I know it's very late to be raising this issue, but I'm catching up on this fine TL, and can't let this pass. The stated losses are less than half of the OTL losses (452 ships, 1.9M tons). That's a huge improvement for the Allies, with no explanation or knock-ons.Also in the late winter of 1942.
In the Atlantic, German U-Boats sink 168 Allied merchant ships between January 1 and March 30, 1942 or nearly 850,000 tons of shipping. This is called the "Second Happy Time" by the Uboat sailors.
authors note:
Art is from websites remembering 75 years after the attack
Better than historical result here, partly due to butterflies (an Allied convoy with two cruisers in port) and similar bad luck for the Allies. Japanese losses are a bit higher (only 4 aircraft lost OTL).
The Japanese carriers are being used more aggressively in the DEI, as Yamaguchi is more aggressive than Nagumo in OTL.
I know it's very late to be raising this issue, but I'm catching up on this fine TL, and can't let this pass. The stated losses are less that half of the OTL losses (452 ships, 1.9M tons). That's a huge improvement for the Allies, with no explanation or knock-ons.
GB, by the date of your OOB , I would expect Albacore's on fleet carriers not Swordfish ( Formidable for instance had them from Nov 1940 in OTL ).
GB, Just a minor nitpick. You have CAG 6 used twice in the last update. Once for the Enterprise and once for the Yorktown.
per this, total Allied losses for the year 1942 were a 8,339,000 tons (1,859 ships, average tons per sinking 4,500)
http://www.usmm.org/wsa/shiploss.html
...
Uboat.net gives around 700,000 tons sunk in the Atlantic for this period
https://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/losses_year.html
which was my primary source for that section
OK, I see that you used the monthly figures from U-Boat.net. Or did you?
I see these numbers for early 1942:
Jan 284,764 tons
Feb 392,161 tons
Mar 452,349 tons
which is 1,129,474 tons, not "around 700,000" tons. Or did you perhaps mean Jan-Feb only, 677K tons per U-boat.net?
Besides which, the total of U-Boat.net's monthly figures for 1942 is 5.9M, which is much less than the 8.3M tons given in the British government statement quoted by US Merchant Marine.org. (That figure is for losses from all causes in all theaters, which may explain the difference.)
However - my source is the appendix of data tables at the end of U-505 (or Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea) by RAdm Dan Gallery (Chicago's greatest naval hero, theman who captured U-505). The book is a narrative of his role in the Battle of the Atlantic (commander of the USN patrol base in Iceland, then commander of a Hunter-Killer task force as captain of USS Guadalcanal (CVE-60)), and of the war career of U-505, up through its capture. I don't know where Gallery got his stats. (I have them transcribed on my computer; the book is packed away.) The 1942 total from Gallery's stats is 7.7M tons, which is less than the British statement, but still much larger than the U-Boat.net figure. (Jan and Feb, 1.07M tons).
hmm, made an error on the March figures it seems, so the 800,000 figure will go up (to historical plus 10%)