from Hacker News

Sunken Ships of the Second World War

by alakra on 3/27/24, 9:00 PM with 15 comments

• by sixthDot on 3/29/24, 9:20 AM

  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_...

• by jdeibele on 3/28/24, 8:51 PM

  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

• by lonelyasacloud on 3/29/24, 11:53 AM

  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.

• by lerela on 3/29/24, 8:33 AM

  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)!

• by snake_plissken on 3/29/24, 1:59 PM

  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.

• by WarOnPrivacy on 3/29/24, 1:14 PM

  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.

• by vkou on 3/29/24, 6:09 AM

  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.

• by assimpleaspossi on 3/29/24, 7:22 AM

  This doesn't work in Chromium