My uncle was on a small gunboat in the pacific, which was sunken by a single Japanese plane. They were on extended patrol, supposed to be observing and reporting from concealment.
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.
Thank you for doing this, the wreck map is amazing and humbling. This map makes it easier to follow some historic naval battles; things like being able to locate where the Atlanta went down, so close to the runway on Guadalcanal that was the focus of so much fighting.
For context, the contemporary commercial merchant fleet is about 80,000 ships, roughly a third of which are bulk liquid carriers (a/k/a oil tankers). As a percentage, that's actually down from the 1970s/80s when half of all commercial ships were tankers. Most of the growth has been in container ships.
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.
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.
The US submarine warfare operation in the Pacific was also absolutely devastating to Japan, particularly as that country has virtually no indigenous mineral or energy resources.
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.
I was mind-blown by the fact that pearl-harbour (and the attack on Singapore) where planned by the Japanese with the main goal of getting to Dutch Indonesian oil reserves.
There were certainly groups in the services in WW II who suffered much higher casualties. For example, flying in a bomber crew was very dangerous. I can't quickly find some complete stats, but for example in 1943:
>During 1943, only about 25% of Eighth Air Force bomber crewmen completed their 25-mission tours—the other 75% were killed, severely wounded, or captured.
But you're now talking about a much smaller group within the US Air Force. Obviously if you zoom in on any small unit of any force, you can find units with extremely high casualty rates.
See my comment above. Total air crew and merchant-marine sailor contingents were likely somewhat comparable.
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.
> presuming several crews per aircraft to sustain multiple missions
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.
Everything I have ever read suggests crews “owned” their bombers.
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.
[1] says they rotated and only flew every third day:
> 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.
They're not F22s either, they didn't need to go in for major maintenance every sortie. They had inspections after every flight and daily/25/50/100 hour inspections [1] but most of the time they went hundreds of hours before needing major work that would take a plane out of rotation for extended periods of time.
How long did those regular services take? 20 hour missions means they’re going in for service every mission. The 50 hour is every other mission.
Between the B-17 and B-24 we built about 30,000 strategic bombers in WWII. They don’t all have to be in the air regularly to maintain constant 1000+ bomber formations.
If you can find any account of how crews sharing aircraft regularly I’d love to see it because I have never heard anything like that.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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:
(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.)
They aren't an officially recognized uniformed service [0] even though they do have uniforms, a paramilitary structure and (those which are US citizens) can be called for mandatory service [1].
Not taking away from their very real service and sacrifice, it's just an interesting question what we mean by "US service".
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
I'm actually surprised the losses were so low. Obviously 4% is dramatically higher than your chance of death in other jobs but it's still quite low (e.g. when I'm playing X-COM I feel like the computer is cheating when I miss a 96% shot). I would have thought that in going to war, especially one as deadly as WW2, you'd at least have a double digit chance of dying.
The National Memorial Arboretum in the UK has a memorial dedicated to the Merchant Navy. When visiting the scale of it is thought provoking, each tree represents a lost UK ship.
> A wood of oak trees representing the 'convoy' of merchant and fishing vessels lost in conflicts of the 20th Century, resulting in the deaths of 46,000 crew. The 2,535 trees each represent a ship lost during WW2.
There is also a memorial at Tower Hill to those with no known grave.
My dad served in the Merchant Navy in WWII and narrowly escaped death more than once. I don't recall the details because I was too self absorbed as a young man to pay sufficient attention to his stories. Which astonishes and shames me now, nearly 40 years after his death.
> For context, the contemporary commercial merchant fleet is about 80,000 ships
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.
They shipped it from the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida/ Cuba, and up the coast to the eastern US. (And there was a lot of Mississippi river <-> ocean traffic too)
And some of them got torpedoed by German submarines around there. (E.g. off the coast of Louisiana)
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.
This was Texas (and perhaps Oklahoma and Louisiana) oil. Texas alone produced a huge fraction of the oil used by all parties during WWII, with Russia being the other major supplier.
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.
My recollection is that they did use trains, at least during the worst parts of the war. (In terms of tanker losses & shortages.)
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.
Thanks for asking, as I seem to have misremembered (and inflated) my earlier source, and have pulled in fresh data.
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:
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.
If you're interested in how some of the wrecks got in Ironbottom Sound, read Neptune's Inferno by James Hornfischer.
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 linked page is very impressive, as is the work that must have gone into the database.
I once scuba dived on SS Thistlegorm, which was sunk by German aircraft while waiting to enter the Suez canal. It was quite eerie to see the trains and other vehicles still onboard.
What was fascinating to me was that the first US commercial ship sunk by Germany was sunk on the south side of Australia! I found that by accident clicking around. Truly a world war, I suppose.
Also of interest are the two dots off the mid point of the west coast of Australia, one green for "non combatant merchant" one red for "armed warship".
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.
On a related note: Those ships are highly sought after. At some point there will probably a startup using this data to salvage all these ships.
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.
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.
There is nothing left of those remains. The flesh was gone between a few days to a year or so depending on the water temperature. Microorganisms feed on the collagen binding the inorganic matrix, reducing the bones to dust within 10 years at the most.
> Naval shipwrecks are granted sovereign immunity under international law and remain the property of their nations, in this case Japan. These protections makes it illegal to destroy them without permission from Tokyo.
By your logic, any random long-urbanized space on Earth should remain untouched because at some point it was the site of people's (often violent) deaths.
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.
By your logic, any random long-urbanized space on Earth should remain untouched because at some point it was the site of people's (often violent) deaths. 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.
They don't need to have been underwater; the steel just has to have been made pre-1945. The steelmaking process incorporates of lot of gases into the final product.
Nah, they don’t use low-rad steel for medical implants. Mostly for scientific instruments that would thrown off by even a small rise in background radiation.
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.
I still don't understand why ore dug up out of the ground and made into steel is more effected by this than this steel. (Edit, made into steel, not iron)
Steelmaking is the combination of iron ore and carbon (from coked coal) with huge amounts of forced air or direct oxygen to form the alloy of carbon and iron we call steel.
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.
When you turn iron ore into steel with blast furnaces and steel making (e.g. basic oxygen process) you blast it with atmospheric air (or oxygen made from atmospheric air), and tiny amounts of impurities in the air (such as fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing) get embedded in the 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.
Also to note that, in theory, you could use purified oxygen for the forging and create new steel similar to low-background radiation steel, but it would be ridiculously expensive given how much oxygen is used.
mostly because steel is used for things like particle accelerators that are understandably very sensitive to contamination - as a sibling comment noted this is not much of an issue anymore.
> At some point there will probably a startup using this data to salvage all these ships.
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.
Seriously though, it's no longer starting a small business or even a business. It's a startup. Is this just a change in the language, or is there an appreciable difference between a new salvage business and new salvage startup?
There's a value to scrap steel but it's not all that great, and the low-rad steel isn't as much in demand as it used to be. Many of these ships are likely in such deep water that they aren't worth salvaging.
There is another kind of wreck used for extreme low background physics experiments. These experiments (put deep underground) need even lower background than medical equipment. They use lead for shielding, but any modern lead is contaminated with Pb-210, an isotope with a half life of 22 years. This contamination comes from the radioactive decay of uranium in the lead ore.
These experiments have come to use lead that's been underwater, in wrecks, for centuries, so almost all the Pb-210 has decayed away.
If there was ever a map that showed the global scale of the war, this is the one if you consider how much of the Earth is Ocean.
Clicking through the years also shows very clearly the tides turning, the war contracting around the axis powers, and the amount of absolutely destruction.
<3 the scrolling implementation of this website. The browser scroll is as default, nothing is hijacked. It is just the background & images on webpage are updated as you scroll it creating those animations. You can use page down, space key, the scrollbar or whatever to scroll and it just works
I don't. Please stop making sites in this style - it isn't easy to navigate, especially if you're disabled. I find it extremely obnoxious and immediately exit this style of webpage.
I think NY Times started long back and this style was kinda "cool" that goes well with the narrative. Then, there is https://pudding.cool that does this pretty well. Now, many just copy and tries without a meaningful treatment and is just there - kinda not working-out in most cases.
In the NYT story, it makes much more sense (also the way it's implemented is far less offensive). It makes sense because it was trying to tell a story, and the slide show gives more emotional impact to it. That's cool! I still don't like it and would prefer just the story, but I see why it makes sense here.
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.
I have in the grandparent comment - it’s not easily usable to many types of disabilities, chiefly - and it does nothing to augment the information it is trying to convey. this site also renders poorly, as others have mentioned. Just adds absolutely nothing to the page, so it is offensively bad in that I want to read what it says but cannot/will not.
Thanks for that perspective. I lost sight of the fact not everyone is like me, but to be fair to my righteous anger about this kind of thing, is that probably more people like you are like me and due to the nature of how design decisions are made, that leaves huge neglected parts of the population after a time.
I’ve done a lot of UX work with and for people with various disabilities. I can make a few guesses about aspects of this site which are difficult, but I don’t know about you personally. It could be visual difficulties making the low-contrast hard to read, or the overly-controlled layout making text-zooming difficult. Perhaps it’s poor source order screwing up a screen reader. Perhaps attention or anxiety issues make the constant motion too much to bear, or concentrate through.
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.
Sorry, I had assumed you meant a physical disability, which probably wasn't a good assumption to make. (And I in no way say that in order to be rude. Most of us are limited in some way. I think you just find it difficult to process information in this format.)
For what it's worth, you can probably get what you want here:
I think the visuals are subjective (and imo think they are fine). I was mostly talking about how "custom scroll" and animations that reacts to scrolling is implemented. If one wants to implement one, this is an OK way of doing it in my opinion
For the curious, this interaction is called "Scrollytelling".
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.
Not a good experience here, because I scroll more quickly than the background stuff takes time to load, and it’s not clear if something is broken, or when loading is complete for the current part. It’s messy and distracts from the actual contents, and has no apparent benefit for the reader, compared to a normal fixed document layout.
The presentation feels like watching a movie through a drinking straw, but yeah, I guess the "straw controls" are not hijacked and I can point the straw smoothly to places that haven't fully loaded yet. :]
My pop's uncle was one of those Atlantic dots, he got off the SS Santore in 1942 after it stuck a mine coming out of Chesapeake Bay, and I remember growing up with his stories of how the merchant marine took greater casualties than any of the armed services.
It's surprising to me how few ships seem to sink out in the open ocean where it would be nearly impossible to ever recover or research their wrecks.
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?
Something like https://www.shipmap.org/ could help answer this, but without sounding too trite, it probably depends on where the ship's destination is.
That's mostly a function of which ports ships travelled between, various choke points (particularly straits and canals), and Great Circle routes.
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:
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.
I wonder why there’s that “elbow” off the west coast of the US. Is that composed of vessels avoiding the US EEZ or Coast Guard regulation or something?
There's one which follows the inner Channel Islands passage, and would be used by ships traversing West Coast ports (e.g., between Tijujana, San Diego, Long Beach / Los Angeles, Oakland/Richmond, Seattle, Vancouver).
And there's one further offshore which looks as if it mostly connects the Panama Canal to Vancouver.
I suspect you're referencing the latter, and I'm not sure just what it signifies, though that's in interesting observation, yes.
There are interactive shipping visualisations which show individual ships and their origins / destinations, which might help resolve this.
You are correct, I was referring to that Vancouver-Panama routing.
The more I look at the map, the more I think it does have something to do with some aspect of US jurisdiction - at first I thought the phenomenon was limited to the west coast, but it looks like there’s a hint of it off the east coast as well. And the waters around Hawaii look suspiciously empty (other than traffic that’s Hawaii-bound) compared to the entire rest of the pacific. To my eyes, I don’t see clear evidence of the same phenomenon occurring anywhere else in the world.
Good thought on checking a vessel tracker to see which ships are using that route and whether there are any evident commonalities.
The thing about Hawaii is that there's very little that would pass by there unless it was going to or coming from Hawaii. So the idea that there's traffic around it heading in or out but not much else ... makes sense. There's extraordinarily little traffic across the mid-Pacific otherwise.
(This has strong implications fro the island states of the Pacific as well: they've got great water access ... but nobody goes there. Places such as Pitcairn see very few vessels, similarly for the islands of the South Atlantic.)
I'll see what I can dig up, you're nerd-sniping me.
Agree that Hawaii is (gloriously) remote, but to my eye there still seems to be less shipping in its vicinity on average than there is in similarly remote areas of the Pacific. But I also just noticed I was misinterpreting the scale of the map and had substantially overestimated the breadth of Hawaiian archipelago, so the seeming absence of non-Hawaiian traffic could certainly be a function of, well, being smack in the middle of a giant ocean with not much else around.
That said, another thing I noticed that makes me think could be a regulatorily driven pattern - there’s a quite noticeable void in the map around the Galapagos. I assume that’s some sort of environmental regulation, and vessels either route around (or turn off their transponders) due to that - wondering if there’s a reason to do the same in US waters that doesn’t really seem to hold true anywhere other than the US or the Galapagos.
May of 1943 was called Black May because so many U-Boats were sunk, 25% of the force.
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.
I thought the German subs used more sophisticated encryption and were more disciplined in operational procedure such that the subs were largely not decrypted by the Allies.
Supposedly the better question is why it took so long for an allied victory. Britain’s economic output was absolutely vast, and its colonies made it very powerful. Yet it still took the US industrial capacity coming online and a significant portion of the USSR’s population dying before victory.
It's a silly thing to say, because ship losses are largely driven by German submarines in the Atlantic and American submarines in the Pacific, which are about as disconnected as things get in WW2.
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.
If you look at the graphs there is nothing like an 'inflection point' or qualitative change in the graph behaviour.
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.
Honestly the loss of life is kind of horrifying. Especially when you consider the vast majority were unarmed transport ships of some kind. I cannot imagine slowly trawling along in some tanker when suddenly you're under fire from a uboat with no way to shoot back.
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.
When I say I 'hope that sanity prevails' I'm hoping that China realizes Taiwan isn't worth the cost. I'm also extremely dubious that it's worth 10's or even 100's of thousands of American lives for us to intervene. I'm happy for us to sell Taiwan as many weapons as they want for them to defend themselves, but I draw the line at putting American lives at risk for a country that has taken a negligent attitude to it's own defenses in the hopes that we bail them out.
That seems to be the recent business plan of the military industrial complex. Wars aren't popular among US voters, and military recruitment numbers are struggling. Instead, if we sell slightly dated weapons to foreign armies then the money keeps flowing into our war economy.
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 compare them with Israel, another small nation with high defense needs. They've spent less than 2% of their GDP on defense until very recently, they don't have a strong history of conscripting and training their civilian population. In short, they seem to have operated under the assumption that the united states would ride in to save the day.
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.
Why is 2% a meaningful number? Less than that is insufficient and more than that is sufficient? Taiwan couldn't effectively defend itself against China regardless of how much it spends on defense. Nor could any other country on the planet except potentially the US.
> 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.
>Taiwan couldn't effectively defend itself against China regardless of how much it spends on defense.
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.
This comment comes from a misguided position of believing USA are in the position to allow or disallow. As this article shows, ‘disallow’ is not as straight forward as it seems.
Another way to think about it though is without nukes there’d be nothing stopping NATO and Russia blowing the crap out of each other. That might not actually be better.
NATO has completely undermined itself by watching Russia attack its neighbours and responding so weakly. What’s the point of a nuclear deterrent if your key strategy is going to be appeasement?
Did you read up about MAD and how computers evolved because the US was calculating what to nuke in the USSR in the event of a nuclear strike?
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.
Nuclear blackmail is what stops NATO from ending the war overnight tomorrow with a massive air assault on Russian troops in Ukraine. Instead, we ship arms over the border and wring our hands with every small ratcheting up of aid calibrated to hopefully not trigger it.
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.
A less charitable view of the strategy is that the west is letting Ukraine bleed out defending itself with too little support to win, and too much to lose.
“The US” isn’t doing that. Democrats are trying to defend our ally, and Republicans are trying not to. The net result is a rather incoherent US position, not a malicious one.
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.
The current war situation is quite convenient for the US. They watch the Russians screw themselves up in Ukraine while mostly supplying it with aging weapons that were mostly sitting around close to being decomissioned. O handy way to get rid of old inventory and also to push Eastern European NATO members to update their stuff: donate your USSR-made scrap to Ukraine and we'll give/sell you more modern NATO compatible equivalents. Putin was dumb enough to start a war and enable this. And this time the US reacted with more than just sanctions.
Of course it's not a big sham, we want more modern US or NATO weapons systems. Most of us also want our Soviet inventory donated to Ukraine and getting used against the Russians. I'm not insinuating anything, just stating a fact.
It's a sad day that machines of war are better when "put to use" than recycled or left to rott in museums. But I agree that use against an unprovoked invader is more just than 'peace' under the boot of a dictator.
By giving nuclear states a vested interest in maintaining the world order as it is. We've mostly managed to do that so far, even if with Ukraine and potentially Taiwan it's looking a bit iffy.
Ah, thank you for adhering to general internet commenting guidelines, where we insert words into others mouths that aren't the most generous interpretation of what they could be saying. No, I certainly wouldn't have stepped back further, as another respondent said, and argued that China should leave Taiwan alone, nope - I definitely insinuated that nuclear-armed states should invade folk at their own whim and we should do nothing about it.
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.
No, the premise of the conversation is "sleepwalking towards war". Sleepwalking involves doing things that you're not aware you're doing, which could have dire consequences. The alternative is to wake up and be conscious of moving things in the right direction.
Sensible positions worth holding are valid contributions to conversations.
Not sure why you feel the need to gatekeep the kinds of responses we can give to your question - you asked, and I sure wasn't the only one with that answer. But maybe you're right - maybe we should cherry pick what we discuss, you never know if Xi will stumble upon this very HN thread and realize that he needs to change course thanks to our highly informative discussion.
China gets to "don't invade another country" with regards to Taiwan.
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".
It can be said as well that war between China and the Philippines may break out even before that given their current encroachment on a number of strategically important shoals in the South China Sea.
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).
A long time ago I was a Merchant Marine cadet. One of the classes we had to take during senior year was on working with the Navy during conflict/all out war.
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.
Look at 1942. You'll see a large number of Allied ships were sunk in the Atlantic, not that far from the US coast. I'm not expert on WWII history, but I would not have expected that.
Wow that article is full of gold:
* Justice named Igor Judge
* Lawyer named James Counsell
* Lawyer named Sue Yoo
* Weather reporter named Storm Field
* Vicar named Michael Vickers
* Orthopedic surgeons named Limb, Limb, Limb, and Limb
Sometimes I feel like the universe really is a simulation and these names are the result of QA testers having a little bit of fun keeping track of who's who.
Going on 12 years now. If I had known it would have taken so long before I started I might not have taken this on. It’s been a lot of work on my own time but it’s something I enjoy. Why did I start? I thought it would be cool to see it all mapped and see the patterns that result, including the temporal ones. And I think I was right - it is cool. Also, aside from this forum there’s been a huge interest in from folks involved with cleaning up potentially polluting wrecks and underwater cultural sites. Glad people are enjoying it and finding it worthwhile.
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.