Crazy stats on the size of the U.S. Navy by January 1945

By January 1945, the U.S. Navy had an armada of 61,045 vessels of all types. This included:

- 100 aircraft carriers
- 23 battleships
- 59 cruisers
- 425 destroyers
- 400 destroyer-escorts
- 237 submarines
- 54,000 landing craft and assault ships

The Navy also had in its arsenal 37,000 aircraft of all types.

And the vast majority of that firepower was in the Pacific, arrayed against the Japanese. Dudes never stood a chance.

quote:

---

100 aircraft carriers

---

damn thats impressive

1902 first airplane. 40 years later landing planes on ships. Pretty impressive technology leap.

War brings quick advancement in tech.

Imagine what we have currently that we don't know about.

Just finished Ian W Tolls series on the naval war in the pacific… it’s very thorough and goes through it all from Pearl Harbor the atom bombs.

Gave me a knew found appreciation for what the US Navy was able to accomplish in relative short order… don’t know that the world will ever see a fleet like that again.

quote:

---

67 years later we land two men on the moon and bring them back home safely.

---

And in the 60 years since then we ain't done shit

quote:

---

Try 1902 first fight stays in the air for 12 seconds.
67 years later we land two men on the moon and bring them back home safely.

---

I had a great grandmother who lived to be 103 years old. She was born in 1867 and died in 1971. When she was a little girl her family was attacked and killed by Indians during a migration after the Civil War. She and her brother were spared. Before she died she sat in an air conditioned room with a television set and watched NASA engineers use computers to direct the moon landing.

That's crazy. Think of everything that happened in her lifetime. I don't think many humans have ever witnessed the amount of change and progress she saw.

quote:

---

67 years later we land two men on the moon and bring them back home safely.

---

*allegedly

quote:

---

And in the 60 years since then we ain't done shit

---

Baw posted this on a device that didn’t exist 60 years ago to an internet that didn’t exist 60 years ago.

quote:

---

100 aircraft carriers? Was that supposed to be 10?

---

Nope. The main fleet carriers back then were built based on light or heavy cruiser hulls and then evolved into the purpose built Essex class. These were front line ships, but they weren't nearly as large as today's carriers. WW2 fleet carriers were 25 to 30000 tons displacement; today's Nimitz and Ford ships are north of 100000 tons. The WW2 fleet ships could be cranked out en masse. I think we had something like 25 operating by the end of WW2, most of them built after Pearl Harbor.

The rest were smaller escort type carriers that might only carry 10 planes used to do things like protect convoys or hunt and kill submarines outside of fleet on fleet battles away from the main battlegroups. Many of these ships were just merchant ship type hulls with a flight deck slapped on top, so they could be cranked out even faster than the fleet ships.

So, don't think supercarriers. Think a number of smaller carriers that were the flagships of battlegroups and navies with the vast majority of the carriers being any smaller ships that could be fitted out with a flat top and could operate independently of the battlegroups where needed.