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

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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.

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One happened, the other is purely speculation.

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do you cherry pic this strategy (maybe / maybe not) or is it applied to every accomplishment of humanity of the last 100 years?

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

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Doolittle played a huge part of the playoffs we made in the late 20s-30s. It's easy to look back and forget there were a lot of DOD types who dismissed the importance of naval aircraft.

We had three sizes of carriers CV's the big boys, CVL's carrier Light on Cruiser keels and the small one CVE escort carriers.

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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.

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amazing...

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f, if we landed on the moon, we’d have gone back by now I think.

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Yep and get all that helium 3 up there

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Shows how meaningless Pearl Harbor was from Japan’s perspective. Even if Japan succeeded and wiped out the entire US fleet at Pearl Harbor it would have been easily replaced quickly.

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Bag the carriers at Pearl Harbor and there's no Coral Sea, no Midway. No Guadalcanal. Japan takes New Guinea and invades Australia or forces it into an armistice. It may not affect the ultimate outcome, but the war may last into 46 or 47 and ends with Japan's incineration in a rain of atomic bombs.

Germany may be the big beneficiary. The Pacific gets America's full attention and Britain has to fend for itself. With Japan unchecked, Stalin has to keep substantial forces pinned down in the Far East. The war in Europe stalemates until Britain or Germany develop, or Russia steals, a bomb of their own.

One of my wife's relatives served on the USS Breton, a light carrier that ferried aircraft to and from the war zone. I looked up the ships war diary one time. The thing that struck me was how tedious it must have been. Many entries just said, "steaming as before," or "anchored as before." He only saw combat once, attacked by a kamikaze at Okinawa. It missed. The duty was not without hazard though. He saw more than one fatal flight deck accident. So many of those guys never did anything to make the history books, but without them we don't win the war.

During the war, the US built 175 Fletcher class destroyers. Not destroyers total. Just one class of destroyers. Extrapolate that over every type and class and you can see how we got to 61K.

The Axis had absolutely no conception of the industrial might of the United States. Hell, I'm not sure our allies really could grasp how economically and industrially powerful the US was.

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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.

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