Apparently unrecorded, this remarkable survival from the Alaskan theatre of World War II was produced at a military studio in Anchorage between August 1940 and June 1941.
Classified “Restricted,” it was created for the use of U.S. military pilots based at Elmendorf Field (today’s Elmendorf Air Force Base, part of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson), in Anchorage, Alaska. This was the main logistics and staging centre of U.S.-Allied forces during the war, and notably, for their ultimately successful efforts to counteract the Aleutian Campaign (June 3, 1942 – August 15, 1943). It was during this campaign that the Japanese briefly occupied Alaska’s westernmost islands, the first time any part of the US was occupied since the War of 1812.
Of course, the United States didn’t enter the war until the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Nonetheless Japanese aggression prompted America to improve their defensive capabilities in both Hawaii and Alaska. Construction of Elmendorf Field commenced on June 8, 1940, with the base becoming operational in August of that year. The base was named in honour of Captain Hugh M. Elmendorf, a famed U.S. military test pilot who was killed in a flight accident, in Ohio, in 1933. In November 1940, the base was technically renamed Fort Richardson, after the adjacent army post. In early 1942, thousands of airmen and troops flooded into Elmendorf, leading to the formation of the Eleventh Air Force.
The map depicts the greater Anchorage area covering a region about 60 miles north and south of the city and around 30 miles to the east and west. The waters of Cook Inlet are prominently featured, with its branches of Turnagain Arm and Knik Arm. The map is tint-coded for easy comprehension by pilots in the cockpit, with lowlands show in dark tones, while highlands are white, featuring contours of elevation and the names and spot heights of major peaks in feet (as some mountains exceeded 6,600 feet, they posed a serious hazard for aviation). Major towns and landmarks are also labelled.
A spider-web grid, centred on Elmendorf Field, divides the map into 35 numbered sections. Each concentric circle in the web is code-named (working outwards to inwards): GEORGE, FOX, EASY, DOG, CAST, BAKER, AFIRM. By cross-referencing the code names with the numbers along the margins, one can define locational sectors in the airspace around Elmendorf. As such, pilots could, for example, radio Elmendorf Tower that they were in sector DOG-14 or FOX-22. This allowed pilots to quickly communicate their positions to control, a critical factor in a wartime environment, in a place with notoriously bad weather. The radio frequencies of “Elmendorf Tower 346” (which was Control) and “Anchorage Radio 338 HQ” (used largely to receive weather reports) are labelled on the map.
While the map is undated, its time of production clearly falls sometime between August 1940 (when Elmendorf Field became operational) and June 1941, as the map is stamped as being made for the ‘U.S. Army Air Corps’ (the name of the force was changed to the United States Army Air Forces on June 20, 1941). It was likely made in Anchorage, at or near Elmendorf, at a secure military photographic studio, and is predicated upon a hand-composed hardcopy template. Photography was commonly used by the U.S. Military during the World War II era to duplicate Restricted/Secret documents and maps. This was particularly the case in frontier theatres, such as Alaska and small Pacific islands, where there was scant access to sophisticated military printing studios. The benefit of duplicating classified material by photography in frontier zones, was that it could be executed using mobile equipment in a small space that was easy to secure. At that time, photography could yield only a small number of prints, and so distribution could be easily controlled.
The map would have been issued in only a limited number of examples, and only to pilots who required their use.
During the Cold War, Elmendorf Air Force Base, not least due to its proximity to the Soviet Union and the Arctic, became one of the most important centres of NATO operations.
