Tracing wartime merchant losses by nation and cause

At the back of the volume, individual losses are classified by marine or war hazard, often with the attacking submarine identified. The examples range from Brazilian ships torpedoed by German U-boats to one sunk by the Italian submarine Leonardo da Vinci, followed by Belgian, Argentine, French, German, British, and imperial entries. The British and imperial list includes only ships already in existence in 1939, excluding wartime construction. That boundary makes the destruction especially stark because the entries measure losses against the prewar fleet. The catalogue is factual rather than argumentative, allowing named ships and their fates to show the scale of commercial and logistical damage.