Air War Over Europe

What you’re looking at

Each small plane on the map stands for a group of bombers flying together, called a formation. It might be 2 aircraft or 50. The plane flies from the area where its group was based to the place it attacked, and leaves a ring where it struck. Places glow when they’re hit and slowly fade.

Press play to watch the war unfold day by day. Each year begins with a short introduction, and small diamonds on the timeline mark important dates. Click any place to see its history, from the whole city down to a single attack. Filters let you focus on particular air forces, aircraft, or dates.

The records give the date of each attack but not the time of day, so the moment each plane arrives on the map is made up.

Where the information comes from

The attacks come from a US Air Force database called THOR (short for Theater History of Operations Reports). It was built from mission reports written during the war, and it covers both American and British (Royal Air Force) bombing around the world.

The US Air Force’s original download pages are no longer online, so this map uses a public copy of the same files. The copy is saved exactly as downloaded, so it can be checked against an official version if one becomes available again.

During the war, each bomber unit wrote its own report, and each report became one record in the database. So a single big raid can show up as dozens of records, and on this map, as dozens of planes. To make raids easier to follow, the details panel groups every record for the same place, site and date into a single raid, with the combined number of aircraft and bombs.

How the records were cleaned up

Records typed up decades ago contain mistakes. Before anything appears on the map, a script checks the records and fixes or sets aside the ones that don’t add up. Every change is counted, and corrected records are labeled when you open them.

Every judgment call, such as which spellings to merge or where a misplaced town really belongs, is kept in a simple spreadsheet next to the code, so anyone can see why it was made.

How we checked the numbers

This log records each time the map’s numbers were compared with an outside source, and what changed as a result, oldest first. A version of the bomb-tonnage check also runs automatically every time the data is updated.

What the map can’t tell you

How it was made

I built this map with the help of AI. I set the goals, designed how it looks and works, and made the judgment calls about the data. Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, wrote the code, one reviewed step at a time.

The records are cleaned up with a script written in Python. The map itself is a single web page, hosted on Cloudflare at airwarmap.pages.dev.

About the historical notes

The yearly introductions and the notes on important dates were drafted by Claude, using trusted sources: the RAF Museum, the Imperial War Museums, the National Museum of the US Air Force, the official British and American air force histories, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, the Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Each note lists its sources, so you can read further.

I’m reading and editing every draft myself: … of … checked so far.

Credits