Nine days after Germany invaded Poland and one week after Britain and France declared war, the Los Angeles Times published this dramatic full-page rotogravure map with a bold instruction: “SAVE THIS MAP! IT SHOWS THE THEATER OF WAR.”
Created by Times staff artist Charles Owens and dated Sunday, September 10, 1939, the map is both a practical reference and a piece of wartime graphic design that feels almost cinematic. A dark storm cloud of German troops sweeps from the west, their arrowed advance piercing Poland like black lightning. Swastika flags mark the front lines, while tiny illustrations of battleships, submarines, and aircraft dot the seas and skies.
What makes the map fascinating today is how much it reveals about what Americans knew—and feared—at the very start of World War II in Europe:
- Poland is still shown as a large, intact country (in reality, it would be fully partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union just weeks later when the USSR invaded from the east on September 17).
- The Soviet Union appears neutral and untouched, with no hint of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or the coming Soviet stab-in-the-back.
- Britain and France are depicted mobilising but not yet fighting (The Phoney War period).
- The Maginot Line is prominently labeled along the Franco-German border—symbol of a defensive mindset that would soon prove tragically inadequate.
- British naval bases (Scapa Flow, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria) and the Italian naval base at Taranto are carefully marked, foreshadowing the Mediterranean as a critical theatre.
The tone is urgent but not yet despairing. The war is still mostly “over there.” American readers are being asked to preserve the map the way people today might bookmark a live-updating dashboard—because everything is about to change, week by week.
Owens’ illustration style—dramatic shading, bold arrows, and that menacing cloud bank rolling eastward—turns a simple political map into propaganda-grade storytelling. It’s easy to imagine families unfolding this page at the breakfast table, tracing the black arrows with their fingers, and wondering how far the storm would spread.
Eighty-six years later, the map is a frozen moment: the last Sunday when “the war” still looked containable on a single newspaper page.
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