MAPS OF HISTORY · The Road to War · THE QUIZ
The Road to War, 1931–1941 · TEST YOURSELF
The quiz
8 questions from the atlas’s Field Exam, free to try. Answer, then read the verdict — every answer is an argument, not a flashcard.
The League’s Lytton Report (1932) named Japan the aggressor and was adopted 42–1. What followed?
Honesty without pressure: the verdict was accurate and cost Japan nothing. Every later aggressor read the file — the first unpunished gamble set the price of all the rest.
League sanctions against Italy over Abyssinia failed chiefly because —
Fifty nations acted, but the sanctions spared everything the invasion actually ran on — and the leaked Hoare–Laval plan showed Britain and France negotiating against their own verdict.
The war between Japan and China began at the Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937 —
Nobody planned it — which is the lesson. By 1937 an unaccountable field army and a China that could concede nothing more had made a world-historical war startable by accident.
What did Germany gain materially at Munich, beyond territory?
“Peace for our time” disarmed the wrong country: the Czech army’s thirty-five divisions dissolved, and its arsenal re-equipped the Wehrmacht for 1939 and 1940.
The secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 —
The century’s two loudest enemies partitioned eastern Europe on paper — and then, over the following year, executed the schedule almost exactly. The map’s dashed line is the protocol made visible.
France in 1940 had more tanks than Germany, and many better ones. It fell in six weeks because —
Sedan was a failure of doctrine and reserves, not of courage or hardware — 50,000–90,000 French soldiers died fighting. The “decadence” story was Vichy’s alibi, not the archive’s verdict.
The American oil embargo of August 1941 was intended to deter Japan. Tokyo’s planners read it as —
Each side’s pressure strengthened the other’s hawks — the escalation spiral in its textbook case. From 1 August 1941, Japan’s decision ran on a fuel gauge, not on diplomacy.
On 11 December 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. He was obliged to by —
The decade’s last gamble: it spared Roosevelt the argument for fighting Germany first and completed the world war this atlas spent ten years assembling.
THE OTHER 8 QUESTIONS ARE ANSWERED ON THE MAP
“Click the border where the tide stopped for good.” 8 of the Field Exam’s questions can’t be asked on paper — you answer them by finding the place on the living map, and the exam stamps your rank when you’re done.
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