The demand for mapping in WWII initiated the largest cartographic undertaking the world had ever seen, resulting in a combined Allied Forces output of close to a billion maps. These maps ranged from the detailed 1:12,500 scale topographic sheets for Operation Overloard, codenamed ‘Benson,’ to the geologic maps used for the siting of temporary airfields, supply depots, and cross-country transportation routes for tanks and heavy vehicles. They also included hydrographic charts and cross-sectional profiles of the D-Day landing beaches, as well as aeronautical lattice charts for the newly invented ‘Gee’ radio-navigation system used on bomber missions. The McMaster University Library Map Collection contains approximately 3,000 examples of these maps, and has partnered with the University of Alberta William C. Wonders Map Collection, the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies, and the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum to add roughly 7,000 more maps to our online collection.

These catalog records are primarily for non-digitized materials housed in Stanford Libraries.

Stanford University Libraries holds a large collection of Japanese military and imperial maps, referred to as gaihōzu, or "maps of outer lands." These maps were produced starting in the early Meiji (1868-1912) era and the end of World War II by the Land Survey Department of the General Staff Headquarters, the former Japanese Army. The Library is in the process of scanning and making available all of the maps in the collection. This portal allows you to search for the maps geographically through an index and then download the images at multiple resolutions.

The Army Map Service (AMS) produced hundreds of millions of maps for the war effort during World War II. A small number of the output were city plans of which Stanford's map library holds around 400 either made directly by them or reprinted from work done by the Great Britain War Office, General Staff, Geographical Service (GSGS). Three regions are covered: Far East Asia (248 maps), North Africa (88 maps), and Europe (54 maps). The maps cover a very narrow date range from 1942 to 1948 with the earliest imprints in Algeria and Morocco and the latest from France. They range in scale from 1:5,000 to 1:14,000, with the most detailed maps tending to be the ones originally produced by the GSGS. This exhibit highlights these maps allowing one to examine these cities at a detailed scale as they would have been reviewed during wartime.

This military map series at 1:25,000 was begun in the 1930s, but at the outbreak of War in 1939, only covered around a seventh of the country. Printing was then dramatically speeded up, so that the whole series was completed in a few months. Our holdings have printing dates from 1940-43.