But bored sailors will do anything, and what they did was fire upon a small plane (missing it). Which turned and strafed them, sinking their little boat and leaving my uncle with shrapnel in his butt for the rest of his life.

His tiny experience in a vast planet-wide panorama of violence. This mapping project is a heroic undertaking! My hat is off to the people involved.

Relevant to WWII, oil tanker losses by the US alone were staggering. "A total of 129 tankers were lost in American waters in the first five months of 1942." (<https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/operation-drumbeat...>).

A consequence was the US government building the first long-distance oil pipelines, the "Big Inch" and "Little Big Inch" pipelines from east Texas to refineries on the Atlantic seaboard in New Jersey. They remain in use.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Inch>

I've also realised that both whales and large-scale commercial shipping rely on similar circumstances: the ability to on- and off-board cargo (or food) rapidly, widely-separated ports (or feeding grounds), and no significant predators (or war / piracy hazards). Whales are a remarkably recent evolutionary development, with the large great whales dating back only about 5 million years. Similarly, bulk shipping required not only global markets but cargos which could be handled in aggregate, whether liquids (as with petroleum), dry solids (mostly ores), or containerised miscellaneous cargo, the latter being premised on standardisation. Canals, safe shipping routes, and quayside cargo handling capacity were also prerequisites.

A large part of Japan's invasion of China (from whence it could reasonably readily ship resources) was China's own mineral supplies, particularly coal an iron. For petroleum though the nearest viable source was Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), and the US sank much of what moved from there.

This fact, as well as my parent comment above about U.S. east-coast oil shipping and pipeline construction are quite well covered in Daniel Yergin's book The Prize. If you want an appreciation for just how much oil transformed the US and world, it is an absolutely excellent resource. And that's from someone who's not partial to Yergin's oil-industry boosterism.

The US built ~35k bombers during WWII, generally with large crew sizes: 8 for the B-24 Liberator (18,118 built), 10 for the B-17 Flying Fortress (12,731), 11 for the B-29 (3,970). That's ~35k aircraft, which would have required at least 3,500 crew members, and probably a multiple of that (presuming several crews per aircraft to sustain multiple missions).

That does make the bomber crew contingent itself smaller than the merchant marine, and air losses seemed to be concentrated among bomber crews, which were larger, slower, and generally more vulnerable than fighters or fighter-bombers.

Everything I have ever read suggests crews “owned” their bombers. This is how you see nose art.

There weren’t multiple crews per aircraft although sometimes crews would share planes if their aircraft was damaged and the other crew suffered casualties but that wasn’t a daily thing. Certainly there weren’t multiple crews per aircraft.

Wikipedia says 350,000 Americans served in the 8th air force alone. That’s larger than the 215,000 of the maritime service.

Wiki says 3.4 million total in the Air force but most of that is not air crews. You need a literal army of mechanics, ground crews, and mission planners.

I can’t find numbers to answer the “most dangerous job” question but everyone suffered greatly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Air_Force (Defeat of the Luftwaffe)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#mili...

If you could turn up any information either way, I'd be interested to see it.

I can't find any clear statement. I'm familiar with nose art and pilot-specific names (e.g., "Bockscar", named after Captain Frederick C. Bock, which dropped the atomic bomb over Nagasaki). Wikipedia states that the practice varied by country and force, e.g., the US Army Air Forces permitted the practice, it was uncommon for the UK RAF and Royal Canadian Air Force, and the US Navy prohibited the practice.

What nose art says about specific crew-aircraft assignments and their specificity or exclusivity isn't clear.

Multiple sources note that crews would rotate out after 25 missions, though heavy casualties meant that both crews and aircraft faced challenges surviving that long.

And I still find it implausible that aircraft would be idled between individual crew missions, though overhauls and repairs might well account for that.

> So began Fitzpatrick’s life as an air warrior. At first, bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to earn the right to rotate home. Because of high casualties, the Army Air Forces leadership increased the number to 30. The crews rotated, and as a result Fitzpatrick flew every third day. “I got 25 missions in before the end of the war,” he said. “I did most of my flying in the winter of ‘45 and the spring.”

They often flew 20+ hour missions. I have no idea how they'd operate like that without switching crews or underutilizing the plane.

[1] https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/25-missions-over-f...

> What nose art says about specific crew-aircraft assignments and their specificity or exclusivity isn't clear.

The B-17 was named “Ye Olde Pub”. There’s a chapter describing the crew meeting each other and naming their airplane. I don’t recall any mention of another crew being involved. But I did get a strong sense of connection and ownership between the crew and plane.

I believe after their return they fly another B-17 that lost much of its crew, maybe combining crews to fill in losses. It has been a while since I read the book.

I don’t recall ever reading anything to suggest B-17s were regularly flown by multiple crews.

> And I still find it implausible that aircraft would be idled between individual crew missions, though overhauls and repairs might well account for that.

Yes, I believe this is the case.

I don't find a total size of the US Army Air Corps' European flight crew operations, but I do find a casualty count of 70,000 (<https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/black-thursda...>). If that constitutes 75% of the total force size, then we come up with a total force size of 93,333. Let's call that 100,000.

For the merchant marine:

During World War II, nearly 250,000 civilian merchant mariners served as part of the U.S. military and delivered supplies and armed forces personnel by ship to foreign countries engulfed in the war. Between 1939 and 1945, 9,521 merchant mariners lost their lives — a higher proportion than those killed than in any military branch, according to the National World War II Museum.

<https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/30...>

The US Army Air Corps trained 435,000 pilots during WWII, with more trained by the US Navy and Marines.

"WWII’s Tragic Aviation Accidents", Warfare History Network (2018)

<https://archive.is/718ZJ#selection-671.287-671.295>

The US Navy reports 5,563,507 officers and 6,570 enlisted (totals are regular and reserve), presumably aviation, with 12,133 total fatalities, of which just under 30% were combat deaths. (The remainder were largely non-combat crashes.)

<https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading...>

(The total officers count seems suspiciously high, and I suspect is for the total Navy corps, rather than just flight operations.)

And about 15,000 pilots died during training.

<https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2019/02/12/stagger...>

This still doesn't break out bomber crews relative to the overall US air operations, but at least for ballpark estimates, it seems that air crews and merchant sailor contingents were at the very least comparable in size, if not more air crews. That makes some sense as ships would be larger, fewer in number, and with a more efficient use of personnel (in terms of crew to net operations and tonnage delivered).

Another triangulation: the US produced about 300k combat aircraft, and about 35,000 bombers, during WWII:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...>

(The story of industrial production and scale at which the US poured out materiel, whether ships, tanks, fighters, bombers, or what have you, during WWII, is worth its own discussion.)

There was a Tom Hanks movie on Apple TV a couple years ago called "Greyhound", about a destroyer captain leading a convoy across the Atlantic in WWII.

Just the very beginning, the banter about what they were about to encounter was pretty chilling.

They are (or have been) during wartime, attaching to the US Navy:

During World War II the fleet was in effect nationalized; that is, the federal government controlled the cargo and the destinations, contracted with private companies to operate the ships, and put guns and Navy personnel, the Navy Armed Guard, on board.

U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration FAQ

<https://web.archive.org/web/20150411091000/http://www.marad....>

The army’s policy on leaving divisions on the line and replacing losses with replacements made those infantry jobs a death trap. 17% KIA is Europe.

Yes, though the contemporary fleet moves a lot more cargo than the WWII era fleet, as the ships are a lot bigger, somewhat faster, and thanks to containers and ro-ro ships cargo handling is a lot more efficient so the ships spend much less time in port unloading and loading.

The source I'd relied on for the 80k ships figure actually reported 47k ships, as of 2014.

The latest estimate, from the same source, is 105k ships of 100 deadweight tonnes or greater.

UN Trade & Development (UNCTAD) Review of Maritime Transport, 2014 and 2023.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41472992>.

(And thanks to dkga for asking me to cite sources and review my previous research.)

And some of them got torpedoed by German submarines around there. (E.g. off the coast of Louisiana)

No rounding South America involved.

> Why not trains

Way cheaper to ship by boat up the coast.

Corollary: one reason we see a mismatch here in modern days is the long term effect of the Jones Act. WWII was only a couple decades after Jones Act, and there was still a huge domestically flagged merchant marine. Today, not so much. It's illegal for a non-US flagged ship to go between two US ports, so we see more done by train.

Texas oil shipped from Gulf of Mexico ports (probably Port Arthur, though there may have been others), around Florida, and up the East coast of the US, principally to New Jersey where the major East Coat refineries were. Probably Bayway Refinery, owned and operated by Phillips 66.

There was no significant oil transport around South America so far as I'm aware. West-coast oil was supplied out of California, presumably the Pacific Theatre as well.

But an oil tanker is vastly more efficient than train full of tanker cars. And the supplies of tanker cars, rail lines, locomotives, & etc. were all pretty constrained.

My source was the UN Trade & Development organisation's Review of Maritime Transport 2014, which I'd looked up a ways back for an earlier essay.

Turns out I'd misremembered the size of the shipping fleet as of 2014, it was 47,601 ships, not ~80k, though that makes my point on this thread all the more apropos. I suspect I'd turned up the ~80k figure (if I recall, slightly less than, in the 70--80k range) from that or another source, and current fleet size is somewhat above that, keep reading. It should be remembered that current ships tend to be far larger than those of WWII, with the 2014 fleet totalling 1.68 million deadweight tonnes (DWT), or about 35 DWT on average. That's ... still lower than I'd have thought, as, for example, a Maersk E-Class container ship weighs in at 158,200 DWT,[2] and the largest oil tankers range up to 550,000 DWT.[3] From my sources earlier in this thread, WWII ships tended closer to 10,000 DWT.

The 47,601 ship number comes from summary line of the table on page 37 of the 2014 report, and applies to ships of 1,000+ DWT:

<https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2014_en...>

The UNTD's Review has been updated, the latest edition is for 2023:

<https://unctad.org/publication/review-maritime-transport-202...>

Full report: <https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2023_en...> (PDF) (English)

From that:

In January 2023, global maritime trade was transported on board 105,493 vessels of 100 gross tons (GT) and above, with oil tankers, bulk carriers, and container ships accounting for 85 per cent of total capacity.

(p. 29)

________________________________

Notes:

1. "Shipping and Safety: The nuclear option" (2015) <https://web.archive.org/web/20230604211742/https://old.reddi...>

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-class_container_ship>

3. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker>

Then read The Last Stand of The Tin Can Sailors by the same author. Because it's an amazing book about some astonishing bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.

The reality is that the heavily armed "merchant ship" Kormoran was a stealth convert by the German Navy and generally referred to as the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran.

The Kormoran was approached by the RAN warship HMAS Sydney for signaling and inspection, figuring that its game was up it unloaded everything it had fatally damaging the Sydney and taking on terminal shelling in the process.

https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/hmas_sydney

Why? Because it was before the nuclear bomb and all the other desasters that followed which actually permanently raised our background radiation levels. And because these ships were and still are underwater, they have been largely unaffected by this.

It might not seem much but apparently the radiation difference is enough, so for things that go into your body (like after an operation) only this old steel is used.

Or so I was told by a friend working in medical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Since we've stopped nuclear testing, though, it's returned pretty close to normal, and such steel is no longer as sought after.

> World anthropogenic background radiation levels peaked at 0.11 mSv/yr above natural levels in 1963, the year that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted. Since then, by about 2008, anthropogenic background radiation has decreased to 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels.

Parent comment is 100% correct, unfortunately this doesn't stop people from continuing to do it to this day.

These ships weren't memorial vessels, they were just ships doing work and there's nothing wrong with salvaging them. Cemeteries are a different story. They represent places where people specifically chose to bury their dead for the sake of memorializing them.

IIRC the bulk of the supply came from the scuttled German fleet at Scapa Flow, where the ships involved were not graves - they were intentionally scuttled by the crew, who got off and were rescued.

These experiments have come to use lead that's been underwater, in wrecks, for centuries, so almost all the Pb-210 has decayed away.

One notable form of radioactive contamination is Carbon-14, which is what makes radiocarbon dating after ~1950 unreliable. Though of course since the carbon in coal is itself primordial, that isn't the principle route of steel contamination.

Best I can make out it's radioactive isotopes in the air itself which increase the radiation background of post-WWII steel, with several sites mentioning Cobalt-60. Substances used in the post-smelting processing of steel (welding rods and the like) may also introduce contamination.

Given the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty which has halted most atmostpheric nuclear testing, radiation levels have fallen to the point that current steel is largely similar to pre-WWII "low-emissivity" steel in terms of background radiation.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel>

Yes, this is the same air you're breathing. No, the levels are not high enough to be a health issue. But it's an issue for very sensitive scientific instruments and such.

I assume that they find big pieces of already smelted steel in the ocean and just grind away the rust / mill it into the shape they want.

FFS, yes this is HN and all, but why does everything have to be a "startup"?

FWIW, there's lots of under-the-radar (apparently mostly Chinese) companies that are hard at work breaking up these ships and selling them for scrap. Considering many of those wrecks are war graves, a lot of people are kind of upset by this.

Clicking through the years also shows very clearly the tides turning, the war contracting around the axis powers, and the amount of absolutely destruction.

Tip: Try reading with Reader Mode.

however, when you're trying to convey information, this style of page is offensively bad and I doubt is really doing you any favors - inline images and videos do the exact same thing you're trying to accomplish here without all the obnoxiousness.

I feel like the tight integration of text and visual content does an excellent job of telling the story. There's no confused looking around for what goes with what. It's all tied together into a seamless narrative, sort of like television documentary style.

It seems like the issue you have is with scrolling down, but that's an advantage, because it means you can go at your own pace.

What value does it add for you?

And on desktop I'd not realised how much of the site was disabled under my default uMatrix configuration.

I know about "Snowfall" and other infographics. I'd much prefer straight text and static visualisations to the maximum extent possible.

Each of these has a different solution, or type of solution. Calling out any of those problems might be useful feedback for the site authors, or for industry professionals here.

For what it's worth, you can probably get what you want here:

https://ww2sunkenships.ca/

It's very enjoyable for some people. It makes me feel physically sick. But that's okay, I'm okay with the idea that not everything on the internet is aimed at me.

Does anyone know to what degree modern ships tend to hug the coast on their trips? My understanding is that until relatively recently (maybe the last 500 years or so?) almost all sailing was coastal and it was mostly unheard of for anyone to venture out into open ocean. However, I don't know to what degree that's still the case. E.g. if a modern ship is traveling from from somewhere in Asia or Europe to South Africa do they plot a relatively direct route or do they tend to hug the coast?

As an example, shipping traffic between Long Beach (Los Angeles, CA, USA) and Shanghai, China, doesn't head straight out into the Pacific, but hugs the west coast of North America, the southern coast of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and threads through the Japanese archipelago, not because today's container ships fear the open ocean and cannot navigate across it, but because that is the shortest route, following a Great Circle from Los Angeles to Shanghai. Similarly, Atlantic traffic between New York and Britain travels significantly further north than one might expect.

WWII saw little US-China traffic, but a great deal of US-UK traffic.

Sea traffic generally would have been concentrated along major supply routes. US-UK, as noted, Japan-Indonesia, and along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe and North Africa. Venezuela was another major oil hub, and Japan was sourcing materials from occupied China and Indonesia.

There's also logistics for attackers: it's militarily advantageous to strike within target-rich environments (where there's a lot of traffic), where the opponent cannot defend or strike back, where traffic tends to be concentrated (straits, islands, port mouths, around islands), within range of a home base or resupply network (the US's western Pacific operations are a solid indicator of just how robust the US logistics chain was, to permit operations over 8,000 mi (13,000 km) from West Coast ports), etc. Hanging out in mid-ocean waiting for the stray target to come into view makes little sense.

Even today, many shipping lanes tend to follow or be shaped by coastlines, see for example:

<https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapping-shipping-lanes-m...>

That map doesn't do justice to the tremendous traffic from China via Suez to Europe, or the massive amounts of South China Sea traffic, though at least the general routes are evident. It also cuts the US-China route in two by way of the map projection.

> There is a clear inflection point around March 1943: From this point onward, the Allied forces sank more ships every month than they lost.

Any idea what what happened early 1943? Was there a specific event that changed the direction, or is the balance point of slow attrition?

The reason was a bunch of technologies coming together. New weapons like Hedgehog and new tactics. More escorts and better ones. The Mid-Atlantic gap was closed by B-24s, there were more escort carriers.

You can see clear trends in the data in each of those theatres, both of which turn drastically in the Allies favor later in the war. The main driver for that is American war materiel production, but there's also plenty of decisions in strategy, tactics, and weapons systems that are entirely different.

Japanese Empirical codes were cracked dating to the beginning of the war AFAIU, or at the very least 1942.

The Allied line goes slowly down and the Axis line goes slowly up. At one point they cross, but there's nothing particularly significant about that crossing point. Nothing happened in the month that they crossed other than the two numbers were equal momentarily.

Battle of Midway - June 1942

Allied Victory at El Alamein - November 1942

German surrender at Stalingrad - February 1943

It was all downhill for the Axis powers after that.

I feel like we're 'sleepwalking towards war' today with China over Taiwan (many top military brass have said they expect a war later this decade), and to be brutally frank, it's kind of insane to me that the powers that be have decided a mountainous island and some computer chips are worth the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands or even millions of human lives. I hope sanity prevails.

I think this strategy will only work because of MAD, and it's essentially a modification of our previous proxy war strategies that existed prior. It has several risks and benefits. I'm worried that the separation Americans feel (we aren't at war, one of our allies we are heavily supporting is) isn't the same level of separation that the other side of the conflict feels. I'm worried that some of these allies will be manipulated into conflicts in order to generate customers. I'm worried that if our soldiers are needed too many of them won't have combat experience, which improves their effectiveness. I'm worried that the loss of life will have less of an emotional impact when it's happening to other people far away.

The benefit of not risking American lives while still maintaining cashflow for weapons R&D is massive though.

I am a little sick of seeing the US, a country with two friendly neighbors, and massive oceans between us and our nearest peer adversaries spend ~ 1T / yr on defense to be the 'world's police'. The real threat to our security is at home.

> I am a little sick of seeing the US, a country with two friendly neighbors, and massive oceans between us and our nearest peer adversaries spend ~ 1T / yr on defense to be the 'world's police'.

If you think the US isn't a major beneficiary of global peace and open trade, you are very mistaken. It isn't a charity project, it's a strategy.

> The real threat to our security is at home.

What does this mean?

They don't have to be able to defeat China to deter them, they simply have to make an invasion too costly to be worth it. Google porcupine strategy.

If Taiwan was serious about their defense, they would have a higher percentage of their population conscripted and trained for longer. They would have been spending a much higher proportion of their GDP on defense. The fact that they've done neither of these things tells me they're passing the buck to us and expecting the US to pay the cost (in both money and lives) of their defense, and I don't think we should.

>If you think the US isn't a major beneficiary of global peace and open trade, you are very mistaken.

You don't think the world had free trade before US hegemony? The truth is that other countries would step up and help shoulder the burden instead of simply relying on us to do everything.

I'm extremely doubtful of the benefit to the average us citizen of the tens of trillions of dollars in us military expenditures since WWII. I think we would find ourselves in a more stable, prosperous country had we spent that money on education, infrastructure and healthcare.

Regardless, I'm not interested in continuing this conversation further. We're not going to change each others minds.

As far as I can tell, we have solid empirical evidence that those things are sufficient, based on the fact that China hasn't invaded.

> The truth is that other countries would step up and help shoulder the burden instead of simply relying on us to do everything.

Right... and they would each overlay their own protectionist policies.

I don't know who in here said the US's military expenditures are optimal, but it wasn't me. I hope you find 'em so you can tell them they're wrong!

Otherwise wouldn't Russia have just walked into Ukraine with a nuke saying "we're the boss now or eveyone is dead"?

The West has responded with a very slow, incremental ramping up of aid to avoid triggering it.

If Russia didn't have nukes, the situation in Ukraine would look very different.

The point of nuclear deterrent is to have it, not to use it. If one has too much of it they'll go bankrupt like the USSR. None and they'll get attacked or invaded. That's why nobody attacks North Korea and Iran mainly uses proxies to attack Israel.

Plenty of countries have no nuclear weapons and aren’t attacked.

The USSR didn’t fall because it had too many nuclear weapons.

Plenty of nuclear armed countries have been attacked or invaded.

Russia isn’t gonna stop with Ukraine just like they didn’t with Georgia and Moldova.

Blackmail doesn't have to be perfect to be functional. The West has correctly assessed "they're not going to nuke us over x" so far, but it remains a consideration.

Totally coincidentally, Republican media figures are being discovered to be essentially Russian stooges. It’s very shocking, if you happened to ignore their constant purveyance of Russian propaganda.

But it's not just like US policy in Ukraine is just a big sham to get these countries to buy modern weapon systems, if that's what you're insinuating.

Yep, you're right, that's definitely where I was going with it.

Edit: To make things perfectly clear, "not going to war" starts with "don't invade another country". I'm not sure how that isn't obvious.

"Would prefer if they didn't" is a sensible position to hold and not an actual contribution to the conversation.

Sensible positions worth holding are valid contributions to conversations.

If China chooses to invade, the US is left with a choice of how to intervene. "No war" isn't on the table any more, even if the US choice is "don't get involved in the war and let our ally get clobbered".

Things are escalating in a very scary direction between the two countries coast guards.

That being said the Pacific has not changed in the last 80 years and it will still be eerily similar to the naval escapades seen then - but I anticipate with far greater loss of life despite autonomous capabilities (due to range of weapon effectiveness and lethality of munitions).

As we were working through the Convoy Operations unit, I remember thinking that it was basically bullshit. You're in a group of other merchant ships being protected by the US Navy, but the maneuvers were based on an enemy with a WW2 level of technology. If you are attacked by any modern force that somehow managed to get through the outer ring of defense, as a merchant vessel, you might as well start lowering lifeboats.

The FDR administration lied about it then, and I see from the map in the article that they have never corrected those lies.