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Escort carrier

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I recently learned about the battle of Midway on one of the recent WWII Netflix docuseries.

It was an early battle following Pearl Harbor, and it was Japan’s entire carrier fleet vs US’ entire carrier fleet, and the grand totals were something like 4 carriers vs 3 carriers.

At the end of the battle they mention that by the end of the war the US was completing multiple carriers per month, and they were just orders of magnitude ahead of every other country when it came to manufacturing power and steel production. Japans only hope was finishing the us Navy early on at Pearl Harbor and midway but once the US ramped up production the US never lost their military lead (arguably they still have it). Meanwhile at the start of WWII the US wasn’t even top 10 militarily. It’s astounding how much changed in those 5 years.

One of the things that I always wondered was how much the safety of home allowed that lead to happen. The US never had any real threats to the mainland and so they were able to focus and just execute without distractions. The majority of the rest of the countries in the war had to balance their manufacturing power and steel production with defense.

Other countries also had a much larger proportion of the population off fighting and dying. UK casualties in ww2 were 0.94% of the 1939 population, France's were about 1.44%, the USSR's were about 13.4% (of course the USSR was a wild outlier). The USA lost about 0.3% of its 1939 population, still an appallingly huge number, but smaller. Since the people who were off fighting were predominantly the healthy young men who worked in industry at the time the impact on industry was magnified.

The US was able to focus a much greater proportion of its effort on making things.

> The US never had any real threats to the mainland

Hey, the Japanese destroyed the backstop on the baseball diamond at Fort Stevens in Oregon. They literally threatened America's past time! /s

This. It cannot be understated how blessed geographically the US is.

Even today, it is largely too far from anything really happening in the world.

While this definitely played a factor (I doubt the US would have had over 50% of the global GNP at the end of the war if their factories were getting bombed), the US was a global manufacturing powerhouse in 1937 by any measure; in both raw number of factories, and per-capita productivity the US was far ahead.

The US had more manufacturing capacity than Germany and Japan combined before a single bomb was dropped on a German or Japanese factory.

Homefront serenity is what underpins US military primacy, and to large extent hegemony. But that era will come to end with proliferation of conventional global strike.

It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive. The fact that the U.S. was able to do this at the home front, with some 12 million of its laborers in their prime working years serving overseas instead, is just bewildering. It makes you wonder what the state of our nation and technological progress might have been by today, if we didn't abandon the centrally planned economic system that was established during world war ii and instead shifted it towards peacetime goals.

Central planning is great when you have one clearly defined goal that takes precedence over any other, namely winning a war. It's trash for anything else.

It can still work somewhat great for parts of the economy.

E.g. healthcare, education, utility...

I feel like it works out about the same for those. The difference is market forces work much worse in those cases.

After reading many business books: central planning works great as long as the benefits of centralisation outweigh the drawbacks of centralisation. After reading Outsiders by Thorndike, I’m convinced that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits surprisingly rapidly because distributed companies are shown to run much better. Historically, it has been the same with countries/states, according to Taleb. Although large countries had benefits and could stay alive for long times, small city states (e.g., Florence centuries ago or Switzerland today) and decentralized nations (e.g., Habsburg or the EU), run much more better.

To quote my economics professor: “central planning works great as long as consumer preference isn’t important.”

Obviously the situation in WWII was more complex, as the central planner and the consumer were the same entity.

Maybe a better quote would be “central planning works great when the preferences of non-state consumers aren’t important.”

The idea of consumer preference is a little bit of a stretch IMO. When I enter a marketplace I can't have my preferences be met my definition, I have to adjust my preferences to meet what the market is able to supply in excess and make a profit on. Sometimes advertisements are used to make me think these preferences of the producers are actually preferences of my own. So either in the centrally planned US or the US we have today, I can't get a hot pink ford mustang from the dealer even if that's what I want as my preference. I get something that's ultimately a compromise of many factors.

Ford's statement on that was you can have any color (Model T), as long as it's black. There are plenty of wrap companies that will turn your Mustang hot pink. For a fee, naturally. what the vendor doesn't provide, someone will step up to provide it, so long as there's a market for it.

There's a company turning Tesla Model 3's into work vans, even.

That seems great and all until you consider the inefficiencies of that sort of model. Say there is latent demand for x and the market doesn't make x. That doesn't mean x is made. That probably means everything from A-Z is made and tried to make stick, some x is seen to be in demand, then you get demand+alpha companies making a crack of making some x for some time until the alpha portion of that equation drops out for lack of sales. All of this seems great until you start respecting peoples time and money.

For example, all the people slaving to make (a:z)-x, that was all wasted labor and investment. So were all the x making companies overproducing for demand, that was all waste too, representing money and labor that could have been better spent at some other unmet need of people, if resources (labor and material) were better planned.

Then there is the more sinister idea of profitability and a timeline on returns that perverts this further, preventing good ideas from seeing the light of day because they can't ensure a healthy enough return in a short enough time. Good ideas like the bow and arrow or the wheel might have been stopped short in their development if their producers couldn't ensure a healthy enough margin for their shareholders, if we had free market capitalism in the neolithic age.

Actually WWII central planning is what broke the US health care system. Unable to compete on wages because of price controls, employers asked the IRS to make health care deductible.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/why-is-health-care-expensive-...

>> It really goes to show what is possible when there is a centrally planned economy vs having the labor tied up serving decentralized market forces without any clear directive.

Truly this is one of the most outlandish statements I have ever read on the internet. Bravo.

Contemporary North Korea is a decentralized paradise I suppose. Cuba must be similar? I would love to know your opinion of China before the Deng reforms, Vietnam before it liberalized, or of state planning in Venezuela, to say nothing of the also-centrally-planned Soviet Union??

You ask us to imagine “what the state of our nation might have been today,” if we had stayed on that path?!? You need only have visited Russia in the 1990’s to see what an absolute disaster that was. Lucky for you if you didn’t make that trip there are still parts of the world where you can see it if you dare.

It works sometimes, for some purposes. No one suggested that it should be taken to such extremes.

The community guidelines recommend reading comments in the best possible light, and to converse curiously. I believe that it would do you some good to read them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

User asdff recommended it be taken to such an extreme by suggesting that America should have remained in a centralized command economy after WW2 ended. huitzitziltzin's response is on point and you are out of line.

These sorts of comparisons are always in bad faith. Cuba is not a good comparison partner to the U.S., neither is China. There are so many variables in play that you have to be acting in bad faith or have a much too simplistic understanding of the world to be believing you can reduce such complex history to this single factor. A simple case to break the argument of Cuba is to look at nearby Haiti and see that conditions don't magically improve under a free market economy, there are more factors at play than that.

For reference current PRC shipbuilding is like 2x of peak US WW2 production in terms of tonnage. Which probably doesn't matter during war time since Homefront production easier to degrade than ever.

This is seriously a terrible take. If you want to look at centrally planned economies, you need look no further than the Soviet Union, post WW2 china, and post-partition India.

Soviet Union make 85,000 T-34 tanks (with a large amount of industrial and technological support from the United States).

India adopted the centrally planned economy with western style democracy.

China basically mirrored the Soviet Union until the 1990s.

These three nations basically languished enormously under centrally planned economies and didn't recover until the 1990s when all three of them switched over to free markets

I think there are a lot more variables in play than a simple boolean of whether or not the economy was centrally planned that explain the past 100 years of these countries. These comparisons always strike me as contrived because they aren't perfect experiments of A US government in one universe compared to a US government in another where the only variable you've changed is the economic system. It's a comparison of the US versus Russia and India, like comparing apples to oranges and grapes.

Yes and similarly for airplanes. US’ planes were worse than Japanese at the start of the war but at the end US’ plane manufacturing was much faster and the plane designs had gone through multiple rounds of improvements unlike the Japanese. (Having said that, Japan was never going to win the war if you compared the numbers. It was a long shot right from the start but they felt it was necessary. According to Hardcore History, the decision to enter the war was something that slowly evolved over time starting at the moment they decided to participate on colonisation.)

If I remember correctly, the US carriers still had wooden decks though at the end of the war, which is completely nuts because they could be blown up by one airplane. British carriers did have steel decks at the end of the war.

Unarmored flight decks (the wooden flightdecks had a un-armored metal banking behind it) were certainly vulnerable, but you have to consider how long it takes to take a ship from planning into production. The Essex class which formed the backbone of the fleet by '43 onwards was basically design frozen in '40. The Essex had an armored hanger deck (which likely contributed to why none of them were actually ever sunk by kamikazes).

Moving the armor layer up to the flight deck had significant weight and balance ramifications (would eat into air wing capacity or fuel/weapons depth) that would make retrofitting existing designs very challenging.

British carriers were armored from the beginning of the war.

The difference in design philosophy can probably be attributed to the British expecting their carriers to frequently be operating in range of superior numbers of enemy land base aircraft (ie, around Europe), and therefore expected their carriers to be repeatedly engaged. American doctrine assumed fleet action, primarily against enemy carrier aircraft, where air wing size would be more useful.

Ultimately in the end, a little bit of both solutions won. The post-war carriers (at least American ones) grew to become large enough to both be armored (by WW2 standards) and have large airwings. But in relative terms... by mid to late Cold War, guided missiles had become large and sophisticated enough that passive defence (armoring) was very much a last chance gamble.

Also, at least in terms of aircraft, while some of the aircraft deployed in the Pacific were clearly woefully out-classed (RIP Brewster Buffalo and Devastator), right from the beginning, many other USN aircraft were qualitatively right in the mix. Certainly the F4F had enough good qualities that USN pilots could wield it at an advantage. The final K:D ratio versus zeros is like 5-7:1 or so, which leads positive for the F4F even trying to account for kill over counting.

> Japans only hope was finishing the us Navy early on at Pearl Harbor and midway but once the US ramped up production the US never lost their military lead

From Admiral Yamamoto's diary:

> I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion.

Japan would always have needed to defeat the US industrial base. Even if Pearl Harbor had less to an immediate occupation of Hawaii and bombardment of the west coast - the US wasn’t going to forget and go home. A negotiated settlement would have been impossible to enforce until the US was incapable of fighting.

> The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion.

How does match the actual outcome? WW II ended in the complete defeat of Germany and Japan and post-war domination by the US and USSR, not least through their industrial capacity as well as possession of nuclear weapons. This does not seem very debatable. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you meant?

edit: clarification

> The biggest lesson of ww2 is that once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion.

I don’t see how one would draw that conclusion. The USA were far from exhausted at the end of World War Two, and neither was Russia (but that required help from the USA. World war two was won thanks to American industrial output and Russian blood)

I also think the USA would have accepted a Japanese surrender long before its armies and industry were destroyed, if it came with giving up all occupied territory and large parts of its army and navy. Having too few natural resources at home, Japan barely (if at all) was an existential threat to the USA at the start of the war, and certainly wasn’t anymore once they were cut off from the oil fields in what now is Indonesia.

Isn't that what the person said? The US and USSR were not exhausted. Germany and Japan were.

They said “once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion”

I said I don’t see anything mutual about it. World War One was almost like that, but even then, the USA still was relatively fresh in November 1918, and, if fighting had gone on, the collapse of the western front would likely have raised morale for Britain and France.

> once a major industrial war starts - the only end is mutual exhaustion

Nothing mutual about it in this case. Imperial Japan's exhaustion was but a matter of time. The nukes only accelerated the inevitable.

> At the end of the battle they mention that by the end of the war the US was completing multiple carriers per month, and they were just orders of magnitude ahead of every other country when it came to manufacturing power and steel production.

I saw a very interesting video a few years ago [1] - by the end of WW2, tank production figures were:

Russia built 106,000 tanks

America built 102,000 tanks

Germany built 47,000 tanks

Britain built 36,000 tanks

Needless to say, once you know one side had 5x as many tanks, the outcome becomes something of a foregone conclusion....

[1] https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?si=Srf6tPVwrre20d2X&t=1702

The numbers at the end of WW II are even more lopsided if you look at the number of commissioned vessels in the US Navy on VJ day 1945: 7601. [0] I have read elsewhere this included 12 carrier battle groups of which one could deploy about the same firepower as the British Royal Navy. By contrast the US Navy now claims about 280 vessels. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_I...

[1] https://www.navy.com/life-in-the-navy/vessels

It is sad that you learn basic history (highschool level) via Netflix.

Seriously, has public education degraded so much? Extra points if you are from USA and dont know its basic history...

Same thing happened in China. Just the last 5 years we have seen how incredible productive and industrial China is. Able to completely manufactured their own chips while USA had to rely on external allies. Just on the hypersonic missile production along by on some analysts estimate, China avle to outproduce entire NATO combined by at least 25 to 1 ratio. The same already seen happening today when Russia alone can outproduce artillery shells about 6 to 1 what USA and EU can produce combined. I believe we are in the middle of world event witnessing something like destruction of Spanish armada (or now more aptly to say American armada) being played out in coming years.

> The same already seen happening today when Russia alone can outproduce artillery shells about 6 to 1 what USA and EU can produce combined.

This being counterbalanced quite a bit by range and accuracy advantages on the other side of things.

Submitted title was "USA built 151 Aircraft carriers in WWII" - that's a great bit of information but not suitable for the title. (From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."")

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Fair enough. Will keep to the rules in future.

For reference I heard an off-hand comment by Perun on his channel and thought "surely the USA did not have 100 aircraft carriers", and went looking. I should reawaken my own blog, and stop using HN as my own deli.icio.us / blog.

Cheers

Found the largest aircraft carrier launched during WW2 while following links from that page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Shin...

Lasted 10 days. 64,800 tons of displacement, 266 meters long. Was only ever photographed twice. 78% larger displacement than the largest US carrier at the time, Yorktown (CV-10).

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_W...)

Had no idea idea there were carriers (or even ships) this huge in WW2.

This ship was a converted battleship hull which would have otherwise been the third Yamamoto/Musashi. Somewhat of a Franken ship without a clear mission.

That's not significantly bigger than contemporary battleships, right?

[edit]

I dug a bit; the Japanese forces had 2 similarly sized battleships (indeed this was initially planned as a third). The Iowa class displaced about 55kt, and while the Russians started 3 ships of larger displacement, they were never completed.

(I'm at a noob-level in this field, thanks for your research!)

and 3 liberty ships every 2 days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship#:~:text=Eighteen%....

Or over 2700 during the war.

Germany expected to use its big U-boat fleet to block shipping to the the Allies in Europe, but the US was building Liberty ships so fast that Germany only managed to sink about 10-15% of them.

The massive amount of weapons and ammo and other supplies that those ships delivered was a big part of enabling the Allies to win. With the ships being made too fast for Germany to stop that shipping, and the US being too far away for Germany to attack the factories, they were screwed.

Quoting a British officer (from the book Army at Dawn): The US does not solve problems. It overwhelms them.

FYI tiny, slow escort carriers not full-sized modern aircraft carriers.

> not full-sized modern aircraft carriers.

17 "full-size modern" Essex class fleet carriers, assuming you mean 'modern' by contemporary standards.

Yes. It says "WWII" right there in the title. Modern aircraft carriers are..well, modern.

No, even in comparison to the times. The Casablanca-class escort carrier were 8,200 tons and could go 19 knots compared to the Essex-class carriers at 30,800 tons and 33 knots. the US made 122 of the slow, small carriers, only 24 of the bigger ones (with others in between, and then one bigger, i.e. Midway, which never saw service in the war)

“Only 24” is a funny framing.

Relative to 151 it's "only 24", OP is really not diminishing the significance of that accomplishment, but defining it more clearly.

And massed escort carriers was something that would spoil your day.

http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm does a nice job of outlining how hilariously overmatched the IJN was in terms of naval production. In addition to that, the IJN didn't have an effective pilot training pipeline, so by mid war they were struggling to outfit their air groups for their carriers, and after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, their naval air arm was absolutely broken.

My great uncle (now departed), as a teen who lied about his age to join up, served in Taffy 3 on the Fanshaw Bay. His stories of the battle always had me riveted, the massive Yamamoto, and especially about the loss of his sister ships Gambier Bay and St Lo and what it was like as a still-teen to see and be in all of that.

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Rest in peace Uncle Jimmy.

Mostly small escort carriers which displaced around 10,000 tons. Smaller than some modern superyachts.

Imagine what we could do if we could find a way to put the same effort we do into killing other humans into helping other humans.

Curiously, this simple idea is not nearly as popular as one might think, a lot of people even think it is humourous.

That's something I think about a lot. I don't know how we could do it but I think it should be priority to try and figure it out. Social and psychological question rather than technical/engineering.

Yeah crazy you’re being downvoted

No, it's really not. It's the incredibly naive "oh I just thought about this great idea, how about we just focus on not killing each other" that is just provokingly ignorant.

I mean, there's are multiple related research fields with LOTS of smart people who have worked on this at an academical level for the past 70 years, give or take.

Actually I think a lot of people find that idea pretty appealing. What tends to be significantly less popular though is bringing up opposition to violence when it's defensive in nature like you just did. The US would have had a lot of opportunity in the 1940s to spend effort and resources on something other than 151 carriers if Japan had just kept to their own borders; it wasn't a lack of enlightenment or whatever you're suggesting.

WWII wasn't the united states idea.

This may be a hot take, and one that's very biased, but I think people with bad intentions exist, and when they make a move against the interests of the good, we need to both be prepared to and willing to face that evil. This isn't to say that the US hasn't done countless things in the name of this idea that have been misguided at best, but there has been plenty of good things that have came from being a military superpower, and I truly believe WWII is an example of that. The Nazi military complex was incredibly strong, and without an equally strong response from the allies it's hard to see how we would've prevented them from going onto their larger goal of world domination. I don't think the incredible allied response was a bad thing, despite all of the bad things that happened as a part of that pursuing that interest.

In my opinion, we can't unilaterally invest resources otherwise invested in our military without equally opening ourselves and our allies to opportunistic attack.

Exactly.

Imagine someone saying we shouldn't spend money on antibiotics and antibiotic research, because of some neotenic sentiment of "guys just think of how much better off we'd be if humans and flesh eating bacteria just got along". Well yeah, no shit. But that's not the world we live in.

A favorite quote of mine comes to mind, while I'm not really a fan on most of Joseph de Maistre's ideas, the following perfectly encapsulates the reality of the world that I observe daily as an agronomist:

>In the immense sphere of living things, the obvious rule is violence, a kind of inevitable frenzy which arms all things in mutua funera. Once you leave the world of insensible substances, you find the decree of violent death written on the very frontiers of life. Even in the vegetable kingdom, this law can be perceived: from the huge catalpa to the smallest of grasses, how many plants die and how many are killed!

>But once you enter the animal kingdom, the law suddenly becomes frighteningly obvious. A power at once hidden and palpable appears constantly occupied in bringing to light the principle of life by violent means. In each great division of the animal world, it has chosen a certain number of animals charged with devouring the others; so there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fish of prey, and quadrupeds of prey. There is not an instant of time when some living creature is not devoured by another […]

>Thus is worked out, from maggots up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.

>Joseph de Maistre

Agreed. Better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.

It's not nearly as popular because recent history has shown there are assholes like Vladimir Putin for whom "wanting to help other humans" is only showing weakness and a reason for him to try to overthrow you or conquer you.

How anyone can promote pacifism as a credible foreign policy in 2023 boggles my mind. Ironically, the best quote is Trotsky: it doesn't matter whether or not you're interested in war, but whether or not war is interested in you.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

What about diplomacy? The US has done everything it could to provoke this invasion, going back to the fall of the USSR, when we broke the promise that NATO would not move one inch eastward.

It's a worse idea than "everybody could be a billionaire if we printed more money." That idea would actually technically work, except inflation would make it a pyrrhic victory. Conversely, "let's just all get along and stop fighting" is dead on arrival; anybody who isn't willing to fight will inevitably be conquered by those who are. You couldn't even implement this idea for a pyrrhic victory, the only prize you'd win for yourself is your bloody annihilation.

People laugh when you tell them this idea because unexpected twists that subvert normal expectations are fundamentally humorous, and a seemingly mature adult suddenly saying some childish nonsense like that is an unexpected twist.

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