Description

4 pages of newsprint on a single folded sheet with full colour map appearing on the final page (Very Good, some light wear along old folds), full page: 62 x 43 cm (24.5 x 17 inches); size of map only: 33 x 39 cm (13 x 15.5 inches).

This is the first sheet (of four pages) of the edition of the Cumhuriyet (‘The Republic’) newspaper, one of Turkey’s leading dailies, dated October 5, 1943.  By the autumn of 1943, World War II was far from over; however, the Allies had turned the tide against the Axis powers.  Earlier that year, the German Wehrmacht had been throttled at the Battle of Stalingrad, rolling back their invasion of the Soviet Union and leaving them desperately short of resources.  Mussolini’s Italian regime fell in September 1943, leaving the overstretched Germans to pick up the stack, as the Allies invaded Italy.  A massive Allied invasion of Nazi occupied North-western Europe was inevitable and expected, just nobody yet knew when or where the invasion would land.

The map, on page 4, centred on the English Channel, depicts England, the bulk of France, Benelux and bordering regions of Germany and Switzerland.  In well executed and entertaining pictographic form, the map labels all major cities (ex. Eiffel Tower for Paris; Big Ben for London), and shows the Germans’ awesomely powerful line of defences along the Atlantic, Channel and North Sea coasts, as being a virtually impregnable wall.  On the other side, in Britain, are the Allies’ seemingly scattered martial resources.  One gains the impression that any place the Allies chose to land would not be good place!

Across the ‘Manş Kanali’ (English Channel) and the southern part of the ‘Şimal Denizi’ (North Sea), there are several arrows with kilometric distances showing the Allies’ various options for landing on the Continent.

As it turned out, the Allies would make their first landing in Normandy, on D-Day (June 6, 1944), and while the invasion proved exceedingly difficult (as the present map suggested!), it was ultimately successful – the Allies entered Paris on August 24-25, 1944.

While Turkey remained neutral during almost all of World War II (it entered the conflict on the Allied side only in February 1945), Turks were vitally interested in the war, and news from the front occupied as much space in their newspapers as it did in England or any combatant state.