Alright, let’s talk about this “back to back world war winners” thing. It’s a bit of a meme, a bit of historical debate, and a whole lotta fun to dig into. So, I decided to see what I could actually DO with it.
First things first, I needed data. I straight-up Googled “countries that won both world wars.” Yeah, real sophisticated research, I know. I wanted to see what popped up, and if there was any consensus on which countries legitimately earned that title. I mean, obviously the big players like the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union are in the mix, but what about the smaller guys? What about contributions versus just being on the winning side?
So, I grabbed that list, knowing full well it’s gonna be subjective. Then, I thought, “Okay, what can I actually DO with this list?” Just staring at it isn’t exactly a thrilling Friday night activity.
I started messing around with some basic Python. I thought, “Maybe I can pull some population data for these countries, both pre-WWI and post-WWII, and see how the wars impacted them demographically.”
Here’s the kinda janky process I followed:
- I found a few historical population datasets online (a lot of Wikipedia scraping involved, I ain’t gonna lie).
- I cleaned up the data (this took FOREVER). Dates were all over the place, country names were inconsistent, units were different… you name it. I used Pandas in Python to wrestle it into shape.
- I wrote a script to iterate through my list of “back to back winners,” and for each country, grab the population numbers closest to 1914 and 1945.
- Then, I calculated the percentage change in population for each country between those two dates.
It wasn’t perfect, by any means. The data was messy, the date ranges weren’t always ideal, and I had to make some judgment calls about what to include and exclude. But, hey, it was a start.
After that I made some simple graphs by Matplotlib. Nothing super fancy, just bar charts showing population change. I also added a small chart of economic impact before and after the war.
The graph showed the change in population of the countries I extracted from the internet, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia.