WWII Aircraft Bombing Visualization

Wenzhuo YANG
5 min readApr 10, 2021

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Yang Wenzhuo, Jin Dawei

This article is on the theme of World War II (WWII) and about some visualization and analysis work. The following will be my content at the order of WWII background, data processing, data visualization and my reference.

WWII Background

WWII is a world-wide war concerned with nearly all countries and lasted from1939 to 1945, which destroyed so many years’ culture and industry’s accumulation. There is no doubt that wars are man-made disasters, no more than such a large-scale world war. Aircraft bombing wasthe most destructive attacking method during WWII and completely changed the trend of this war.

Therefore, I have gone through the Internet to find the related data and have done visualization work.

Data Processing

The dataset is from about WWII and the concrete link has been put in the reference chapter.

This dataset is about WWII Aircraft Bombing and has recorded the bombing missions during WWII in detail. It contains 46 columns and describes kinds of information, including missions, source countries, target countries, total bomb weight and mission results.

Data about missions includes the information of mission type, mission id, mission date, flight altitude, aircraft team and so on. Data about source countries includes source countries, takeoff latitude, takeoff longitude, takeoff base and so on. Data about target countries include target countries, target cities, target latitude, target longitude and so on. Data about total bomb weight includes incediary device type and weight, fragmentation device type and weight, total weight and so on. Data about mission results include aircraft loss, aircraft return and so on.

Data Visualization

Bombed Countries

During WWII, many countries and their people have suffered from aircraft bombing mission. What is the distribution of these bombed country and how much weight did they suffer? To solve these doubt, we have done the visualization on the world map.

Map of Countries Bombed

This map shows the bombed cities during the WWII. Obviously, most bomb missions are targeted at Asia and Europe countries, mainly Germany, France, Italy, China and Japan. These countries are Fascism countries or where Fascism countries occupied. In other words, the bombing missions are mainly to destroy these evil countries’ army or to help union countries fight the enemy. This information is in line with our common sense and the later display of visualization can prove this.

Map of Main Targets Bombed

More straightforward, we can see the details of the main targets bombed. The most serious is Germany and the remaining are Italy and France. Italy was the ally and France surrendered.

Bombed Countries Ranking

To find which countries were the most seriously destroyed by bombing missions more reliably rather than by eyes, we have drawed a bar chart to rank these countries by total bomb weight of attacking missions.

Bombed Countries Ranking

From this rank, we can see that the main sources of the bombing missions are the USA and the Great Britain. Besides, many missions’ source countries are unknown, but all missions’ target countries are completely recorded in the dataset. And not surprisedly, the top 4 countries of this rank are Germany, France, Italy and Japan. Three of them were the main three leader Fracism countries and France was the later helper after surrendering.

Therefore, this rank clearly and correctly displays the victims of bombing missions during WWII.

Mission Source Distribution

Similarly, the mission source countries can also be found and marked on a world map.

Map of Source Countries

In the world map, source countries have been marked by different colors and the color shade stands for the total weight of this country has dropped during WWII. Obviously, the USA are the main source country for bombing missions. Followed are the Great Britain and Australia.

Bombing Weight by Source Countries

As time went through WWII, source countries would continue their bombing missions. What’s the trend of their bombing weight? This is a good question related to science, industry and so many areas, so that will be good for research.

Bombing Weight Trend

From this line chart, we can see that the main sources are still the USA, the Great Britain and unrecorded countries. And they all increased their bombing weight from 1942 and decreased from 1944. This is also in line with the history, because WWII got the peak in 1942 and after two years’ war, the result got clear and the war came to the end. So in 1945, the total weight of bombs dropped.

Aircraft Mission

During WWII, different kinds of aircrafts are devoted in the bombing missions. They were used in various missions and had different performances. The visualization of this part is referenced from Kaggle.

Aircraft Bombing Weight

This chart shows the weight of bombs that different aircrafts have dropped during WWII, from which we can see that B24 has been used in most large-scale missions.

Aircraft Mission Altitude

This chart shows the altitude of mission for different kinds of aircrafts, from which we can have a better understanding of these aircrafts’ function in WWII’s bombing missions.

WWII Lost

There is no doubt that wars should be avoided, because the loss of war can’t be afforded.

WWII Lost

This chart shows the loss during WWII of countries. Countries have lost their people, assets and so much.

Avoid and resist from now and for everybody!

References:

[1] WWII Dataset

[2] WWII Introduction

[3] Mission Aircraft — Kaggle

[4] WWII Lost — Tableau Public

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