JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 209
This map comes to us from The Illustrated London News, 3 August 1940, which reproduced it from an article in Fortune Magazine. Though it looks oddly wrong from the outset, it really is pretty lucid--elegant, even--once you understand its purpose. And the purpose of this map was to show the distances that the goods and raw materials from the British Empire (and from the possessions of France) had to travel via the then-closed Suez Canal route versus the new routes "not open to enemy interference" to Great Britain. Countries depicted in outline show the distance via Suez while the same country depicted in shade show the new, longer, non-Suez route. Ever stiff lipped, the Brits announced that even though some of their major natural resources are coming from these vastly removed areas, "even with the fall of France, the British Empire and its allies remain an economically self-contained and immensely powerful war unit, and still control the great part of the world production of some vital commodities..." I'm not sure why, exactly, that it was necessary to display this map to the public eye, what with England under assault in the Battle of Britain (the Nazis extending their aerial assault in preparation for Operation Sealion), the loss of France, and the nearly-there Nazi blockade of English waters. Perhaps it was drawn to show that even though the material was coming from the same places that were now further away, they were still getting there.
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