US Naval Losses in WW2

Quote of the Day

Every time you find your attention captured by an advertisement, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.

— Tim Wu

Figure 1: US Naval Losses in WW2. (Source)

I have been putting together some information on US naval actions during WW2. Specifically, I wanted to look at US Naval losses by year during WW2 in order to get a feel for the change in battle tempo over time. The Wikipedia has an excellent page on all the US naval losses during WW2, so I simply downloaded this page, cleaned it up, and generated an Excel pivot table (Figure 1). The breakdown by combatant type is my own, everything else is from the Wikipedia.

To help illustrate the loss rate by year, I added sparklines on the right-hand side of the table. The sparklines do make it clear that the pace of battle was high during 1942 and 1944. It is difficult to assess the tempo of naval losses in 1945 from this chart because (1) 1945 was a partial year of WW2, and (2) the Imperial Japanese Navy was a shell of its former self during most of 1945.

There is nothing particularly special about this data or my analysis, but I thought I would make the spreadsheet available to others in case they were interested in looking at WW2 data – there are a fair number of discussion groups on this topic. Having the data in a spreadsheet makes it easy to work with.