When maps won wars

Printed maps remain a vital part of military life as they have done down the centuries. Battles could be decided by knowledge of terrain and the likely location of the enemy and were as essential for communications between fighting forces, whether attacking or in defence.

Even today with satellites and GPS, the printed map retains its vital role on the battlefield and in tactical decision making. In 2013 the army took delivery of a new truck based means of producing maps close to the battlefield. Mapping and make making are now part of the intelligence gathering operations using aerial and satellite imagery to understand the environment and landscape ahead or to understand what is going on in a particular location. That task falls under the remit of the National Centre for Geospatial Intelligence which was formed in 2016 from units that had been based at the army’s print centre under 42 Royal Engineers corps in Feltham and the RAF’s at Northolt, RAF Wyton for aerial reconnaissance and analysis and where the deployable unit is based. 

This has use of six-wheeled all terrain vehicles equipped with Canon inkjet printers to print maps at the point of need and slightly less mobile shipping container sized forward map distribution points. The Feltham site has since been earmarked for closure with activities consolidated at RAF Wyton near Huntingdon.

The trucks are able to hold servers with 25,000 items logged and 350 informational layers that can be combined or removed according to need and printed on the spot.

At the time of the formation of NCGI, its commander Brigadier Ben Kite explained: “There will always be a need for printed maps, until that time electronic paper has unlimited battery life and can be folded multiple times, can be annotated and with a weight next to nothing.”

But put multiple maps together and the weight climbs significantly. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands there was a scramble to equip the Task Force with the maps needed to recapture the territory, a project named Operation Corporate. One commander told staff at the depot responsible for holding maps in stock that he would send a Landrover around to pick up 57,000 maps only to be told to send three 4-tonne trucks instead as that number of maps fitted inside 104 cartons and on 11 pallets. It was far from the only Wantamap request.

In all 654,000 maps were printed for the Falklands conflict, 210,000 of them at the Barton Lacey plant near Andover on five large format presses delivering 10,000 maps to the floor each hour. The remaining maps were printed at Feltham, at the Ordnance Survey itself and at civilian map printer Cook, Hammond & Kell in Mitcham.

Additional maps were needed for training reserve troops and for military targets outside the Falklands, film strip maps were required for RAF aircraft and navigational charts by the Royal Navy.

The heyday of military map production, however, must surely have been World War II. The book has not yet been written, but records exist and memories have been recorded.

In the North African campaign in 1942-43, the main map printing centre for the British Army was at Tura Caves in Egypt where there were seven large presses, one a two-colour machine. It could print 50,000 four-colour maps a day and in the Library held 38,000 different maps. These could be updated from the latest aerial photographs.

In the 12 months from May 1942 to May 1943 the site printed 6,698,313 maps. Across this and the mobile map units on trucks, the Royal Engineers Corps printed 10,117,313 maps in 1942, 2 million in July alone.