Living Battle Maps

Press play and watch a battle happen.

Living Battle Maps shows armies moving across real ground. Terrain, rivers and roads sit under every unit, and a clock you can scrub lets you stop at any hour and see where each formation stood and what had just happened.

Twenty-six battles and one war map, from four wars:

American Revolution: Bunker Hill.
Napoleonic Wars: Trafalgar and Waterloo.
American Civil War: twenty-one battles, from First Bull Run and Fort Henry through Gettysburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness and Cold Harbor to Nashville and Appomattox.
Second World War: Midway and Prokhorovka.

The war map follows ten armies across the Civil War, from April 1861 to May 1865. Every battle is a star on it that you can open. The first time you open a Civil War battle, the war map plays toward it and then moves into the battle's own map. You can skip it, play it again from the settings, or turn it off.

On every map you can play, pause and change the speed, scrub the clock to any moment, and zoom and pan across the field. The camera can follow the fighting for you. Read the dispatches in the order they arrived. At each dispatch the clock holds for a moment so you can read it, then goes on by itself, or you can have it stop and wait. Every battle has a dossier with its commanders, its order of battle, and the arms and ground, with period photographs that are in the public domain.

Each battle has its own soundscape that follows the fighting: quiet before contact, drums on the approach, recorded gunfire when the armies meet. Sound follows your silent switch and can be turned off in the app.

The app works with VoiceOver and Dynamic Type, and runs on iPhone and iPad.

Every map is stored in the app. There is no account, no sign in, no tracking and no advertising, and every map opens with the phone in airplane mode.

Dates, figures and dispatches were checked against published sources. Where the sources disagree, the dossier says so, and the credits list where the maps and imagery come from.

Free, with nothing to buy.

Maps and text by Sasha Lawrence.