WORLD WAR II INTERACTIVE

A visually engaging and highly atmospheric overview of World War II, including the runup and the fallout.

This is an impressively smart historical survey of World War II: condensed, but complex without being labyrinthine; smooth in its delivery without being trivial. It comfortably merges a political overview with snapshots and film of military action, gratifying both those who gain most from the written narrative and those who like a visual prod to the proceedings. The war is broken down into absorbable chunks, starting with World War I’s unfinished business, through the Japanese invasion of China—the story moves fluidly between the European and Pacific theaters—the blitzkrieg and the homefront. It covers the military campaigns from North Africa to Guadalcanal, Stalingrad to the Coral Sea. The user experience is easy and intuitive—well-organized, clean screens are active but not numbingly so, and there are toolbars for hopping about. Visual cues indicate when more material can be accessed by a swipe of the screen. There are plenty of brief film clips, chosen with finesse, and with their sepia tone or grainy, gray look, they send readers back 70 years in a flash. They wed the fleetness of a footnote to the most pungent visual imagery: One moment you are in the cockpit of a Stuka dive bomber, the next you are looking down at the dock of the Nuremberg trials. What gives the story so much texture, though, is the inclusion of less-notorious moments in the war, such as the Russian-Finnish conflict, helping to paint the big picture in all its swarming complexity.

A powerful capsule history of World War II, chilling and reflective in one breath.