About

I am a professional historian and graphic designer. Since 1991 I have worked at the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies as the communications director.  My main job has been the managing editor of Canadian Military History, a quarterly journal-in-a-magazine format.  In the first years of this journal I was always struggling to find suitable maps to illustrate the articles.  If it was possible to find a map it never seemed to show the information needed to match up with the story.  The solution was to start drawing my own maps.  My first attempts were rough, but over the years I have refined my techniques to a very high professional level.  Please take a look at the galleries for some samples, as well as some ‘before’ and ‘after’ maps.

I would be pleased to work with you on any custom map job, whether it be one simple map, or an entire gallery for your project.

My bio:

Mike Bechthold is the managing editor of Canadian Military History and the communications director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies. He teaches military history at Wilfrid Laurier University and has published widely on various aspects of the First and Second World Wars.  Mike is the co-author, with Terry Copp, of a series of battlefield guidebooks and is an experienced battlefield tour leader.  Over the past 15 years Mike has been to Europe over 20 times leading groups of students, high school teachers and military officers to visit and study the Canadian battlefields. He has co-edited two books of essays, one on the Battle of Vimy Ridge and the other on Canada and the Second World War.  One of Mike’s areas of specialization is the question of tactical aviation in the Second World War.  He has published a number of articles examining various aspects of Allied tactical air operations in North Africa, Normandy and Northwest Europe and is currently completing his doctoral dissertation (University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy) on the topic of the early development of tactical air doctrine in the Western Desert, 1940-41.