Category Archives: Military History

While answering a recent question about the tonnage sank by the top US submarine skippers during WW2, I realized that I had not made available my conversion of the JANAC data for vessels sunk by US submarines. The JANAC records are considered the official records because they were cross-checked with information from Japanese records. Continue reading →

I watched an interesting lecture on American History TV this weekend called Japanese Perspective on the Battle of Midway by Anthony Tully. The most interesting part of the discussion occurred when Tully began showing how the US production of aircraft carriers eventually overwhelmed the Japanese ability to build carriers. He used some simple graphs to show the relative carrier strength of the US Navy versus the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) over time. In this post, I will come up with my own graphics to visualize this information. Continue reading →

I have been doing quite a bit of reading lately on WW2 naval actions, and I have been putting together tables that show me ship losses by year. This information gives me a feel for the tempo of battle during the war. I first looked at US naval losses (link) and am now looking at the Royal Navy losses (Figure 1). Continue reading →

I was doing some reading about President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and was surprised to learn that he actually commanded three PT boats: PT-101, PT-109, and PT-59. His service on PT-101 was very short. His next command, PT-109, became famous because of its ramming and sinking by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Continue reading →

I just watched a wonderful BookTV presentation by three authors on the WW2 attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred 75 years ago today. While I am generally familiar with what happened during that attack, I had not looked at the details of the attack. In particular, this show motivated me to look at the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) attack force composition and what happened to these ships over the course of the war. The fate of these ships reflects what happened to the rest of the IJN during the Pacific War. Continue reading →

I recently was watching a documentary on WW2 that mentioned that Greece and Yugoslavia suffered some of highest casualty rates during WW2. While I have read much about WW2, I had not looked at the casualty rates as a percentage of each country's population. I did some quick web searching and found that the Wikipedia has an excellent table summarizing WW2 casualties, which I imported into Excel and sorted by casualty rates. These percentages are mind numbing. While Greece and Yugoslavia suffered terribly, other countries suffered even more. Continue reading →

So I prowled around the web and found a site that seemed to have some good information on the combat history of active jet fighters, including the F-16. I thought I would use this question as a vehicle for sharpening my Power Query and Excel web scraping skills by making comparison table between the active duty fighter jets. Continue reading →