Wars on Map

Second World War

World War II Map & Timeline: 1939–1945

The Second World War was not one war with one front. It was a set of campaigns in Europe, North Africa, the Atlantic, the Soviet Union, China and the Pacific that overlapped in time and only partly in cause. Following it on a map makes that structure visible: while one arrow is moving east from Warsaw in 1939, another has already been fighting in China for two years.

Sources checked 2026-09-11 · Estimates are given as ranges, not single figures

70–85mDeaths most often estimated for the whole war, military and civilian together. The range is this wide because famine and disease deaths are counted differently by different scholars.
6 yearsFrom the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 to the Japanese surrender aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.
23Battles and campaigns mapped movement-by-movement in this atlas, from Poland 1939 to Berlin 1945.

When did the Second World War begin?

In Europe the answer is exact. Germany invaded Poland at dawn on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September. The war catalogue this atlas draws from codes the Second World War as beginning on that first date and ending on 14 August 1945 — the day Japan’s surrender was announced in Washington, which was 15 August in Tokyo.

In Asia the answer is different, and the map shows why. Fighting between Japan and China had been going on since the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937, and Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931. The catalogue keeps these as separate records — its Manchurian and Sino-Japanese wars — and folds the China fighting into the Second World War only from December 1941, when Japan’s attacks on the United States and the British Empire joined the two conflicts into one. Neither choice is wrong; they measure different things. Scroll the timeline to 1937 and then to 1939 and you can see the Asian war running for two years before the European one starts.

Sources
Correlates of War — war datasets and codebooks ↗Sarkees, M. R. & Wayman, F. W. (2010), Resort to War: 1816–2007. CQ PressMitter, R. (2013), China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival. Allen LaneUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum — World War II key dates ↗

Timeline of the Second World War

These are the dates the map animates. Where a date is disputed or depends on a time zone, the alternative is given rather than hidden.

  1. 1 September 1939Germany invades Poland

    Warsaw capitulates on 28 September; the last organised Polish resistance ends in early October.

  2. 3 September 1939Britain and France declare war on Germany

    Neither is able to act against Germany in the west in any strength during the Polish campaign.

  3. 17 September 1939The Soviet Union invades eastern Poland

    Under the secret protocol of the German-Soviet pact signed on 23 August.

  4. 30 November 1939The Soviet Union attacks Finland

    The Winter War ends with the Moscow peace treaty of 12 March 1940.

  5. 9 April 1940Germany invades Denmark and Norway

    Denmark surrenders the same day; fighting in Norway continues into June.

  6. 10 May 1940Germany attacks France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg

    The decisive armoured breakthrough comes at Sedan on 13–15 May.

  7. 26 May – 4 June 1940Dunkirk evacuation

    338,226 Allied troops are lifted from the beaches and harbour, roughly a third of them French.

  8. 22 June 1940France signs an armistice

    It takes effect on 25 June. Germany occupies the north and west; a French government is established at Vichy.

  9. 10 July – 31 October 1940Battle of Britain

    The dates are the British official ones. The Luftwaffe fails to win the air superiority an invasion would have required.

  10. 22 June 1941Operation Barbarossa

    Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union along a front from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

  11. 7 December 1941Japan attacks Pearl Harbor

    Japan simultaneously attacks Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Guam. Germany and Italy declare war on the United States on 11 December.

  12. 4–7 June 1942Battle of Midway

    Japan loses four fleet carriers and the strategic initiative in the Pacific.

  13. 23 October – 4 November 1942Second Battle of El Alamein

    The Axis advance into Egypt is reversed for good. Operation Torch lands Allied forces in French North Africa on 8 November.

  14. 19 November 1942Operation Uranus

    The Soviet counter-offensive encircles the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad; the last of it surrenders on 2 February 1943.

  15. 5 July – 23 August 1943Battle of Kursk

    The last German strategic offensive in the east fails, and the Red Army holds the initiative from then on.

  16. 10 July 1943Allied landings in Sicily

    Mussolini is removed on 25 July; Italy’s armistice with the Allies is announced on 8 September.

  17. 6 June 1944Normandy landings

    Roughly 156,000 Allied troops come ashore or drop into occupied France in one day.

  18. 22 June 1944Operation Bagration

    The Soviet summer offensive destroys German Army Group Centre and reaches the outskirts of Warsaw.

  19. 25 August 1944Paris is liberated

    Allied forces from Normandy and from the 15 August landings in southern France converge on the Rhine.

  20. 16 December 1944German offensive in the Ardennes

    The Battle of the Bulge is contained by late January 1945.

  21. 16 April – 2 May 1945Battle of Berlin

    Hitler kills himself on 30 April; the city’s garrison surrenders on 2 May.

  22. 7–8 May 1945Germany surrenders

    Signed at Reims on 7 May and ratified in Berlin on 8 May — which was already 9 May in Moscow, which is why Victory Day is marked on different dates.

  23. 6 and 9 August 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    The Soviet Union invades Japanese-held Manchuria on 9 August.

  24. 15 August 1945Japan announces its surrender

    The instrument of surrender is signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945.

Sources
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — World War II key dates ↗Dear, I. C. B. & Foot, M. R. D. (eds.) (1995), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War. Oxford University PressWeinberg, G. L. (1994), A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge University PressBeevor, A. (2012), The Second World War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Reading the fronts as movement, not as colour

Most printed maps of this war show territory: a shaded area for Axis control in 1942, another for 1944. That is a useful abstraction and a slightly misleading one, because it implies a tidy line where there was often a patchwork of garrisoned towns, contested countryside and partisan-held forest.

This atlas draws arrows instead — where forces moved, on the dates the sources give — and leaves the space between them uncoloured. It is a deliberately weaker claim. An arrow from the Bug to Warsaw asserts that German forces advanced along that axis beginning on 1 September 1939, which is well documented. A shaded polygon would additionally assert who controlled every hectare in between on every date, which is not.

The consequence is worth stating plainly: nothing on the map should be read as a front line or a border. Where the source data only supports a region, the atlas shows a region.

Sources
Natural Earth — public-domain map data ↗Correlates of War — war datasets and codebooks ↗

How many people died in the Second World War?

There is no census of a war. Figures for the Second World War rest on military casualty records of varying quality, post-war population reconstructions, and judgements about whether to count deaths from famine and disease caused by the war. Ranges below are those of the scholarship, not a spread invented for caution.

Two specific cautions. First, the Soviet and Chinese figures dominate any total and are also the least certain. Second, the frequently quoted world total of 70 to 85 million includes tens of millions of civilian deaths from starvation and disease, so a total without that qualification is not comparable to one without it.

Country or groupDeaths, all causesBasis
Soviet Union26–27 millionPost-war demographic reconstruction; military dead alone are put near 8.7 million irrecoverable losses
China15–20 millionVery wide uncertainty; includes famine and displacement deaths across eight years of war
Germany6.9–7.4 millionMilitary dead of about 5.3 million from Overmans’s record-based study; the rest civilian
Poland5.6–5.8 millionIncludes roughly 3 million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust
Jewish victims of the HolocaustAbout 6 millionCounted across all countries, so overlapping the national rows above
Japan2.5–3.1 millionMilitary dead of roughly 2.1 million, plus civilian deaths from bombing, famine and the fighting on Okinawa
Yugoslavia1.0–1.7 millionEstimates contested; includes deaths in internal conflict alongside occupation
India1.5–3 millionAlmost all from the 1943 Bengal famine, whose inclusion in war deaths is itself debated
FranceAbout 600,000Roughly 210,000 military and the remainder civilian
Italy450,000–500,000Includes losses on both sides of the 1943 change of allegiance
United KingdomAbout 450,000Roughly 383,000 military and 67,000 civilian
United StatesAbout 418,500Roughly 405,000 military; almost no civilian deaths on home soil

Rows are not additive: the Holocaust row counts people already counted in the national rows. Figures are drawn from Overmans (German military), Krivosheev (Soviet military), Ellman and Maksudov (Soviet total), the USHMM (Holocaust) and Clodfelter’s statistical compilation for the remainder.

Sources
Overmans, R. (1999), Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. OldenbourgKrivosheev, G. F. (1997), Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century. Greenhill BooksEllman, M. & Maksudov, S. (1994), "Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note". Europe-Asia Studies 46(4)Clodfelter, M. (2017), Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia, 4th ed. McFarlandMitter, R. (2013), China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival. Allen LaneUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum — World War II key dates ↗Frank, R. B. (1999), Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. Random House

What the catalogue does and does not contain

In the underlying dataset the Second World War is a single record, coded to five regions — Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania — with no single coordinate, because there is no honest one. That is why, on the map, it appears as a dashed region badge rather than a dot: a war fought on four continents cannot be placed at a point without inventing a location.

Around that single record sit dozens of others the catalogue keeps separate: the Winter War, the Franco-Thai war of 1940–41, the Greek civil war, the Sino-Japanese fighting. The 23 detailed campaign layers in this atlas are a curated supplement, not part of the source dataset, and each one links to the historical account it was built from.

Sources
Correlates of War — war datasets and codebooks ↗Sarkees, M. R. & Wayman, F. W. (2010), Resort to War: 1816–2007. CQ PressDear, I. C. B. & Foot, M. R. D. (eds.) (1995), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War. Oxford University Press

Open the atlas at 1942 — the year the war reached its widest extent ↗

Mapped battles and campaigns on this subject

Each of these is a layer in the atlas with dated movements and its own sources. Opening one sets the timeline to its date and takes the camera to it.

Full notes on all 23 layers are on the battles page.