Sunken Ships of the Second World War | Hacker News Reader

Sunken Ships of the Second World War

arcgis.com

86 pointsalakra15 comments

Yuu might be interested to zoom in the Toulon harbor area (FR) and to observe the numbers: 99 ships sunk, representing 290 968 Tons, but only 3 causalities. Here is why [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_...

This is a factoid I didn’t learn until recently, and it blew my mind. I’m not sure how serious they were, but the UK apparently also offered to merge France and the UK into one country before they fell.

I learned a ton about WWII from this series on YouTube…here’s the week when the UK sinks the French navy: https://youtu.be/gRR683NJOwc

There's tons of crazy things you learn. For example France actually invaded a small part of Germany in 1939 and encountered almost no resistance due to the German invasion of Poland, and had they continued they likely would have taken a significant part of the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saar_Offensive

This is neat. I was curious about the demand for steel that wasn't exposed to atomic explosions, making this a kind of treasure map for scavengers.

However, Wikipedia says that there's much less need because there haven't been anywhere near as many atomic explosions recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

They're still being predated

One of the dots off Dunkirk represents the Lancastria.

And one of the thousands killed when it was sunk was my Grandma's half-brother.

He was twenty two and his name was Arthur.

One dot.

Randomly clicking on the map led me to learn about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident

Would love to be able to filter for events with a Wikipedia page (assuming they were the most significant)!

This is really cool, nice work!

I knew U-boats operated off the Eastern US coast but I did not know they operated so much in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Tangential, I've been watching this documentary series called Battlefield (highly recommended) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21qqkC1cWvE and they mention later versions of U-boats had a 12,000+ mile range. So the Gulf of Mexico is within range especially if they sortied from France.

Thanks!

Also one of the fascinating parts from my own perspective. Apparently the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Caribbean from a history perspective, which I never read about, and kind of looks like the "Year of Fear" from a history perspective. ~350 ships of 2 million tons in less than a year. (WP says by 17 submarines)

The histogram zoom feature being one of the cooler UI portions of this. Something that places like MarineTraffic, FlightAware, and Windy could probably implement as a neat zoom for seeing boat traffic statistics in areas and such.

Also pretty cool for divers. Maybe not the old steel, yet a lot of these are in fairly shallow water, which would be pretty neat for diving excursions. Probably semi-dangerous, yet there's probably also humans willing to take the risk or sign a disclosure.

Is there some way to change the displays? The interface looks like it should be possible ("Show only", "Show sunk by"), yet clicking on times, clicking areas of the UI, only zoom/shrink, and bring up individual ships.

There were more ship sunk in the Gulf of Mexico than I expected. Mostly by u-boats. (A few ships ran into mines.)

U-166 was depth-charged/sunk off Louisiana, among a cluster of blue dots.

Excellent visualization!

It would be amazing if the timeline could be filtered - to compare the rate and number of sinkings in each area year over year.

Hey there. Thanks for the compliment. By clicking on the chart at the bottom of the dashboard you can select multiple months.

This doesn't work in Chromium

Here that does (version 119)

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