Visualizing World War II
nathangoldwag.wordpress.com
nathangoldwag.wordpress.com
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)
The electronic version does feel rather odd, though. It's much harder to open it to a random page and find something interesting (say, a list of refugee scholars who at the time had moved to the US, 561-63), which, for me at least, is the point. I could find the vast majority of the information, if not all of it, elsewhere with little effort, if I was so inclined. It's more in the discovery aspect of it (and the advertisements, which are often absolute gems, although less so than the 1909 edition, which included two awkwardly arranged vertical ads which had large text of 'Rupture' on the left and 'Your Lungs' on the right so it reads as 'Rupture Your Lungs', and also "Dr." Rupert Weils, who claimed to be able to cure cancer at home, using "radiatized fluid", which I think is radioactive water; by 1944 they were much less blatantly wrong or poorly arranged.)
Pages 42-60 of the 1944 900+ page tome are advertising (maybe more, I timed-out).
Writing for pay and body building spent well ...
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.
Second part: https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/07/09/saipan-landing-ii/
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.
Without diminishing Overlord (a landing of this magnitude was unparalleled), I think Bagration is just as impressive, devastatingly effective at annihilating the German army (most of Army Group Center gone, poof), and must have been a logistical and secrecy nightmare to employ maskirovka at such a large scale. It was larger scale than Overlord, too.
Not many in pop culture know about the Siege of Leningrad.
Stalingrad is better known in pop culture, but regrettably most of it at the level of terribly bad and misleading movies such as "Enemy at the Gates".
> Eastern Front also had its iconic moments [...]
That's a bit of an understatement... The Eastern Front is where most of the fighting in WWII happened. It's where the European theater of war was truly won or lost.
I remember being very surprised when I heard for the first time that something like 80% of all casualties taken by the Germans happened on the Eastern front. Or the total sizes of the armies (collectively on both sides) fighting one another and the large margin by which the Western front was dwarfed by. It stood completely at ends with everything I learned about WW2 growing up in the US, through school, pop culture, friends, family of friends. I suppose it's not too surprising though that any country emphasizes their own involvement over that of others- for example I doubt that the Soviets touched much on the extent of lend lease in their education or war movies.
Well, I disagree.
Landings are generally considered to be very difficult and risky operations to execute, and Overlord is by far the largest scale landing in history. It was a one-off, all-in operation. It had to be close to perfect or it would fail badly. You can't just call off the landing in the middle of it or reduce its objectives if it doesn't go well.
Meanwhile, operation Bagration is just standard maneuver warfare, only particularly large and this time quite successful in achieving its objectives. Soviets had plenty of previous (some failed) attempts to improve their strategy and tactics. Maskirovka / deception campaign is standard for any such large operation. If things don't go as planned, you can scale down the objectives, or call it a diversion (Operation Mars). Operation Bagration might be more impactful on the course of the war, but in my mind it's not close to be as impressive as Overlord.
> That's a bit of an understatement... The Eastern Front is where most of the fighting in WWII happened. It's where the European theater of war was truly won or lost.
"Most iconic" is not the same thing as "most impactful". Maneuver warfare is just generally not as iconic as pitched, close quarters battles.
It seems we possibly agree Bagration was more impactful, but our disagreement is whether it was as impressive. I'll argue that it was: the scale was humongous, and in war, this means more chance of fuckups or logistical nightmares. Scale in troops & territory is a huge source of trouble (just ask Hitler...). Military deception was practiced by all sides, but the Soviets took maskirovka to an art form. Not only were there feinted strategic offensives (with the potential to become real as plan B), but huge troop formations moved one way during daytime and retraced their steps during the night. Radio discipline exercised atypically for the Red Army. The Germans later claimed not to be fully taken in, but really... that's what they would claim. Reality shows otherwise and their army was shattered.
As for whether it's as iconic... well, "iconic" is an ill-defined term anyway. "Most iconic" in the Western world is just because, like I argued, the Eastern Front is way less known and depicted in movies. It's almost the definition of "lesser known", of which there are many reasons (Cold War thinking being a big reason initially). Overlord is more iconic in the West because it has been brought to the forefront in multiple accounts, movies and games.
Imagine if there were American movies about Bagration like there are for Normandy, "Saving Conscript Petrov". There are a million interesting and amazing stories you could tell set during this massive operation, just like Private Ryan or Band of Brothers.
Stalingrad in contrast is indeed iconic -- possibly as iconic as Overlord, because everyone knows about Stalingrad too -- but regrettably not too many good movies have been made about it. I've mentioned "Enemy at the Gates" (sigh!) but there's also that terrible Russian movie called... "Stalingrad"? Yuck. About the only one that's decent is ironically the German "Stalingrad" movie, but that one mostly shows the German perspective.
I don't think it is just Eastern Front, the Chinese Theatre and War in Pacific get far less attention as well. I'm Australian and we learn a little bit about it in history class at school but there are no movies or books about relatively momentous things like Fall of Singapore etc.
I'm not sure the Pacific War gets that much less attention. There are plenty of American-made games set in it (Call of Duty, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2, etc) and shows, most noticeably "The Pacific", and movies (e.g. "Letters from Iwo Jima"). This is the theater where the only atomic bombs were ever used in anger, so there's also that making it famous.
Well, what makes Bagration unique in the same sense as Overlord? The scale alone does not cut it, and it's not the largest land operation anyway.
> Military deception was practiced by all sides, but the Soviets took maskirovka to an art form. Not only were there feinted strategic offensives (with the potential to become real as plan B), but huge troop formations moved one way during daytime and retraced their steps during the night. Radio discipline exercised atypically for the Red Army.
So far I haven't seen what would set Soviet maskirovka apart from e.g. Allied effort. All methods you mention seem pretty standard.
> "Most iconic" in the Western world is just because, like I argued, the Eastern Front is way less known and depicted in movies.
Partially yes, but that's not what makes Bagration forgettable.
"Iconic" is about human stories. Photos from the landing craft moving onto the beach, soldiers getting mowed by the machine guns while running over completely exposed positions, German soldiers sitting in fortified, but ultimately outnumbered and hopeless positions. Those are very memorable. You can make stories about close quarters combat for months in a completely destroyed Stalingrad, fighting for every building, pretty much living next to the enemy etc. You could make stories about Bagration, but it would not appear unique to the reader, you can't really transmit the scale of manouver warfare into the human story.
Scale alone is very important, and Soviet operations were larger scale (meaning harder to coordinate) than Western Allied ones. Also, I explained maskirovka. It's just that you don't find it interesting enough, and I cannot argue against your preferences except to disagree.
Barbarossa to my knowledge was/is the largest land operation of all time (and nobody will disagree it's both iconic and massively important), and Bagration comes second. Let's not mince words here. And also, Barbarossa was impressive at first but ultimately a failure, in particular a logistical failure -- precisely where Bagration succeeded.
> Partially yes, but that's not what makes Bagration forgettable.
> "Iconic" is about human stories. Photos from the landing craft moving onto the beach, soldiers getting mowed by the machine guns while running over completely exposed positions, German soldiers sitting in fortified, but ultimately outnumbered and hopeless positions. Those are very memorable.
> [...]
> You could make stories about Bagration, but it would not appear unique to the reader, you can't really transmit the scale of manouver warfare into the human story.
There's plenty of similar human stories and memorable situations that could be told for Bagration, plenty of furious advances, encirclements and desperate last stands (e.g. the German "fortress cities"), plenty of individual soldier stories to be told with Bagration as the backdrop. There's even smaller scale preparatory actions, such as the partisan operations "Rail War" and "Concert".
It's just that, like I've already said, Western media is not interested in telling these stories, partly because they would overshadow American contributions to the European theater of war, and partly because audiences must not empathize with the Red Army too much. You could make a "Saving Conscript Petrov" movie as powerful as Saving Private Ryan, but who wants to make it?
Overlord was large scale too yet Spielberg found the way to make it smaller and about individual soldiers. You can make this with Bagration as well. You don't need to make a documentary about large scale maneuvers, you can make it about individual soldiers. The Soviets suffered massive losses during Bagration, so you are not even sure your heroes will survive! Spielberg could do it, if he was interested. So could Clint Eastwood. Imagine: comrade Petrov is taking part of partisan actions, but he's captured by Germans; he's carrying some papers/knowledge that would betray the larger Bagration operation... now Stavka must send a platoon to Rescue Conscript Petrov before it's too late. Intersperse with scenes of his mother and girlfriend back behind the frontlines, anxious about his fate. (Ok, ok, I'm no Spielberg).
> You can make stories about close quarters combat for months in a completely destroyed Stalingrad, fighting for every building, pretty much living next to the enemy etc.
And yet... so few good movies have been made, right? The most well-known, "Enemy at the Gates", is a complete distortion of the truth, and pretty bad movie-making as well. Where are all the good Stalingrad movies? The best one is still the German-made one.
I believe the real problem -- affecting even you, now -- is that the Soviets (and later Russians) were not perceived as the good guys after the outbreak of the Cold War, and to this day Russians are not the good guys, and so their big moments in WWII tend to be downplayed in Western pop culture. Movies like "Enemy at the Gates" spent as much time making sure the audience didn't empathize too much with the Soviets, as with presenting the Germans as the enemy.
Complicating things even more, there's the thing that the Germans -- the ultimate bad guys of WWII -- have been somewhat rehabilitated in pop culture, making German "things" somewhat cool. (Unless one is watching a movie specifically about genocide or the Holocaust).
The 900 Days is an eye-opening and compelling book about the siege of Leningrad. Highly recommended.
And the pictures at the Hermitage are labelled "Great Patriotic War 1941-45"
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
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.
I would love to endow Mr. Goldwag to undertake such an endeavor. His site demonstrates his love of maps as tools to help understand history. Fantastic!
With your post and all the opportunities open to you I feel like you advertised a grilled sausage event but when I showed up I discovered you were vegan and only serving salad.
Where's the links?
1. Pay for an Audible account. (Or figure out how to get free access to audio books from your local library.)
2. Listen to the books “Winds of War” and then “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk.
The drama and characterizations are just fine, and will pull you right in to caring for Pug Henry and wanting to know what happens to him and his family.
The battle scenes are true history and will blow you away, and teach you a lot. Midway, incredible.
The coverage of the Holocaust will break your heart, but make you think, “wow, everybody in the world should read this once”.
The character evolution of Werner Beck, in light of today’s world events, might terrify you. Whole nations don’t all of the sudden become evil. Evil powerful leaders push evil down into a country over time.
The modern maps, while technically more "accurate" than hand-drawn diagrams, are almost shockingly light on information in comparison, and the accompanying text is a linear recounting of various advances and retreats with only passing explanation of the strategic importance of either.
I think there are two effects at play here: one is the decrease in expectation of the readership to have much comprehension or critical thinking facility, which is counterintuitive given supposed strides in education over the last eighty years. The second is the gutting of the news media as an industry where career professionals could get and keep lifetime experience in understanding important events and their place in history. While no doubt reporters today are doing their best, the news media is increasingly reliant on contract work and fresh grist for the mill, and it seems obvious that the writers at the NYT have just not been given the resources or motivation to become as familiar with the contours of the conflict as the writers of the past.
I think your complaint about the "linear recounting" has more to do with the nature of the war in Ukraine compared to WW2. The battle in Ukraine is almost entirely on land, while in the WW2 maps the majority of the maps are focused on sea lines of communications and air bases. The front lines in Ukraine aren't static by any means, but compared to WW2 these lines are barely moving.
> the decrease in expectation of the readership to have much comprehension or critical thinking facility
> the gutting of the news media as an industry where career professionals could get and keep lifetime experience in understanding important events and their place in history
I think you have certain per-conceived notions and are trying to justify them in these maps, rather than the other way around. I've read old newspaper articles and really don't see any "decrease in expectation of the readership". As for the "gutting of the news media," I think there is some truth their, but I don't think you should denigrate the journalists of today. Recall that Ernie Pyle, perhaps the most famous war correspondents of WW2, before the war was a human interest writer.
Part of the issue is that World War II is a vastly more complex situation than the Russo-Ukrainian war; it's really not so much a war as it is an overlapping mess of several smaller wars, with a large amount of rapid geographical alterations in a short timeframe. To explain to people in September 1939 what's going on, you have to bring up the Saarland, Sudetenland, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, the dismemberment of Austria and Czechoslovakia... and that's before Germany actually invades Poland. For the Russo-Ukrainian war, you need to bring up... Crimea, the Donbass, and maaaaybe Transdnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia if you're trying to build a wider geopolitical picture. And most maps you see do highlight Crimea and the Donbass!
As the war progresses, World War II grows in massive scale, so that places like Tobruk became important locations for the strategic aspect of the war, and even a well-informed individual would have been hard-pressed to locate Tobruk before then. So you need to highlight this town in North Africa, and then explicate why a town in North Africa is important in the context of a literal world-wide war. By contrast, Ukraine is far smaller than the entire world, and even an important linchpin like Vuhledar has only the significance of, say, Bastogne in WW2.
Feels like both are light on information. But what do you expect? It's war time propaganda. It isn't meant to educate or inform. The news during war is not the same as it is during peacetime. They serve different goals. Whether it's ukraine. Gaza. Or ww2.
> one is the decrease in expectation of the readership to have much comprehension or critical thinking facility, which is counterintuitive given supposed strides in education over the last eighty years.
Mass education was never meant to increase critical thinking. Mass education exists to brainwash and instill conformity. The modern education system was created by the prussians in the 1800s to "educate" the peoples of the various germanic states into one single nation. It's the same education system adopted by the US and much of the world.
> and it seems obvious that the writers at the NYT have just not been given the resources or motivation to become as familiar with the contours of the conflict as the writers of the past.
Because NYT reporters were so familiar with the contours of iraq and their wmd program? If someone gave the NYT a trillion dollars, what would change? Nothing. The reporting would be the same. Especially when it comes to wars.
When you read war propaganda from the past ( pick any war ) or in any country, it's remarkable how similar they all are.
Mass education exists to brainwash and instill conformity.
It's the truth. Go look it up.
> A century ago, most of the world was illiterate and innumerate.
Yeah. That's the point. Far easier to brainwash literate people. Far easier to get literate people to conform. Especially when you train them since they are young.