Road to WW2 quiz: 8 questions

The League had reached an accurate verdict, but imposed no cost on Japan. The first gamble went unpunished, setting a price that later aggressors could read in the file.

Fifty nations acted, yet the sanctions spared what the invasion needed to run. The leaked Hoare–Laval plan showed Britain and France negotiating against the verdict they had supported.

Nobody planned the war. By 1937, an unaccountable field army faced a China that could concede nothing more; under those conditions, an accident could start a world-historical war.

“Peace for our time” disarmed the wrong country. The Czech army’s thirty-five divisions dissolved, while its arsenal re-equipped the Wehrmacht for 1939 and 1940.

The century’s two loudest enemies divided eastern Europe on paper, then carried out the schedule almost exactly over the following year. On the map, the dashed line makes that protocol visible.

At Sedan the failure lay in doctrine and reserves, not in courage or hardware: 50,000–90,000 French soldiers died fighting. “Decadence” was Vichy’s alibi, not the archive’s verdict.

Pressure from each side strengthened the other’s hawks, producing a textbook escalation spiral. From 1 August 1941, Japan’s decision ran on a fuel gauge, not on diplomacy.

This last gamble of the decade spared Roosevelt the argument for fighting Germany first. It completed the world war the atlas has spent ten years assembling.