World War II Database

For as long as I could remember, I had always been a fan of maps. I could recall being only ten years old, index finger on the road atlas, sitting in the backseat of my parents' car while we were going to see the grandparents. When a fellow history enthusiast picked up an extra copy of The West Point Atlas of War: World War II: The Pacific for me, I was undoubtedly excited to lay my hands on it!

The atlas contains 39 maps, each about 12 inches by 9 inches (or about 30 centimeters by 24 centimeters) in size. Some of the maps in this collection includes:

• Japanese advances in 1937 that started the war in Asia
• Air routes during the attack on Pearl Harbor
• Invasion of Hong Kong
• Japanese landing operations between Dec 1941 and May 1942
• Guadalcanal Campaign and the fight for Henderson Field
• Burma Campaign
• Leyte Gulf Campaign
• Planned invasion of the Japanese home islands

Each map is accompanied with a page of text, providing some narrative about the events illustrated by the corresponding map. While a mere single page of text is wildly inadequate to cover all aspects of the map that it attempts to describe, the verbiage does provide some context on how those events affected the subsequent chapters of the war. Inside the front cover is a comprehensive guide to symbols on the map, helping the readers to translate each symbol into the unit (airborne, armor, infantry, etc.), size (battalion, division, army group, etc.), and commander that each symbol represents; this guide proves to be very helpful as I thumbed through the pages.

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