D-Day in Miniature

The Library’s Geography and Map Division holds many treasures from critically important moments in American and global history — maps that chronicle exploration, discovery, war, peace and progress.

One such map is a raised relief model created in early June 1944, showing an area largely known to the world by its World War II code name: Utah Beach.

U.S. naval officers at Camp Bradford, Virginia, produced the map — a unique three-dimensional object made of rubber-on-foam backing — mere days before the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, that helped change the course of the war toward Allied victory.

The mapmakers painstakingly compiled it from stereo photographs taken by low-flying American pilots that April and May, noting information critical for amphibious landings: tide lines, the slope of the beach, the location of hedgehogs — metal beams German forces welded together in a jack-like shape and hid underwater to tear open the hulls of landing craft coming ashore.

Once completed, the map was flown to Plymouth, England, where a young Navy intelligence officer, Lt. Charles Burwell, used it to prepare troops for the Omaha and Utah Beach landings. Burwell donated the map to the Library in 2003, and he told his story through a Veterans History Project interview available on loc.gov.

As he described in that interview, Burwell immediately had thought the map would be useful for troops to understand what they would encounter during the predawn invasion, due to its three-dimensional characteristics. He also used it to brief U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery on June 4, as final preparations for the invasion began.

Burwell participated in the planning of other amphibious assaults in Europe and Asia through the rest of the war. The Utah Beach map remained in his possession from June 6, 1944, until he donated it to the Library, where today it serves as a resource for researchers and a reminder of the monumental seaborne invasion that changed the course of history.