The war next door

From airplanes and ocean-crossing battleships to radios and even early rockets, World War II completely changed the face of modern warfare. It wasn't just that the war was extraordinarily violent and deadly. The geography of conflict had a broader reach than ever, marking first truly worldwide war, spanning across hemispheres.

No cartographer was more closely associated with the U.S. view of global war than Richard Edes Harrison. (Schulten 1997; Barney 2012) Harrison was trained as an architectural draftsperson, not as a cartographer, and his illustrator's sensibility would become a key characteristic in his richly-designed maps. Hired by the magazine Fortune during the early years of the New Deal, Harrison gave the magazine a distinctive visual perspective on the conflict that began to spread throughout the world in the 1930s.

One of Harrison's key interventions was to set aside rectangular projections like the Mercator in favor of projections like this azimuthal equidistant projection that allowed for a more sensible comparison of the geographic relationships between the various theaters of war. In a caption on the upper left of this map, using the metaphorical figure of a dancer with a globe-shaped skirt flattening outwards as she twirls around, Harrison writes that:

The projection has two important advantages: it shows little distortion of the Northern Hemisphere, and it nowhere breaks the continuity of the lands or seas involved in the present far-flung struggle.

This map was published in the August 1941 edition of Fortune; it wasn't until December of that year, with the attack on Pearl Harbor, that the United States would enter the war. In fact, at the time this map was published, many Americans rejected the idea of entering the war, believing that the conflict was too far away to concern the United States. Harrison's map makes the argument that the war was not as distant as it first appeared. “The entire conflict pivots around the U.S.,” reads the accompanying text.

The United Nations flag, featuring a polar projected map

The polar projection became the preeminent cartographic symbol for both the war as well as the U.S.-led global order that emerged from the defeat of the Axis powers. This projection made it possible to easily visualize the supply lines, landing strips, and troop outposts that connected superpowers together into a global balance of power. (Immerwahr 2019) The polar projection became part of the emblem and logo of the United Nations. It also became symbolic for another frightening form of globalization: nuclear warfare. In recognition of the fact that missiles and bombers could easily fly over the poles between the United States and the Soviet Union, polar maps like these became the basis for a new kind of military strategy and world conflict.

In a 1944 map of the world from eight perspectives, Harrison showed how different parts of the world fit into the global conflict