Updates

August 2024

I raised the idea of a WWII map with Dad and Matt. Both agreed that it would be a great addition to our two current maps, and one that would be of interest to another audience (much like me). Like most of the talks we have around the maps, we talked about the lines and themes it would cover, but a problem quickly arose: If we have a line for each country, won’t the likes of Germany, Britain and the USA be all over the place? Germany for example would be closely connected to battles in North Africa, followed by Italy and then the Western Front post D-day. This doesn’t include the campaign on the Eastern Front with the USSR. We came to an agreement that this approach wouldn’t work, so what could we do instead?

The decision was taken to have lines for different theatres instead of countries with some kind of metadata to communicate the countries involved in these theatres (flags is the current idea). A quick brainstorm gave us around 15 theatres. Within these, additional theatres could be developed. For example, the Pacific as a theatre could be divided across the three Pacific Ocean Areas (POA): Central Pacific Area, North Pacific Area, and South Pacific Area. Another approach would be to focus on the individual campaigns as additional information to these theatres. For example, looking at the Philippines Campaign, New Guinea Campaign and the Dutch East Indies Campaign as a part of the larger Pacific theatre.

— Jeremy

June 2024

My Dad and I had a tradition that at the end of each school year he would get me a gift as a “well done, you passed your exams. I’m proud of you’’. Gifts varied in nature. One year it was a CD, the next year it was an item of clothing. Nothing extravagant, but meaningful as it was what I had shared with him that I wanted and he listened.

After one set of exams, I think I was around 14 or 15, he gave me four books from the Time-Life Second World War series from the late 1970s. He saw these in the library at his work and thought that would be great given my interest in WWII. This gift sent me down the rabbit hole of all sorts of content related to this conflict: books, magazines, videos, movies and TV shows. It’s safe to say that this made me a real nerd for WWII and something I can talk hours about. It’s a topic that I don’t get bored of because of its sheer scope, the lived human experience of those years, and the causes and consequences (very high school History) of this event. Of late, the TV shows like Masters of the Air and podcasts like We Have Ways of Making you Talk, all deepen my interest in this event. Once we had completed the Sports History map naturally, the next map that I wanted to develop was a WWII history map.

— Jeremy