The Gathering Storm

CHAPTER 1 · 1936–1938 · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

The war begins on this map long before the first shot. Germany, humiliated at Versailles and radicalized by depression, starts testing whether anyone will enforce the peace: troops into the Rhineland in 1936, warplanes to Franco’s Spain, then Austria swallowed whole in March 1938 — watch it turn charcoal on the map.

The turn: Munich, 30 September 1938.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.