British military airfields in mainland Europe, 1944-1945
Click on the image to enlarge

I have already mentioned in this blog that trying to describe the operational history of the Spitfire in a somewhat cohesive way requires a whole lot of basic terminology and facts to be sorted out. A good example of this is a subject as seemingly trivial as sorting out RAF Ranks, another, and one which is a subject of constant consideration, is geography – the names of places. Readers may recall my earlier encounter with this subject in conjunction with my description of the defence of Malta (see RAF Takali or RAF Ta Qali).

My work this week concentrates on post-D-day developments in Europe. As part of this work I have decided to chart all the British 2nd TAF airfields on the continent, from D-Day to VE-Day. Unlike the more or less permanent air stations built in the United Kingdom, many airfields in mainland Europe were temporary landing grounds to be used by the tactical air forces in close support of the moving front. For this reason, airfields were assigned and referred to by coded numbers. In general, British airfields were consecutively numbered, but with a B-prefix, from B-1 to B-174. American airfields were given A-, Y-, or R-, prefixes and numbered consecutively from 1 to 99 .

Easy? So far. Sorting out the geography is, however, another matter. Some places are spelled differently in different sources: Coulombes or Coulombs? Brustem or Brusthem? Other airfields were located in rural areas between multiple villages, so a place could be referred to as Rucqueville, Martragny or Vaussieux depending on the context. And so on.

To sort out the data, I have decided to plot all the airfields on a map. This, in turn, brought a question of which mapping software to use. Preferably, I wanted non-copyrighted base maps so that I would have no restrictions using the result of my plotting on this site or in any other context. Furthermore, an interactive and programmable map system would be nice so that I could retain the opportunity of post-processing and combining my data rather than merely drawing a static image.

I spent a good part of the evening scanning the available interactive map systems on the web, starting with Google Maps, through Google Earth, Map24, Yahoo! Maps and a couple more. Sadly, very few of the systems allow your own objects to be freely added to the map. Google is a notable exception in this respect, with dedicated markup language available in both Google Earth and Google Maps. However, map imagery in these two products is copyrighted material and its use is strictly limited. A general remark is also that public domain maps are difficult to come by.

The solution came in the form of World Wind, a 3D interactive world viewer and therefore a sibling to Google Earth. Originally developed by NASA, World Wind is an open source initiative. True, the satellite images do not hold the same quality as those used by Google, but they have been provided by NASA and therefore are in public domain. I found that I could easily transfer my Google Earth *.kml markups to World Wind and produce decent overview maps with minimum effort. Excellent. This tool is not perfect, but if you have similar needs, you may want to give it a try. My next task will be trying to plot mission routes, we’ll see how it goes!

The resulting reference feature about continental RAF airfields will be published in the Articles section soon.