1943 Potter WWII Pictorial Route Map of the 951st Aviation Engineer Company in Italy

This is a c. 1943 World War II W. Potter pictorial route map of the 951st Aviation Engineer Topographic Company in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. The map is distinctive as one of the few WWII Route Maps published during, rather than after, the war, and thus may have influenced the genre's rise, direction, and popularity.

A Closer Look

This map is a continuation of another map created for the 951st (previously sold by us). It chronicles the company's experiences in North Africa, Sicily, and southern Italy. Using the same pastel palette and distinctive humor, Potter brings levity to a horrible situation. Soldiers are illustrated in hilarious situations throughout: soldiers outside Tunis sleeping in a tent surrounded by children asking for candy; this time in Sicily, a soldier throws out the French-English dictionary in favor of an Italian-English version to romance local women; still others feature soldiers playing craps on an LST and a GI waving at the enemy fighter plane; one of the funniest, tinged with dark humor, is the outline of an airplane in the ground with a soldier looking down in the hole asking, 'flying kind of low, aren't you?' Another joke that runs across both 951st maps is a maniacal medical officer carrying a syringe the size of a man's chest shadowing the soldiers in Africa and Italy. He appears in the illustrations in the upper right corner as well, this time ready to administer an injection to an unknowing victim. A note below the bottom border reads, 'RESTRICTED until a new distributor cap is found', poking fun at Army classification rules.

The 951st Aviation Engineer Topographic Company

We have been able to piece together only a tenuous history of the 951st Aviation Engineer Topographic Company. The company was organized in Connecticut and included 250 men. After training in Colorado, they were sent to England by December 1942. They fought in North Africa and Italy. Given that many other topographic companies and battalions printed many route maps after the war, it is likely that the 951st created and printed this one themselves. As this map was produced during the war, it likely influenced the genre's proliferation in general.

World War II Route Maps

Maps tracing unit movements during World War II were issued by both American and British forces during and after the war. As a genre, these maps represent a broad range of aesthetics, from the purely functional that label places and provide dates, to the artistic, and comic. Many combine the three and provide a visually striking but historically informative summary of the unit's experiences.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by W. Potter and likely published by the 951st sometime in 1943 after the September invasion of Italy. We note a single example cataloged in OCLC, located at Texas A and M University. We know of one other example in private hands.