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AUTHOR:
FORMAT:
THIS ITEM IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH WINDOWS VISTA The Official Historians had
the benefit of various record collections of maps available to them at the start
of their work in 1920. Sorting and arranging material started much earlier.
Although, following the Armistice, many records were pulped or burned in France
because of the impossibility of shipping them all back and the need to reduce
their immense volume to a manageable quantity, many papers and most war diaries
of headquarters, formations and units, and the annotated maps thereto appended,
were untouched by this holocaust. Many 1914-1918 records were, however, later
destroyed by enemy bombing in 1940. In the 1930s the Great War historical and
other records (including war diaries) of the British Army comprised 1,900 tons
and occupied 15 miles of shelving! The Official Historians also used information
supplied after 1918 by their former allies and enemies. The last volumes of the
Official History were not published until after the Second World War. Drawn for
the official series ‘History of the Great War, Military Operations, Other
Theatres,’ the outline dispositions and situation maps and colour-layered
topographical maps represent in a reduced and simplified form the vast
production of British military cartography (over 32 million trench, tactical,
strategic and topographical maps) during the years 1914-18. Providing a powerful
and revealing picture of the stages of operations, they were designed to be used
with the text and appendix volumes. Recent reprints of the Official Histories
have included the sketches bound into the text volumes, but have excluded the
maps in pockets and in map-cases; Naval and Military Press have therefore
decided to concentrate, in this CD Rom, on presenting these maps, which have
never been reprinted since the original publication of the Official Histories.
Price plus VAT where applicable.
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