Unit 1 All Quiet on the Illinois Front

Geography: Its Nature and Perspectives AP Human Geography

It's the morning of Wednesday, 13 September 1939. In an America supremely at
peace, newspapers hit front lawns with headlines screaming of war. The horrific
conflict splashed across the front pages of thousands of dailies is happening an ocean
away, in Europe.
Two weeks earlier, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland, thus ending all pretense that
Hitler's goal was 'peace in our time' [1]. Poland's main allies, Britain and France, have
promptly declared war on Germany. Although the Nazis are focused for now on
winning the Polish campaign, it's clear that this is the beginning of a 'Second World
War' - a term first used widely in these terrifying days [2].
The front page of the Panama City News Herald, published in Florida, is
representative of most other US newspapers during these weeks. Very little local news
on the page, which is dominated by articles on the war - both from an American and a
European perspective.
One headline wired in from London by the Associated Press reads: British-French
Resolve To Fight Until Naziism (sic) Gone, Says Chamberlain. The caption for the
page's main photo says: At German general staff headquarters "somewhere in
Poland", Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, "first soldier of the Reich" looks over map of battle
area. His ace military leader, Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch, stands at his shoulder.
Picture was radioed to New York from the German capital.
A short message datelined London reads: Duke of Windsor is Ready for Service.
Below, an article datelined Boston states, in similar wording: Negroes Ready For
Military Service. From Washington DC, the news is: [General] Pershing Urges
Bigger Defense Power for U.S., and Neutrality Act Change Sought by
President [Roosevelt].
Somewhat prematurely, an article at the bottom of the page predicts the final outcome
of the conflict: Poor Gasoline Said to Cause Reich Defeat, while from the North
Atlantic come terrible tales of the incipient sea war: Athenia Survivors Tell Horrors of
Days in Fear of U-Boats In Atlantic.
But the most remarkable item on the page - at least from the perspective of this blog -
is a small graphic at the top of the page. Titled If Illinois Were Western Front, it is a
map of the US Midwest, and it 'brings the war home' for the American readership. By
grafting the theatre of hostilities in Europe onto the geography of the American
heartland, the aim is to make the conflict that is raging on another continent relatable
to Joe Q. Public.

Unit 1 All Quiet on the Illinois Front
Geography: Its Nature and Perspectives AP Human Geography


The caption reads:
All this talk about history-making battles waged, armies on the march and territory
taken sounds big in the day's war news, but how small it is in American terms may be
seen from the map above. Shifted to the American scene, European armies might fight
their battles on the Maginot-Siegfried [3] lines in the center of Illinois. This would put
London about where Minneapolis is, Paris at Des Moines, Berlin at Toledo, Warsaw
at Washington.
Curiously, it seems the way to translate the enormity of the European war to the
American public is to scale it down to its 'true proportions': folks might have started
calling it a World War, but in reality, it could be contained between Minneapolis and
Washington...
Many thanks to Dan Anderson for sending in a scan of this map, taken from the Marinette Eagle (published in Marinette,
Wisconsin), of 18 September 1939. He notes: "They should have put Paris further west - maybe in Colorado, so that Moscow
could be represented". A slightly sharper image can be found here at the Newspaper Archive, on the aforementioned front page
of the Panama City News Herald [4] .
Unit 1 All Quiet on the Illinois Front
Geography: Its Nature and Perspectives AP Human Geography
________
[1] The actual phrase used by Neville Chamberlain on 30 September 1938 hailing the Munich Agreement was
"peace for our time". Perhaps the misquote stems from the fact that the then British PM was paraphrasing one of his
predecessors, in similar circumstances. Following the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Benjamin Disraeli said: "I have
returned from Germany with peace in our time". Chamberlain's statement is remembered as the epitome of
appeasement, the policy born of the misguided hope that agreeing to Hitler's territorial demands would avoid war.
Less than a year after the German occupation of the Sudetenland (as agreed by France and the UK at Munich), Nazi
Germany had occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and invaded Poland.
[2] The coming conflict had been dubbed the 'Second World War' as early as 1920, but mainly in speculative fiction,
and hardly ever in the mainstream press.
[3] The Maginot Line is the name for the French fortifications constructed in the 1930s along the German border.
The so-called Siegfried Line was the mirror version on the German side of the border. The Germans called it the
Westwall. The Siegfried Line was the name for a similar defensive wall built during the First World War; the name
was retained by the Allies for the 1930s construction.
[4] The logo in the lower right hand corner, spelling NEA, reveals the common source of both: Newspaper
Enterprise Association, a syndication service specialising in both images (comics and pictures) and features,
supplying content to over 700 newspapers in the 1930s.