Monday, Apr. 09, 1945

Maps for War

Events and armies were moving so fast last week that newspaper mapmakers could not keep up with them. According to the Brussels radio, many American tanks had outrun the maps they had and new ones had to be dropped by plane.

Other news of military maps:

P: Rhine-crossing paratroopers carried maps that glow in the dark. Amphibious troops as far apart as the Rhine and Okinawa had maps showing high and low water areas, slippery cliffs and rocks.

P: In each carrier plane's air-sea rescue kit is a Celanese rayon-acetate map, printed on a salt-and-sun-proof pocket handkerchief.

P: The Army Map Service has turned out more maps, in greater variety, than have been used in any previous war. (For the Normandy invasion it produced some 70,000,000 copies of 3,100 different maps.)

Now the Map Service has something new to boast about: a phenomenally durable map paper. It can be folded & refolded 3,540 times in one place before it will tear. Sample maps were tossed with dirty clothes into a G.I. laundry, washed, dried, wet again. Then they were tacked to a floor, trampled, slathered with mud, grease, paint and gasoline. They came out clear and usable. A little vexed by such inanimate obstinacy, a testing engineer put a match to one map, reported happily: "Map burns easily."

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