The Battle of the Atlantic (1939-45): A Visualization

The only thing that ever frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.... It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public. Winston Churchill. Their Finest Hour

This is a visualization of data from the website u-boat.net. It brings together several visualization tools to allow for a user-directed, data-based exploration of the German submarine war during World War II.

Features

Flexible Map: Map can be panned and zoomed in "Google-Maps" style.

Custom date range: At the top of the page there is a frequency chart showing the number of sinkings over the course of the war.

Sinkings ocurring in the blue-shaded area are those shown in the map. The size of each circle is proportional to the tonnage of the individual ship sunk. Fainter circles indicate sinkings ocurring nearer the beginning of the selected date range.

Click-and-drag over the blue-shaded area to shift the date-range. Use the handles on either side to adjust the amount of time the range will display.

For example, to view the entire war, one would simply click-and-drag the right handle to the end of the frequency chart (note that rendering all that will take a few seconds).

Detailed attack information: Left-click on each attack location to show the ship's route. Right-click for detailed information on the attack.

For routes, the green line connects the ship's origin port to the location where it was attacked. The dotted red line connects the latter with the intended destination. Left-clicking on the route will pan the map to the attack location.

Flexible summary data table: Data-table of attacks can be searched, sorted, and filtered.

Hovering over each row will highlight the attack on the map. Double-click on row to pan map to the attack location.

Animation for user-defined period: Clicking on the animation button will move the display forward by one day, whether user selected a week or a month.

Dynamically updated charts: Charts below the map are updated as the date range changes.

[Underlying data from uboat.net dataset, used with permission.
Visualization based on D3, Leaflet, Crossfilter, and DC libraries.
Maritime boundary information taken from marineregions.org and processed using QGIS. Data munging with Python Pandas.
Visualization by Gabriel Uriarte.]