British Bombing Raids in WWII

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Enola Gay

#data from https://data.world/datamil/world-war-ii-thor-data
setwd("/home/robert/Desktop/Code/Blog Posts Markdown/British Bombing")
bombing <- read.csv("THOR_WWII_DATA_CLEAN.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

For this, all I want are the dates, country doing the bombing and the long/lat coordinates

#filter by column name
columns <- c("COUNTRY_FLYING_MISSION", "MSNDATE", "LATITUDE", "LONGITUDE")
bombing <- bombing[which(names(bombing) %in% columns)]
  #convert the dates into R date format
  bombing$dates <- as.Date(bombing$MSNDATE, "%m/%d/%Y")
#select only British bombing raids
bombing <- bombing[which(bombing$COUNTRY_FLYING_MISSION == "GREAT BRITAIN"),]
  #select only raids with co-ordinate data
  bombing <- bombing[-c(which(is.na(bombing$LATITUDE))),]
  
#how many raids do we have to map  
print(paste0("There are ", length(unique(bombing$dates)), " days of British bombing listed"))

[1] "There are 1651 days of British bombing listed"

This is actually pretty incredible as between the start of British bombing and it’s conclusion in 1945 there are only:

campaign_length <- max(bombing$dates) - min(bombing$dates)
print(paste0(campaign_length, " days between start of British bombing and final mission"))

[1] "2068 days between start of British bombing and final mission"

library(ggmap)
library(mapproj)
map <- get_map(location = 'Germany', zoom = 4)
ggmap(map) +
  geom_point(data = bombing, aes(x = LONGITUDE, y = LATITUDE), alpha = 0.2) +
  ggtitle("British Bombing 1939-1945")

There’s also substantial bombing in Ethiopia and Myanmar and also a few raids around northern Norway, the Bay of Bengal, Kazakhstan and even one in Japan. I’m going to ignore all these and just focus on the European/North Africa theater.

For this, I want to make my own map using rworldmap as the ggmap output is a little space heavy and my laptop can barely handle making gifs from it

library(rworldmap)
library(sp)
#get a world map
World <- getMap(resolution = "coarse")
  #subset out the region we're interested in
  EU <- which(World@data$SRES == "Western Europe (WEU)" |
              World@data$SRES == "Central and Eastern Europe (EEU)" |
              World@data$SRES == "Middle East and North Africa (MEA)" |
              World@data$NAME == "Ukraine" | World@data$NAME == "Latvia" |
              World@data$NAME == "Lithuania" | World@data$NAME == "Estonia" |
              World@data$NAME== "Belarus" | World@data$NAME == "Moldova")
  Europe <- World[c(EU),]
  
  #remove various small islands that distort the map
  remove <- c("Greenland", "Iran", "S. Sudan", "W. Sahara", "Sint Maarten",
              "St. Barthelemy", "Br. Indian Ocean Ter.", "S. Geo. and S. Sandw. Is.",
              "St. Martin", "Sudan", "Oman", "Yemen")
  
  Europe <- Europe[-c(which(Europe@data$NAME %in% remove)),]
#show the new map  
plot(Europe)

to plot this using ggplot, it first needs to be fortified into a data frame. The ‘bombing’ data frame also needs to be prepared to be grouped by month

library(ggplot2)
Europe_df <- fortify(Europe, region = "NAME")
bombing$months <- gsub("...$", "", bombing$dates)

then we can use gganimate to sequentially plot by a frames argument and generate an output gif of British bombing raids over 1939-1945

library(gganimate)
library(ggthemes)
#remove points outside the mapping area
bombing <- bombing[-c(which(bombing$LATITUDE > max(Europe_df$lat) | bombing$LATITUDE < min(Europe_df$lat))),]
bombing <- bombing[-c(which(bombing$LONGITUDE > max(Europe_df$long) | bombing$LONGITUDE < min(Europe_df$long))),]
#make a plot of all the raids
animation <- ggplot() +
  #set up the map
  geom_map(data = Europe_df, map = Europe_df,
            aes(x = long, y = lat, map_id = id),
            color = "black", size = 1, fill = "lightgreen") +
  #add in the shapefiles  
  geom_map(data = Europe@data, map = Europe_df,
           aes(map_id = NAME), fill = NA,
           color = NA) +
  #add in the bombs and a 'frame' argument for gganimate
  geom_point(data = bombing, aes(x = LONGITUDE, y = LATITUDE, frame = months),
             alpha = 0.3, colour = "red", size = 1.5) +
    theme_map() + ggtitle("British Bombing Missions: ")
#create the output gif
gganimate(animation, "outputgif.gif", title_frame = TRUE)

Which results in quite a nice gif showing the pattern of the war through the bombing raids Britain carried out. The map is fairly low quality due to computer processing power and I haven’t figured out how to force an order on the animation (and replace the numeric dates with month names), but other than that, I’m pretty pelased with the result.