Quote:
Originally Posted by RN7
Commonwealth ship building
1940: 880,000 tons
1941: 1,276,500 tons
1942: 1,990,800 tons
1943: 1,136,804 tons
1944: 2,139,600 tons
1945: 535,400 tons
Allied Shipping losses in Atlantic
1940: 3,654,500 tons
1941: 3,295,900 tons
1942: 6,150,340 tons
1943: 2,170,400 tons
1944: 505,700 tons
1945: 366,800 tons
So its a good job the Americans were building so many ships.
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Allied Shipping Losses in the ETO
1939: ~500,000 tons
1940: ~2,380,000 tons
1941: ~2,300,000 tons
1942: ~6,600,000 tons
1943: ~2,600,000 tons
1944: ~650,000 tons
1945: ~275,000 tons
Figures are from V E Tarrant,
"The U-Boat Offensive 1914-1945" and are approximate only because he breaks figures down by month and named period of the U-Boat war, not by calendar year.
I have no idea where your figures come from, but Tarrant is regarded as pretty reliable, and your figures seem way way out for the early war years.
British Merchant Navy at the beginning of the war, ~20 million grt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nortra...hant_ships.jpg
Note to this you add the 1000 ships of the Norwegian Merchant Navy, the fourth biggest in the world at the time, plus the Dutch and Belgian merchant fleets and some of the French, and around 60% of the Italian (captured by the Allies in port or outside of Italy on Italian DoW).
Commonwealth/Allied losses were on the down trend until the idiots of the US Navy decided that, in 1942, they didn't need no steenkin convoys ... and were entirely responsible for that spike. Thanks Admiral King. Not.
Because of Admiral King and his ilk it was, indeed, a good thing that the US built so many ships to replace the unneccessary losses his idiotic tactics caused.
Phil