The World the War Made

EPILOGUE · 1945 AND AFTER · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

Look at the map one last time — not at the front lines, which are gone, but at the colors, which have hardened. Where the Red Army stood in May 1945, people’s republics; where the Western armies stood, parliamentary states; Germany itself split along the Elbe handshake line into halves that will face each other, armed, for 44 years. Churchill names it within a year: “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

The turn: The handshake that became a border.

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.