men and kept all wages depressed. The state of the labour market in the 1930s favoured the employer. In the Second World War women once again assumed skilled roles that had been exclusively male in peacetime and in 1945 there was cautious encouragement for some of them to stay. A deep-rooted desire by government, demobbed servicemen and by many working women themselves to restore a sense of social stability as swiftly as possible by returning to pre-war norms was outweighed by a chronic labour shortage. One government solution was to invite citizens from Empire and Commonwealth countries to settle in the UK—with far-reaching consequences—but in terms of women in the workplace, the world of 1939 was gone for good. As the manufacturing industry declined, more women found office work, and in the 1940s major institutions began scrapping the marriage bars that had automatically ended many promising careers at the altar. The pay gap remained huge: the differential was narrower in professions such as teaching, but on average a woman earned half the wage of her male counterpart. However, things had begun to change. Gertrude Williams advised her readers to ‘guard against too intense a concentration of activity within the narrow confines of the home’, as employment profited both women and the community. Some of her readers were ready to listen.
1945: Occupied Berlin: the U-Bahn and daily life in the ruined city
THIS SEPTEMBER 1945 U-Bahn diagram is almost certainly the earliest post-war map of the Berlin underground railway network. It also shows the S-Bahn over-ground connections and the remnants of the rest of Berlin’s transport infrastructure, the trams and buses. It is an unofficial map, not issued by the system operator, the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), but privately printed by obscure publisher M. & R. Meier. The printing costs were offset by the 50-pfennig cover price and by advertising—filling a gap in the market, perhaps, but no mean feat of entrepreneurship in the rubble of Berlin. The U-Bahn had ground to a halt altogether when the power generators failed in April 1945, days before the war’s end, but trains were running again by June.
The map has been specially commissioned, rather than adapted from the standard BVG edition. It bears the monogram of Heinz Schunke, a draughtsman located in Offenburg in south-west Germany. The information is up-to-the-minute. Adolf-Hitler-Platz, for example, has already reverted to its original, pre-1933 designation Reichskanzlerplatz (preserving the name of the office, though not the individual). Unlike any known BVG map, including a proof date-stamped October 1945 which seems to have remained unpublished, Schunke’s map indicates which sections remained closed.
The network had suffered from Allied bombing—the shallow cutand-cover tunnels were vulnerable—but a great deal of devastation was caused by the deliberate flooding of tunnels in the final phase of the Battle of Berlin. Accounts of the last few days of the war are notoriously incomplete and contradictory. Time passed strangely in a twilight underground world of cellars, tunnels and bunkers—military and civilian—while overhead the city was shelled into submission street by street. Hitler may have personally ordered the flooding as early as 27 April.79 Fearing that Soviet shock troops might use the tunnels to outflank the Reichskanzlei and Reichstag, sappers from the SS Division Nordland (mostly foreign volunteers—by 1945 over half the Waffen-SS was non-German) were sent to blow out the roof of the S-Bahn tunnel running beneath the Landwehr Canal. The explosion probably took place in the small hours of 2 May, more than twenty-four hours after Hitler’s suicide and on the day that the remnants of the Berlin garrison either surrendered or made last-ditch attempts to break out. Some 25 kilometres of interlinked S-Bahn and U-Bahn tunnels were flooded, claiming the lives of an unknown number of soldiers and civilians who had sought refuge there. U-Bahn carriages were even turned into makeshift hospital wards. There was time to evacuate and the number drowned was relatively low, but there is no denying the fear and panic caused by the slowly rising water; the damage took months to repair.
For the benefit of U-Bahn passengers, the map also shows the partition of their city and their country. A German nightmare of the First World War (see fig. 1, p. 8) was realised after the Second: at Potsdam in August 1945 the Allies divided Germany into zones of military occupation. There was no possibility of a new generation recycling the dangerous betrayal myths of 1918: this time defeat was total and unambiguous, backed by the presence of foreign soldiers. A generation of British National Servicemen would see out their time with the British Army of the Rhine, although the army of occupation switched rapidly to its Cold War role of first line of defence against the Soviet threat.
Berlin, within the Soviet Sector, received special treatment: it was divided among the Allies, becoming a microcosm of the country as a whole. The zones are not marked on this U-Bahn map—they never were—and trains from West Berlin rattled through closed ‘ghost stations’ in the East until 1989.
Maps are two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space, which distort or highlight aspects of that space for a purpose; by their nature they impose a sense of order that can seem artificial, but seldom more so than here. More than half the housing of Berlin was uninhabitable and more than a million Berliners were homeless. There was a lack of food, power and clean water, and also the terrible absence of friends and family—killed, captured or wandering the Continent among millions of other displaced persons. In their place the city teemed with strangers, often hostile, mostly from the Red Army. Among the thousands of acres of bomb-blasted buildings, personal property and personal morality often went by the board; rape and other acts of violence became commonplace. Across the Continent, survival was often more important than celebrating victory or reflecting on defeat. The very existence of this map is quite profound in its efforts to return to a semblance of normality: against this backdrop of misery and lawlessness its creator actually managed to drum up advertising from the Astoria.
1945: Christmas greetings from Nuremberg
THIS US ARMY folded paper Christmas card was sent from the office of Robert H. Jackson, Chief US Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. The city had great symbolic value for the Nazi regime (see Hitler’s ‘best Parteitag’, p. 84) and its Palace of Justice was one of the few suitable buildings in Germany that remained largely intact. Jackson’s personal assistant, Elsie Douglas, has written a brief seasonal greeting inside: ‘Hello to you and a Merry Christmas!’ A somewhat terse message, perhaps, but it was probably written at the end of November—a week after the commencement of the Trial of the Major War Criminals. British, American, Soviet and French judges and prosecutors tried Hitler’s designated successor Admiral Dönitz and other leading Nazis, including Göring and von Ribbentrop, for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Jackson was noted for his ‘ready wit’ and the card is darkly humorous, possibly a release from the soul-sapping daily task of sifting through evidence of Nazi atrocities. Winged angels watch over the earth, joining together to illuminate the starry sky with a candle. However, in this case they wear the white helmets, greatcoats and armbands of American Military Policemen, the ‘snowdrops’ that could be seen in the courtroom every day. There are echoes here of the United Nations globe on a light blue background, which may not be coincidental: although the UN flag was adopted in 1946, its designer, Donal McLaughlin, also headed the team that designed the Nuremberg courtroom. It is probably safer to say that this is cheap and cheerful single-colour printing, and that the MPs are a reference to the famous Nuremberg angels rather than America’s new role as world policeman.
For the first time leading figures of an internationally recognised regime were held accountable for their actions. The trials were the official counterpoint to the private vengeance being enacted across the Continent. Indeed, they were a beacon of order and protocol in a savage post-war Europe which had—in regions that had been heavily fought over—reached a state of lawlessness unknown for centuries. As already seen in the case of Berlin (p. 112), in parts of Europe money gave way to barter, industrial and agricultural production were negligible, and personal property and morality counted for little in the face of lack of food, shelter and information about loved ones who might be dead, interned or displaced. To complete this picture of misery, a bitter winter was setting in.
Yet it is noteworthy that only the most senior figures (for the most part) were tried at all. It has been suggested that this allowed the majority of Germans to transfer responsibility for the events of 1933–45 to the heads of a few aberrant individuals,80 from where it is a dangerously short step to presenting the majority of the population as victims of Nazism. Despite rhetoric about de-Nazification, it was rapidly apparent that denying all ex-Nazis office would bring the new Germany to a standstill. Soviet Russia was the greater threat, and there seems to have been little appetite in 1945 for pursuing every alleged criminal. The desire for normality was greater than the desire for swift vengeance.
This pattern would be repeated throughout Western Europe. In the heat of liberation summary justice was meted out to some perceived collaborators and war criminals. Far more common, however, was the spiteful shaving and humiliation of women accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’ and the ostracisation of their children. The example of the Channel Islands, the only part of the UK to have been occupied, seems typical: there were revenge attacks against ‘jerry bags’ but no islanders were prosecuted under the 1940 Treachery Act, and the SS guards from the Alderney concentration and forced labour camps were treated like any other POWs. The Nuremberg trials set an important precedent, but it would be twenty years before Europe had the stomach for a second wave of war crimes trials, this time spearheaded by private individuals such as the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
