Background
I am building the support maps for a web site that I created for Clio II. The site will be used by the U.S. Army War College to train its officers on military operations. The exercise places the students in the role of Allied war planners who are planning the invasion of North Africa in August, 1942. The goal of the exercise is to teach the students to:
- Analyze how theater commanders translate national strategic direction into theater strategies and guidance, campaign plans, and unified and joint operations.
- Evaluate the processes theater commanders use to define end states, derive the mission, express commander's intent, and complete their estimate of the situation and campaign plan.
I am building the website to provide a comprehensive, “one shop stop” for information pertaining to invasion planning in August, 1942. I am also designing the site to simulate some of the classified planning tools that war planners are currently using. My integration of maps into the site is central to my project. Further, the maps provide critical information that cannot be adequately addressed in a narrative.
Major Topic
I primarily use three types of maps to illustrate situational factors in the training scenario. The first map is a map of the North Africa Theater of Operations. I use it to depict the overall situation in the region, and it can also be used for navigation to various invasion points. The second map is a local map that depicts specific invasion points or decisive points within the theater. These local maps provide enough detail for the War College students to develop an accurate situation and mission analysis for the exercise. The third map will be a detailed map of the decisive points in theater. These maps will be modern equivalents of the actual maps the planners used.
While I could design the entire site with these detailed maps, I fear that they would overload the students on information and actually detract from the exercise. For that reason, I want to maintain relatively austere regional and theater level maps. At the proposed landing sites, I want to increase the detail to a level that is sufficient to allow the planners to visualize operational and tactical problem. For this class, I am concentrating on the area surrounding Casablanca. I’ve included Casablanca page maps at the bottom of the page.
When building these maps, I had to start from scratch. The maps within the current Army War College training package are inadequate for the following reasons:
- The training packet maps are taken from secondary sources that discuss the actual invasion. As such, they depict a “solution” to the students rather than a problem.
- They don’t show Vichy French troop dispositions—a sizeable force of up to 200,000 troops and colonial police. By the terms of capitulation, the Vichy French were nominally aligned with the Nazis. For more details, go to the French situation exercise page.
- The maps treat Northwest Africa in isolation from critical areas of influence such as Sicily, the Western Desert, and other critical bases in the Mediterranean.
- They provide insufficient detail to allow the students to create a plan for invasion.
- They are poorly illustrated and fail to articulate the operational problem.
I want to use the unique characteristics of a website to provide a more interactive experience for the students. Unlike a written text, a website allows students to look at the operational problem from many different perspectives in a sequence that they can choose. I also want to use the website and interactive maps to allow the students to understand the complexity of the Operation TORCH invasion.
Source Maps
Over the past four months, I’ve been collecting various maps of North Africa for my website. I’m collecting detailed maps on the following areas: Gibraltar, Safi, Casablanca, Fedhala, Port Lyautey, Algiers, Oran, Bone, Bizerte, and Tunis. Almost every map I’ve found has been inadequate for the task of recreating invasion planning.
Original Map
USAWC Student Text Map. Below is an example of a map from the student text. This is one of the better ones...
Other Maps
Due to the inadequacies of the supplied text, the students are forced to go to other sources in order to understand the situation. Unfortunately, all of the maps they will find in the War College Library and the Internet provide too little detail and are focused on the actual execution of the TORCH invasion. As such, they fail to convey the complexity of the pre–invasion situation and force the students to “reverse engineer” a solution from the invasion, itself. Below are some examples:
The West Point Historical Atlas of World War II. The normally superb and comprehensive West Point Historical Atlas will disappoint those who seek more detail on the TORCH Operation.
George F. Howe. Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West. The Mediterranean Theater of Operations. U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1957. The example, below, shows the best operational map of the Casablanca invasion available on the Internet. Note that Howe does not show Vichy French forces even though his phase lines imply some tough fighting. This map does give the viewer a better appreciation for the geographical “lay” of the area, and it frames the specific area of the operations very well. However, it does not provide any information that a student can use to evaluate invasion sites for himself. The CMH brochure provides maps at this level of detail for all of the actual invasion sites, but it does not provide any information on other proposed (but not chosen) landing sites.
Samuel Eliot Morison. Operations in North African Waters, October 1942–1943. As one views the maps posted on the Internet, one notices that the maps contain the roughly the same information. As far as I can tell, all are based on Morison’s superb history of naval operations in World War II. Morison’s book is also one of the few books to provide the actual planning factors that Allied war planners used. The example maps shown below are probably the worst maps out of Morison’s book. Port Lyautey, Algiers, and Oran are covered by full color fold–outs and provide more detail than I have found in any other text.
John Gordon IV. Joint Power Projection: Operation TORCH in Joint Forces Quarterly, Spring 1994. Lieutenant Colonel Gordon’s article probably provides the best maps for unit actions around Casablanca, but his maps also suffer from a lack of detail. He provides the sources for his maps, but he made significant improvements to them. As with every other map I’ve found, it provides little information on the Vichy French defenders.
WGS–84 based aerial navigation charts. Because the regional maps found in the history books were inadequate, I pulled National Geospatial and Intelligence Center air navigation maps to use as the basis for my local maps. Unfortunately, Northwest Africa wasn’t a priority area during the Cold War, so NGIC did not have many of the really detailed products that they provide for Europe and Asia. However, this map does provide a nice aggregate level map with sufficient detail to build a simple representation of the area.
Aerial Photos
I started looking for aerial photos in order to get the details that the maps lacked. Through the National Archives and the Office of the Chief of Information, U.S. Army, I found several aerial photos shot from aircraft flying from the U.S.S. Ranger in November 1942. I’m still looking for the complete set of images from the exhaustive aerial study of the region made by U.S. Navy reconnaissance aircraft. I've taken these photo thumbnails directly from my site:
Photos from Space
I am also using the photos taken by NASA astronauts on shuttle missions. Though urban development has dramatically altered the landscape, I can still use the photos to inform my color choices. In the case of Casblanca, most of the vegetation is now gone, so I used other pictures from the suburbs (not pictured here) to recreate the the less densely populated areas. For each invasion site, I have collected three–five images. Below is one example:
I finally find some good maps.
As I studied many of the primary source documents (mission orders, intelligence estimates, and references in planning guidance), I found entries discussing the U.S. Intelligence Service’s invasion map for Casablanca. Because of the size and detail of this map, I will only include a section of it on this page.
1942 U.S. Intelligence Map of the Town Plan of Casablanca.
This map will allow me to determine the locations of Vichy defense forces. The actual map notes the locations of the artillery parks, the major barracks, military hospitals, coastal artillery positions, and other critical features. The French Army created detailed colonial maps in 1932 and 1935 that served as the basis for the U.S. Army maps. The University of Boston Library maintains copies of these French maps, and I hope to get digital format versions within the next two months. For the near term, I will use Casablanca (and the U.S. map) to demonstrate my map building skills.
This map is perfect for the military planner, and it will work well for the website. However, because of its large format (1/10000 scale) and its high detail, it consumes over 8 megabits of storage and is 3000 pixels across. I can make the map smaller, but it loses too much detail in the conversion. Adobe Illustrator will come to the rescue.
I plan to integrate this map into my local area pages as an inset. Because the map is so large and detailed, I will use Zoomify! or a similar program in order to aid navigation. In addition, I will integrate the threats that are listed in various intelligence and analysis documents into the vector–based map to give it the feel of a military overlay. By using the technologies available and the military presentation techniques taught to our battle staffs, I hope to build an engrossing military situation for the students.
Maps Under Development
Below are the Casablanca regional and the Casablanca Town Plan maps as I am building them. I originally created the regional maps for my site in Adobe Photoshop. Based on what we are learning in this class, I am now converting all of my pixel–based maps into vector–based graphics. The new graphics are much more crisp than the initial versions I created, and I will convert all of my site’s maps to the vector versions over the next three weeks.
As time permits, I plan on building the town plans for Port Lyautey, Fedhala, Oran, Algiers, Bone, and Gibraltar. I also plan on integrating the French Army maps into my regional maps. My terrain reliefs are based on WGS-84 maps and other National Geospatial Agency products, but I believe that the 1932 and 1935 French Army maps are even more accurate. They will also allow me to accurately depict the road and rail networks in the regions. Right now, I can only capture the major systems.
Just some notes on the maps... I will replace the current inset map of Casablanca on my local map with the more detailed version of Casablanca that is shown at the bottom. I wanted to build a “proof of concept” for my local maps before I proceeded with the maps of the decisive points. Now, I need to learn how to plug Zoomify into my local map. I also want to replace the Javascript that is running my local map with an application that shows specific layers within my Illustrator files. Using this technique, I hope to reduce file size and download times.
