Category Archives: Military History

I recently noticed that combinedfleet.com has excellent summaries of the WW2 US submarine patrol reports that are very easy to scrape for data. These patrol reports are interesting because they provide accurate data as to the rate of torpedo firings by US submarines and some indications as to the mix of torpedoes being fired. Like all WW2 records, not every patrol recorded the weapons used and it is difficult to know how accurate the hit count is. Continue reading →

This post uses a combination of data from a Github repo by Jeffery Arnold that contains a fantastic amount of Civil War battle data and some Wikipedia scraping to generate similar tables. I should note that my casualty results are significantly different than Bonekemper's because there are large differences between sources of Civil War casualty data. The reasons behind these differences are complex, but the Arnold repo has data from a number of sources. I chose his Wikipedia file because it is easy to check where the data came from. Continue reading →

Many years ago, at the start of my career, I worked with an excellent safety engineer who had served in WW2 as a fighter pilot in Europe with the US Army Air Corps (USAAC). You could tell that flying was the love of his life. Though we were working on naval weapons systems, our lunchtime talks often focused on his experiences flying aircraft during the war. His war service began in a P-47 (Figure 1) and his unit later transitioned to the P‑51 (Figure 2). Continue reading →