Most WW2 maps are a static picture — arrows frozen on a page, dated to one moment. I wanted one you could play: press start and watch six years unfold, event by event, on a map that moves with them.
That’s andravarldskriget.se. A timeline you can scrub, a histogram of when things happened, and 327 events pinned to where they happened between 1939 and 1945.
Sources, not vibes
The part I care about most is the sourcing. Most of the events carry at least two references, and I leaned away from Wikipedia towards places like the National WWII Museum, the Imperial War Museum, USHMM and the naval history sites. A map like this is only worth making if you can stand behind what it says, so each event tells you where it came from.
Density is the UX
The hard part isn’t drawing points. It’s that some months have three events and some have thirty. So the map changes behaviour with density: when there are few points you get full labels and detail; when there are many you get dots that resolve into detail as you zoom in. You can watch a single month, everything up to a date, or the whole war at once.
There’s an autoplay that flies the camera to the turning points and drops a short caption, control shading for who held what ground, and offensive arrows that appear as you play. It’s schematic on purpose — there’s a note about that in the About panel — because a readable map beats a technically perfect one nobody can follow.
Built to run forever
It’s a static site built with Vite and MapLibre GL, with a Natural Earth basemap baked in — no external tile server to depend on, nothing to bill me, nothing to go dark in five years. Just files on a server. That matters for something I want to still work long after I’ve stopped touching it.
Have a play with it and let the timeline run. It reads differently when it moves.
Leave a Reply