Axis high-water 1942
German reach to Egypt and the Volga; Japanese reach to Burma and the mid-Pacific.
Maps of 1942 (Axis high-water) and 1945 (Allied occupation) are the two images most curricula use. The China theatre is still under-mapped in English school atlases.
Film, games and battlefield tourism now out-earn many monographs in setting what "WW2" looks like to a general reader.
Maps
Eastern Front 1941-45
The longest land war in Europe, from the old Polish border to Berlin.
Pacific island chain
From Pearl Harbor and Midway to the Philippines and Okinawa.
Occupied Europe
Reich, Vichy, satellites and resistance zones -- a political map, not only a military one.
1945 occupation zones
Germany, Austria, Korea and Japan as Allied administrative maps that became Cold War borders.
Portrayals
The Longest Day / Saving Private Ryan
Normandy as the English-language visual centre of the war.
Das Boot and Atlantic films
U-boat war as claustrophobic counter-image to open-beach heroics.
Soviet cinema (Come and See)
A civilian-horror Eastern Front that Anglophone viewers often meet late.
Grave of the Fireflies
Japanese civilian firebombing memory in animation, widely taught in the West.
Band of Brothers
US airborne serial that became a vernacular history for a generation.
School Holocaust units
Often the most structured WW2 teaching in US/UK/AU/CA classrooms, sometimes detached from the wider Asian war.
Rituals
VE/VJ commemorations
May and August/September ceremonies, thinner than 11 November but still official.
Liberation pilgrimages
Normandy beaches, Auschwitz visits, and Hiroshima peace ceremonies as tourism and mourning.
Unit reunions
Now fading as the veteran generation dies; museums inherit the flags.
Sayings
Remembrance rituals grafted 1939-45 names onto 1914-18 ceremonies. The two world wars share stone even when they do not share causes.
Korean and Vietnamese wars inherited this war's weapons, staff colleges and partitioned maps -- a reminder that 1945 was a hinge, not a full stop.