1943 Owens Map of the Possible Allied Invasion of the Balkans

This is a Friday, July 9, 1943 Charles Hamilton Owens and Minneapolis Morning Tribune map of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The map depicts the region from Italy, Malta, and Libya to Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East and from Russia, Poland, and Germany to Egypt and Libya. Fighting in North Africa ended with the surrender of German and Italian forces on May 13, 1943, making the Eastern Front the only active combat against Axis forces in the European and Mediterranean theaters. As of July 9th, it was believed, due to a brilliant misinformation campaign by the Allies, that the Balkans would play host to the next major Allied invasion. As stated in the text box in the upper-left corner of this map, the Allies mounted a successful invasion of the Balkans during World War I, which meant that the Axis had to take the threat seriously. Four different possible invasion routes are illustrated here: one through the Adriatic Sea and Yugoslavia; another through the Aegean and Salonika, Greece; a third through the Dardanelles, the Black Sea, and Romania (Rumania); and a fourth overland through Turkey and Bulgaria. Pros and cons of each of these routes are discussed on the map, allowing readers to understand that each of these routes presents its own difficulties. Thus, the newspaper's readers would have a better understanding of what Allied troops were facing, when the actual invasion was launched, and the official plan was revealed to the world.

In fact, the following day, July 10, 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, unveiling the elaborate hoax that was the Allied invasion of the Balkans. Even though the invasion did not actually happen, the deception campaign served a valuable purpose. By forcing the Axis powers to plan for a possible invasion in the Balkans, the Germans pulled one fifth of their troops out of combat on the Eastern Front against the Russians to reinforce Italian troops in the Balkans. They also began building fortifications in the region, using resources that could have been consumed somewhere else, possibly with greater effect on actual combat. By diverting Axis resources to the Balkans, the Allies forced the consumption of resources in a theater where they would be of almost no use to the enemy.

When Charles Hamilton Owens drew this map, he was doubtless inspired by the work of Richard Edes Harrison, an American illustrator and cartographer who, working for Fortune magazine, pioneered a new style of representing the world for WWII era propaganda maps. Edes developed the convention of using spherical perspective with an exaggerated vertical dimension, as on the present map, to illustrate part of the world as part of a greater global situation. This map was drawn by Charles Hamilton Owens and published in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune on Friday, July 9, 1943.