Monthly Archives: September 2021

Sunken Ships at Ironbottom Sound

Posted on 11-September-2021 by mathscinotes

I just finished watching a series of videos on the Guadalcanal Campaign by Drachinifel, whose work is superb (Figure 2). The marines derisively referred to this campaign as Operation Shoestring because of the resource limitations. Things were no better for the sailors. Unlike many WW2 island campaigns, more sailors died in the battles than ground troops (link). The Allies, and in particular the US Navy (USN), had to learn the hard way that the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was a force that deserved respect. Many Allied ships were sunk while learning this lesson. Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, History Through Spreadsheets, Naval History | Comments Off on Sunken Ships at Ironbottom Sound

US Navy Ship Numbers Versus Time

Posted on 4-September-2021 by mathscinotes

My reading and watching lectures on Mahan have motivated me to look at how the US Navy grew and shrank over the years. Fortunately, the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) have an excellent page on the size of the US Navy over time. Unfortunately, the data is scattered throughout the page and it must be scrapped so that I can consolidate and graph it. This post is about using Power Query to scrape the data from the page and generate a graph in Excel of the number of active ships in the US Navy over time. Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, Military History | Comments Off on US Navy Ship Numbers Versus Time