Gifting. Tis the season. Taken by German soldiers, these photos from the Eastern Front were found tucked in endpapers (always shake down second-hand books). Insights welcome. I'll start with Woronesh in 42/43 and end with Der ReichsKamel.

Yes, that's right. Der ReichsKamel.🎄 Some of the photos don't have captions. Most of the flare is from the original print. This one's marked Gefangene in Woronesh', and was back to back with the, er, tank* in the previous tweet.

*Confession: I'm great with trivia, culture, and observation. Not so good on tanks.

PSA: The new @WeHaveWaysPod is great, and lots of lovely, lovely people have asked me for maps of Italy over the last couple of days. This is the primer for GSGS's 1:25,000 maps - don't panic - the links to make it readable are coming ...

https://twitter.com/WeHaveWaysPod/status/1772560394021716163

... and you'll find that index and maps like this one. (Terelle, 1:25,000. GSGS 4228) on Mapster. It's not an intuitive site. It's - a bit clunky. But it's an excellent source for this kind of mapping.

Nearly forgot. Wee spotlight on Operation TORCH maps, in preçis form, from the forthcoming Map Men book blah blah blah. Mostly insights on security really, with a few random maps and the odd IWM image.
Details in Alt+ as per usual. @WeHaveWaysPod
[E 18982 - BLM, 3 days early.🫡] Okay: first estimates were that TORCH required 30,000,000 maps. That’s more than the entire map run for the British Army in the FWW, but then, Africa is a big place. In all, constraints (and common sense) meant c.10,000,000 maps were produced on 700 different map sheets.

Because reasons, and because the big fella @thinkdefence is feeling a bit needy - more maps. Made by Das Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme in 1938 (I told you there were reasons) ... these show the bridge crossings over the Oder river basin and the coastal rivers in Pomerania: 🧵/

https://twitter.com/thinkdefence/status/1564976402394480643

The whole set comprises a six-sheet military map, prepared by RfL in September 1938, as Germany was getting ready to invade Poland. Covers the bit roughly between the Baltic and Racibórz. Low res here, which may be enough, but super-uber-mega res link in the Alt-Text.

Maps. Maps need triangles. Everything happens somewhere (amirite, @OrdnanceSurvey?!), and to find a point precisely on a map, we need to triangulate that position. Let’s talk about Maj. Gen. William Roy. I'll take questions at the end. 😉🧵/
@natlibscotmaps It’s 1783. Monsieur Cassini – French bloke, good with triangles – has been working on a new projection. How We See The World. But he’s not convinced about everyone else's view of that world, so he writes a wee blog. You can read the whole thing, here:
archive.org/details/philtr…

Maps and war go hand in hand. I’d like to show you a military map so devoid of *topographic* detail it hurts the eyes … but it's a map that is so full of information, it tells its own story. Ready? Okay: this is the battle of Birch Coulee (this 👇 is not the map 🤪) :🧵 For background, while Civil War is rumbling away in the South, a complex system of land treaties and plats (a whole other thread🤦‍♀️) is creating chaos, nationwide. For now, we're focussing on the cession of Dakota territory.

Drunk on the value of writing. God, I love my job. 🧵

🗨️ A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
💭 Two quotations marks walked into a “synonym”.
🗯️ A bar, a bar, a bar, dammit – epizeuxis walked into a bar!
💬 A synonym strolled into a tavern, an inn, and a gin joint. 👁‍🗨 Synecdoche walked into The Literary Device.
🔈 The bar growled as the anthropomorph walked in.
🗨️ A mixed metaphor walked into a bar for angels, saw the light and kicked the bucket.
💭 When it got rowdy in there, polyptoton asked ‘who’s going to bar the bar’?

Friday evening, still working, short 🧵.Yesterday was #HolocaustMemorialDay. Today, @reassesshistory posted an excellent thread about Hamburg. Here’s a small insight about Sandbostel – Stalag X-B – and the humanity of Horrocks. Fair warning: graphic content.

[© IWM B 9302] In September 1939, the Wehrmacht set up the POW camp in Sandbostel, in lower Saxony. This was just one of KZ Neuengamme’s 85 satellite camps, spread across northern Germany. Working conditions varied, the camps were broadly segregated by sex.

Great pod today - @wehaveways – chewing the cud in Burma. Got me thinking about mapping for the country and all that jungle. Who did it? And in 1942, how good was it?

(These are 1954 HMSO issues, done for illustrative purposes, little more.)
#mapmen 🧵 Start big. Overviews are useful. This one is a public domain, US Army-sourced map showing the transportation routes across the China-Burma-India theatre between 1942-1943. It ain't all that. But...

Maps make a battle. Have a gander at the Blue & Greys at Shiloh, April 6 1862. Format, tech, scale are incompatible, I know [🤪], but which *style* nails our view of the *spirit* of the action, best? HT @Blanch6144

General Buell's action overview for public consumption? Or the simple, approved, on-the-hoof version of the action according to the Confederate commander, Beauregard, drawn up by Frémaux, a French artist working in Louisiana as a civil engineer and cartographer?.

Another 🚨🌍map klaxon🌍🚨, this time as part of the 664th Engineer Topographic Company's work, mapping movements through Bastogne (that's "BastooOOOoone" in #wehaveways) running right through from 19 to 31 December 1944.

(Found in an odd folder. I'd forgotten about these.) Bastogne, 20th December...