Merchant Ship Production (in tons) USA Versus Japan

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The Pacific War was also very much a war of merchant shipping, in that practically everything needed to defend and/or assault the various island outposts of the Japanese Empire had to be transported across vast stretches of ocean. Japan also had to maintain her vital supply lanes to places like Borneo and Java in order to keep her industrial base supplied. A look at the relative shipbuilding output of the two antagonists is enlightening.

Merchant Ship Production (in tons) Year
United States==========Japan
1939----------376,419------320,466
1940----------528,697------293,612
1941--------1,031,974------210,373
1942--------5,479,766------260,059
1943-------11,448,360------769,085
1944--------9,288,156----1,699,203
1945--------5,839,858------599,563
Total------33,993,230----4,152,361

Every time I look at these number, I just shake my head in amazement. The United States built more merchant shipping in the first four and a half months of 1943 than Japan put in the water in seven years. The other really interesting thing is that there was really no noticeable increase in Japanese merchant vessel building until 1943, by which time it was already way too late to stop the bleeding. Just as with their escort building programs, the Japanese were operating under a tragically flawed national strategy that dictated that the war with the United States would be a short one. Again, the United States had to devote a lot of the merchant shipping it built to replace the losses inflicted by the German U-Boats. But it is no joke to say that we were literally building ships faster than anybody could sink them, and still have enough left over to carry mountains of material to the most God-forsaken, desolate stretches of the Pacific. Those Polynesian cargo cults didn't start for no reason, and it was American merchant vessels in their thousands which delivered the majority of this seemingly divinely profligate largesse to backwaters which had probably never seen so much as a can opener before.