The war, in full resolution

WW2 Total began as a private collection that outgrew its shelves. Its founder spent decades gathering declassified documents, unit records, and veteran interviews, and kept running into the same problem: the material existed, but it lived in fragments — an archive here, a map collection there, oral histories scattered across tape and memory. Working historians and archivists joined the project to turn the hoard into a platform, with one ambition: the most complete single place to study the Second World War as its participants actually experienced it.

What the archive holds

The collection spans hundreds of thousands of indexed primary documents — letters, dispatches, after-action reports, logs and records — alongside thousands of interactive maps that let you follow campaigns day by day, and more than a thousand hours of uncut veteran oral histories, a large share of which appear in no other public archive. Every item carries source information, cataloguing notes, and cross-references, because an archive without citations is just a pile of scans.

How it is built and used

A team of working historians curates the collection, writing the contextual notes and flagging contested material rather than smoothing it over. Students use it for coursework, educators build units from it, authors and documentarians mine it for detail, and family historians trace units and voices. New material is added on a published schedule, and corrections from readers are reviewed and credited.

• Letters, dispatches, and after-action reports with full source notes
• Interactive maps following campaigns day by day
• Uncut veteran oral histories found in no other public archive

WW2 Total exists so that the most documented war in history stays documented in one place. If your research deserves primary sources rather than summaries, open the archive.