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.
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.
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".
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)
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.
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.
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.
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. :]
Readit News
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.
Nice work on the mapping project, monsieur Paul Heersink.
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.
Of the U.S. services, the U.S. Merchant Marine had the highest casualty rate in WWII of 4%, followed by the U.S. Marines at 2%.
Attacking the supply lines is an important strategy in war.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/merchant-mari...
http://www.usmm.org/ww2.html
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.
>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.
https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact...
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 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".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformed_services_of_the_Unit...
[1] https://www.usmma.edu/admissions/service-obligation
https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials/item/memorial/13633
> 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.
https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/ceme...
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.
I did manage to address that in a follow-up comment, though after you'd pointed out the same:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41472992>
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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>
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Thistlegorm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_City_of_Rayville
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.
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.
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.
These experiments have come to use lead that's been underwater, in wrecks, for centuries, so almost all the Pb-210 has decayed away.
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.
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.
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.