Field Notes
Neither Fleet Saw the Other: The Battle of the Coral Sea, May 1942
On May 7, 1942, American pilots launched from the deck of a carrier into open water toward a fleet they could not see. For four days, two opposing forces fought the first naval battle in history co...
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Title: A Bridge Too Far: Operation Market Garden and the Maps That Planned It
On September 17, 1944, the largest airborne operation in history dropped three divisions into occupied Netherlands to seize a corridor of bridges stretching 60 miles to the Rhine. The maps they car...
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Battle of Belleau Wood — June 1918
In June 1918, the 4th Marine Brigade entered a wheat field outside a French village and walked into one of the most concentrated killing grounds of the First World War. What followed defined an ent...
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The Five Minutes That Changed the Pacific: The Battle of Midway, June 1942
On the morning of June 4, 1942, American dive bombers broke through the clouds above the Japanese carrier fleet northwest of Midway Atoll. In the five minutes that followed, three fleet carriers we...
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Seventy-Six Hours on Betio: The Battle of Tarawa and the Lessons Written in Blood
On November 20, 1943, the 2nd Marine Division assaulted Betio Island across a reef no intelligence report had adequately charted. Standard landing craft grounded hundreds of yards short of the beac...
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The First Shots: Fort Sumter and the Opening of the American Civil War
On April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter from ten positions ringing Charleston Harbor. This is the geography of how it began.
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The Battle of Saratoga: The Turning Point That Changed the American Revolution
In the autumn of 1777, a British army of nearly 6,000 men advanced south through the forests of upstate New York toward a fortified American position on the Hudson River. What followed across two e...
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The Battle of the Bulge: Germany's Last Offensive in the West
On December 16, 1944, Germany launched its final major offensive on the Western Front — a massive armored assault through the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg. The Battle of the Bulge beca...
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World War I and World War II: What the Maps Tell Us
The Somme's trench maps and Iwo Jima's assault charts are not the same kind of map. What the cartographic record of each world war reveals — and why it matters.
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