Merryn Profile picture
🪶 Writer. 📌 Lay Historian. 😊 Excitable. ツ FRGS See also @NewsOfTheWar - and https://t.co/X9WuGFSrsp
Mar 27 5 tweets 2 min read
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 ...
Image ... 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. Image
Nov 8, 2022 12 tweets 5 min read
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.🫡] Lt General Bernard Montgomery, GOC 8th Army, standing in fro 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. OPERATION TORCH INVASION OF NORTH AFRICA – NOVEMBER 1942 (
Aug 31, 2022 8 tweets 4 min read
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: 🧵/ RfL, 1938: Übersichtskarte der Übergänge im Stromgebiet d 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. SHEET 1 - RfL - Poland - Bridges - David Rumsey https://www.
Aug 31, 2022 14 tweets 8 min read
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 Kaspar Schott: “Pantometrum Kircherianum”, Max Planck In 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…
Apr 30, 2022 17 tweets 7 min read
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 🤪) :🧵 This panoramic 'birds eye v... 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.
Feb 21, 2022 9 tweets 2 min read
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’?
Jan 28, 2022 14 tweets 7 min read
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] © IWM B 9302 Lieutenant General Horrocks in France Taken by 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. Neuengamme satellite camps - https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-ne
Jan 11, 2022 8 tweets 5 min read
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 🧵 1954 HMSO issues - BURMA Overview - public domain 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... US Army - open issue - briefing, largest scale
Apr 29, 2021 10 tweets 4 min read
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? General Buell's map of the battle-field of Shiloh. Buell, Do 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?. Frémaux, Léon Joseph, and G. T Beauregard. Map of the batt
Apr 21, 2021 10 tweets 3 min read
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...