A merchant vessel could make multiple voyages and carry many cargos before being lost, so its destruction reduced future movement as well as destroying the cargo on its final voyage. Replacements could be built, but surviving crews might still be injured, hospitalized, or otherwise unavailable. Ships could not sail without experienced people, making personnel attrition a direct limit on transport capacity. That shipping reality supports a wider argument: the industrial scale of the British Empire and the United States meant that logistics and infrastructure shaped the global war as much as individual weapons did. Japan's simultaneous war in China absorbed forces and resources that could not be used against the Western Allies. The balance of industrial bases, population, shipping, and trained labor therefore made Axis victory far less plausible than comparisons of individual weapons suggest.
Chapter · 1:34:00-1:37:17
World War II was a logistics and attrition war
Merchant ships were strategic infrastructure: each loss removed cargo capacity and disrupted the experienced people needed to keep the transport system working.