I expected to spend a couple of minutes browsing this, yet 25 minutes later I'm not even halfway through.
The best (so far) are the ones above the strings "on June 2nd, 1940" and "effort by Russian War Relief". I can't imagine the amount of research and sheer work (especially pre-internet) to create these.
I was a kid who played SimCity 2000, RISK, and had tons of books about geography. Having physical pieces of paper that I'd spend minutes or hours analyzing was so satisfying. Scrolling around Google Earth or doing GIS-based analysis is also satisfying, but I really got a kick out of looking at this post (putting aside the seriousness of WW2).
I never had interest in history when I was young, but developed an appetite for it lately.
Learning how and why people reacted the way they did during times of growing political instability has helped me reconcile some of the trends I see in the world today (even if I don't like them), and lent insight toward forecasting how far the events of tomorrow might stray from my expected norms.
To that end I found the series Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War a pretty riveting documentary exploring the journey from WWII to the present (especially the last few episodes).
I recently finished a large World War II project that covered the full timeline of the war, and Google Maps was a valuable tool to follow what was happening in any given battle. The problem is Google Maps has more detail than you need, so trying to follow something like Operation Market Garden is much more difficult than just looking at this beautiful battle map: https://www.alamy.com/a-bridge-too-far-image68088140.html. "The West Point Atlas of War" is another great resource.
Maps cover the spatial side of war, but in addition it's difficult to follow the timeline. My project stitched popular World War II movies together into a chronological series, making it easier to see what was happening across the world at any given time. You can view the episodes and the full blog post here: https://open.substack.com/pub/ww2supercut/p/combining-143-wo.... And in addition "The Second World War" by Churchill's biographer Martin Gilbert, is a chronological, 750 page book that I couldn't put down.
> Maps cover the spatial side of war, but in addition it's difficult to follow the timeline.
I'd love for there to be an OpenStreetMap style history project with a slider to change the date, allowing users to fill in battle lines and unit positions throughout history. There must be enormous troves of information on units and battles in archives around the world that can be put online in the right form. One obvious problem would be overcoming conflicting accounts of unit positions, strengths and extents, but even basic information on positions of units over time would allow users to get an idea of what was happening in a theater by dragging the slider.
Not quite what you are looking but if you're interested in Operation Market Garden: for the Dutch maps there is https://www.topotijdreis.nl, which gives you historical maps with a year slider. This can at least help one visualize how cities, villages, and topography at through the years.
I made something like this and briefly had it online but I didn't think there would be enough demand to make the time and costs of running it worth it.
> I recently finished a large World War II project that covered the full timeline of the war
When I was in high school I really wanted to make a full blown website with a timeline of WW2, using something like timelineJS (or whatever was available back then), with Wikipedia articles for all events, chronologically and filterable/organised by theatre. Never got around to actually making it, because it would be a massive undertaking.
Related, if anyone is interested in a chronological telling of WW2 in video format, I can recommend the World War 2 channel, ran by real historians, with an episode a week (+ specials covering special events or topics or people): https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
Don't forget some cities have changed a lot during the war. For example Rotterdam was almost completely levelled so what is there now is nothing in relation to how it was then.
Veeery interesting. After realizing that Tora, Tora, Tora! and Midway might make a good double-feature (I tried it, and, they do!) it occurred to me that it might be possible to assemble a film-based curriculum to teach a great deal of the history of roughly 1933-1948, covering the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the war, in a way that's entertaining while being more informative than misleading. There are thousands of films covering the time period from dozens of countries, and lots of those stick reasonably close to historical events, so it might work out.
The hard part, I think, would be tracking down films that give a good sense of the causes and course of more-obscure things like Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. You'd need to find two or three good films on that. Spanish civil war? The invasion and occupation of Poland? The political maneuvering between the Nazis and Soviets before they went to war with one another? The Winter War? These have to be covered by a few films that could act to "teach" the events, but I don't know what those films are and bet most are non-English and not well-known in English, making them harder (for me) to track down.
This could work for World War II since there's so many movies, but even so a bunch of events aren't covered. I also created this spreadsheet of films with their time periods and events covered. It's not exhaustive by any means though, and new ones are coming out constantly.
The first English language film that comes to mind for the Spanish civil war is For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's been a while, but I don't think it has much discourse about the causes or the background for the war - but films often treat those subjects either as assumed background information the audience already has, or as something that is not needed to identify with the characters and enjoy the narrative.
So you could use it, but it would need to be accompanied by supplemental factual materials. But I think that is true of many, if not most, non-documentary popular war films.
Interestingly, a curated collection of films in my opinion is much better than relying on a few history books that, under the cover of being "academic," are considered "authoritative," but, in fact -- there are a lot of facets that aren't easily reconciled. While film simply embraces the ambiguity (meaning a collection of films all telling the story from slightly different viewpoints is a lot better than a single textbook that might be authoritative, but also suffers from the point of view of the writer.
Here is an interesting article on the debate over when WWII actually began (this illustrates my point as "The Invasion of Poland" is often used at the "starting point" of WWII, when that is probably out of academic convenience rather than being factually correct (it's hard to say precisely when WWII began.) https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-09-11/what-if-all-th...
Now I am wondering if there are any deep studies of "World War 2 movie scenes where they talk to a map" from movies. That scene from A Bridge Too Far is a great example of giving the audience some spatial understanding both quickly and using the scene for character building as well.
8 seconds of Star Wars (ANH) was used to establish the time and space background for the "battle of Yavin": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yWrXPck6SI#t=20s and the rest of that scene plays out in the real time (15min) given during those eight seconds.
In contrast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEv999K5Lr0 , with a similar theme and screen time, is nowhere close to real time or distances. (although I guess Star Wars did have a strong advantage in being fictional)
Glad it's useful! There's a few WWI movies in the spreadsheet but I agree they're much more difficult to find. ChatGPT is actually really good for this though, you can say "Generate a table of 100 WWI movies from diverse points of view" and have a good place to start.
WWI may be less cinematographic, but I think it had a larger effect: fascism and communism were both attractive because immediately after the "Great War", the "war to end all wars", people were eager to latch onto alternatives to the systems and political cultures that had gotten them into it (initially they were suspicious of monarchies; later even of capitalist republics; both communists and fascists thought liberal democracies would soon disappear, the former due to incompatibility with the future as revealed by "science" and "philosophy", the latter due to incompatibility with the past as revealed by "tradition" and "action").
I currently think in terms of a "small XX", running 1914-1991.
Originally I'd wondered where to put the 1990s, but seeing as how the Yugoslav Wars (misinformation-stoked fratricidal wars causing massive refugee influx to neighbouring countries) fit the XXI pattern, I'm willing to start it in 1991. (when it ends will not be my concern)
Just when I was about to finish my profile destruction on reddit I find another reason to dig a little deeper into the stew. I wish I had found your stuff on /r/fanedits a long time ago. The work you've done is excellent and is right up my alley, putting things into historical context using reliable sources.
One thing I would like to mention concerns the last map at the end of your post where you show a map based on information from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The caption above the map says "Can't name a concentration camp or ghetto" and the lower states "Many Americans can't name a concentration camp or ghetto". I find it unusual that New York has such a high percentage of the population that is so clueless about history that is this recent. They are, according to your map, #2 behind Mississippi which I would've expected to be #1 or tied for it with some other southern state where white supremacists have long had a foothold or stranglehold on education.
I see that most of the poorly educated states are in the south with Illinois (neo-Nazi foothold in some places) and Oregon (originally intended to be a whites-only state) being exceptions.
And also, that map projection used makes it appear that a (large) hidden hand has torqued the eastern seaboard to the south from Maine to the (limp dick) state of Florida. You can see the distortion along the state lines east of the Mississippi River.
I have a 1944 World Almanac. It's incredibly detailed on World War Two - by my count, page 31 and 35-113 are mostly or totally devoted to it, in addition to the various bits on armies scattered throughout. Sometimes I look at it just to see what happened on that particular day (for instance: today, German forces landed in Leros, in the Aegean Sea, which was at the time held by the British, among many other events - and that just in 1943!) There are also some incredibly detailed war maps which I sometimes look at. At some point I should probably get around to uploading them, as they are absolutely amazing and I'd like to share it, but it's always near the bottom of my to-do list.
I have a copy of Churchill's memoirs of WWII and also read his memoirs of WWI. I always liked the maps in the books, as they somehow brought me a little closer to the time. They're another way of conveying information not only about what is being discussed, but also how the people going through it saw things and what they wrestled with conveying.
Maps made in the current day to accompany Churchill's text wouldn't have the same effect.
I don't think we can really comprehend how big an operation that was. A movie like "Saving Private Ryan" was incredibly good (especially the scene on the beach front) but didn't come anywhere close to show anything resembling that picture.
Even more incredible, the USA landed on Saipan soon after the Allies landed in Normandy. The landing ships for operation FORAGER had to travel 1,000 miles across open ocean.
Recommended reading: The Fleet at Flood Tide by James Hornfischer, and Twilight of the Gods by Ian Toll.
> I don't think we can really comprehend how big an operation that was.
I think that very impressive photo doesn’t even show it.
FTA: “A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels”
⇒ I estimate that that photo only shows about 2% of the vessels involved.
Getting (also FTA) “Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June” onto a coast without using any ports and where you are getting shot at takes a lot of effort.
The photo also doesn't really do justice to how much stuff was going on at one time since it just makes it look like supplies are being delivered to a beach. You've got an an incredibly dense (in terms of participants per area or volume) naval battle, infantry engagements, air superiority operations, close air support and logistics operation all at the same time in roughly same place and even if you pick one aspect to focus on you'll find that the scale and tempo of operations in any one area exceeds what's "normal" even for a pitched battle.
Don't forget those thousands of ships and aircraft started across the channel the night before, only to be turned back by bad weather and having to reset and do it again the next night!
I imagine many more are even less familiar with the massive operations from the Eastern Front, simultaneously more important and lesser known in the West (at least in pop culture; historians of course know them). E.g. Operation Bagration.
Overlord overshadows other operations because it was unique in its nature, scale and difficulties. Eastern Front also had its iconic moments like Battle of Stalingrad or Siege of Leningrad...
They're barrage balloons, unmanned airships intended to make low-level strafing runs hazardous and to break up the view of the ground for higher-level bombers. They were frequently used over London during the Blitz as well.
Something I've come to really appreciate about WWII, is how much effort was put into either creating or implementing concepts about organization and efficiency into action. WWII was likely the largest organizational endeavor in human history.
There's an almost paradoxical immensity to it, where humans, using paper, typewriters, physical mail, and early electric (not electronic) communication systems had to organize millions of humans into large coordinated efforts over about half the surface of a planet.
They did it without the aid of computers and the unlimited up-to-date firehoses of data that we have today. The paradox is that it's not entirely clear that our modern civilization, using these advantages, would be able to do what they did. Modern technologies seem to create an effect of overanalysis, where the WW2 generation often worked in deeply ambiguous grey areas.
Our tendency today is to want to produce as much up to date information as possible, even if its not necessary to the overall goal. We want to use a computer to scrub deeply through immense data to produce marginal gains. A Strategic General in WW2 might want to move 100,000 men and arms to a different location and issue the order where it would be relayed by post, telephone, or telegraph. To find out if that order was fulfilled might take weeks or months to even find out. Today we would want to track each soldier's boots to watch them march across a digital map in real-time.
Yet it worked. With major operations occurring down to the minute that involved multinational organizations moving millions of tons of human lives, arms, supply, and equipment, all also built to fulfill that order, on time and at high quality.
Hard to upvote this comment enough. D-Day alone was staggeringly immense, the largest naval, air and land operation in history, likely never to be matched. And the entire thing was basically planned and executed with pen and paper.
This is awesome. Cool to see the history told this way.
I would also encourage folks to seek out photos/footage of the concentration camps in Europe as well as the aftermath of the atomic bombings in Japan. When you see the unsanitized horror it really gives you pause that people did this to each other. And why war is worth trying to prevent.
For WW2 visualizations, The Fallen of World War II (http://www.fallen.io/ww2/) is a masterpiece—well-researched, clearly visualized, and paired with excellent narration. It balances nuance with the big picture, and even though it addresses tens of millions of deaths, it reminds us that these are people, not mere statistics.
Readit News
The best (so far) are the ones above the strings "on June 2nd, 1940" and "effort by Russian War Relief". I can't imagine the amount of research and sheer work (especially pre-internet) to create these.
I was a kid who played SimCity 2000, RISK, and had tons of books about geography. Having physical pieces of paper that I'd spend minutes or hours analyzing was so satisfying. Scrolling around Google Earth or doing GIS-based analysis is also satisfying, but I really got a kick out of looking at this post (putting aside the seriousness of WW2).
Learning how and why people reacted the way they did during times of growing political instability has helped me reconcile some of the trends I see in the world today (even if I don't like them), and lent insight toward forecasting how far the events of tomorrow might stray from my expected norms.
To that end I found the series Turning Point: The Bomb And The Cold War a pretty riveting documentary exploring the journey from WWII to the present (especially the last few episodes).
Maps cover the spatial side of war, but in addition it's difficult to follow the timeline. My project stitched popular World War II movies together into a chronological series, making it easier to see what was happening across the world at any given time. You can view the episodes and the full blog post here: https://open.substack.com/pub/ww2supercut/p/combining-143-wo.... And in addition "The Second World War" by Churchill's biographer Martin Gilbert, is a chronological, 750 page book that I couldn't put down.
I'd love for there to be an OpenStreetMap style history project with a slider to change the date, allowing users to fill in battle lines and unit positions throughout history. There must be enormous troves of information on units and battles in archives around the world that can be put online in the right form. One obvious problem would be overcoming conflicting accounts of unit positions, strengths and extents, but even basic information on positions of units over time would allow users to get an idea of what was happening in a theater by dragging the slider.
When I was in high school I really wanted to make a full blown website with a timeline of WW2, using something like timelineJS (or whatever was available back then), with Wikipedia articles for all events, chronologically and filterable/organised by theatre. Never got around to actually making it, because it would be a massive undertaking.
Related, if anyone is interested in a chronological telling of WW2 in video format, I can recommend the World War 2 channel, ran by real historians, with an episode a week (+ specials covering special events or topics or people): https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
I'd happily pay for a version of Google Maps where you can hide the streets and highlight the borders between countries, states, provinces and so on.
The hard part, I think, would be tracking down films that give a good sense of the causes and course of more-obscure things like Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. You'd need to find two or three good films on that. Spanish civil war? The invasion and occupation of Poland? The political maneuvering between the Nazis and Soviets before they went to war with one another? The Winter War? These have to be covered by a few films that could act to "teach" the events, but I don't know what those films are and bet most are non-English and not well-known in English, making them harder (for me) to track down.
So you could use it, but it would need to be accompanied by supplemental factual materials. But I think that is true of many, if not most, non-documentary popular war films.
Here is an interesting article on the debate over when WWII actually began (this illustrates my point as "The Invasion of Poland" is often used at the "starting point" of WWII, when that is probably out of academic convenience rather than being factually correct (it's hard to say precisely when WWII began.) https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-09-11/what-if-all-th...
In contrast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEv999K5Lr0 , with a similar theme and screen time, is nowhere close to real time or distances. (although I guess Star Wars did have a strong advantage in being fictional)
Would you happen to know of a similarly curated list of World War I movies?
I feel like the quantity and quality of World War I movies is much more sparse!
WW I doesn't have shocking villains like Hitler and the Nazis.
It doesn't have dramatic events like Pearl Harbor and and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nor does it have big 20th century figures and personalities like Stalin and Mussolini.
So, while World War II has an endless stream of historical movies, I find that World War I is really hard to find the same for.
I currently think in terms of a "small XX", running 1914-1991.
Originally I'd wondered where to put the 1990s, but seeing as how the Yugoslav Wars (misinformation-stoked fratricidal wars causing massive refugee influx to neighbouring countries) fit the XXI pattern, I'm willing to start it in 1991. (when it ends will not be my concern)
Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lamps_are_going_out
One thing I would like to mention concerns the last map at the end of your post where you show a map based on information from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The caption above the map says "Can't name a concentration camp or ghetto" and the lower states "Many Americans can't name a concentration camp or ghetto". I find it unusual that New York has such a high percentage of the population that is so clueless about history that is this recent. They are, according to your map, #2 behind Mississippi which I would've expected to be #1 or tied for it with some other southern state where white supremacists have long had a foothold or stranglehold on education.
I see that most of the poorly educated states are in the south with Illinois (neo-Nazi foothold in some places) and Oregon (originally intended to be a whites-only state) being exceptions.
And also, that map projection used makes it appear that a (large) hidden hand has torqued the eastern seaboard to the south from Maine to the (limp dick) state of Florida. You can see the distortion along the state lines east of the Mississippi River.
Anyway, great work! I enjoyed reading your post.
Maps made in the current day to accompany Churchill's text wouldn't have the same effect.
(Unfortunately only borrowable)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Overlord#/media/File...
I don't think we can really comprehend how big an operation that was. A movie like "Saving Private Ryan" was incredibly good (especially the scene on the beach front) but didn't come anywhere close to show anything resembling that picture.
Recommended reading: The Fleet at Flood Tide by James Hornfischer, and Twilight of the Gods by Ian Toll.
I think that very impressive photo doesn’t even show it.
FTA: “A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels”
⇒ I estimate that that photo only shows about 2% of the vessels involved.
Getting (also FTA) “Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June” onto a coast without using any ports and where you are getting shot at takes a lot of effort.
I imagine many more are even less familiar with the massive operations from the Eastern Front, simultaneously more important and lesser known in the West (at least in pop culture; historians of course know them). E.g. Operation Bagration.
There's an almost paradoxical immensity to it, where humans, using paper, typewriters, physical mail, and early electric (not electronic) communication systems had to organize millions of humans into large coordinated efforts over about half the surface of a planet.
They did it without the aid of computers and the unlimited up-to-date firehoses of data that we have today. The paradox is that it's not entirely clear that our modern civilization, using these advantages, would be able to do what they did. Modern technologies seem to create an effect of overanalysis, where the WW2 generation often worked in deeply ambiguous grey areas.
Our tendency today is to want to produce as much up to date information as possible, even if its not necessary to the overall goal. We want to use a computer to scrub deeply through immense data to produce marginal gains. A Strategic General in WW2 might want to move 100,000 men and arms to a different location and issue the order where it would be relayed by post, telephone, or telegraph. To find out if that order was fulfilled might take weeks or months to even find out. Today we would want to track each soldier's boots to watch them march across a digital map in real-time.
Yet it worked. With major operations occurring down to the minute that involved multinational organizations moving millions of tons of human lives, arms, supply, and equipment, all also built to fulfill that order, on time and at high quality.
https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-bu...
https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/405.html
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10264546...
dieselpunk ftw
Deleted Comment
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_World_War_II
and there is this hard cover ''Atlas of World War II'':
https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-World-War-II-Cartography/dp/142...
"A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps"
See: A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps
I would also encourage folks to seek out photos/footage of the concentration camps in Europe as well as the aftermath of the atomic bombings in Japan. When you see the unsanitized horror it really gives you pause that people did this to each other. And why war is worth trying to prevent.