US Aircraft Carriers, WWII Magazine, Mar-Apr 2009

 
 

This month's graphic for WWII magazine is about US aircraft carriers. Some say the US fought a naval war, one of large naval battles and amphibious landings (including many in Europe).

Drawing the carrier happened after assembling iPhone pics from a book   

I knew that somewhere would be a diagram of the carrier. I knew I had to do a general tour of key areas and ideas rather than 200 specific features. Some of these are fascinating - the 'ready room' for fliers, the split engines to avoid hits, the protective wall around the fuel tanks. Invariably in such a massive system there is a temptation to get stuck in the detail so I had to zoom out a bit to find the actual story.

This was settled on as concentrating on the Essex class carrier and it's hasty and timely entry into service.

I wanted to show the effect the Essex had on the Pacific carrier war by graphing the following variables:

- Post December 1941 - time

- US and Japanese carriers commissioned, sunk, damaged, repaired, capacity of carriers

So that you can see at any one time how many carriers and ultimately planes, the opposing forces could send at each other. This was something I wanted the piece to stress - that naval power was now about mobility of aerial force, not firepower and armour.

The sketch of the wave concept 

The first graph was about aerial force but in a different way - I sought to show the changing balance of planes - from anti-ship torpedo and dive bombers in the early days when the main objective was destroying other ships - to fighter planes, whose main job was to defend against the kamikazes in the final months.

Here is where I got temporarily distracted by a motif. (I sure I am not the first designer to think I have had a moment of conceptual brilliance, only ditch it after a lot of self-discipline and asking the honest opinions of others.)

I really liked the concept of this fighter make up shown as a wave.

It fitted the nautical theme. It symbolised the crushing might of US industrial output. Best of all it referenced the Japanese artist Hokusai whose Great Wave off Kanagawa is a well-known piece. 

 

It also went with the headline "Launching a steel tsunami" which I was pleased with. (Alliterative headlines provide a simple warm glow to me)

Thus began an internal dilemma of being happy with the visual motif, yet being uncomfortable with it as a means of carrying information.

Cute but faulted 

It was faulty - the area if the inner curve is way less than the outer, distorting the quantitative impression in favour if the outer. (and rendering this with illustrator offset path created loads of duplicates of the vector and overloaded my mac - so there's a tip!)

More importantly, it didn't contribute to a strong story idea - "balance of plane types changed to echo changing strategy/tactics" is ok - but " the Essex carrier helped win the pacific war" is better - so I ditched the wave and went for the other graph as it told a bigger story better.

I deleted the vertical grid - it made too much noise - although it did help with the positioning when drawing the graph

 This graph worked ok- some issues were-

- Data - lots of contradictory data meant a lot of work between the magazine and I to get it right (thanks Caitlin)

- Overlapping lines - I decided that if there were two lines overlapping, the top one would be the one that was at the most advantage at that time

- Tour points - worth mentioning that doing a graph with tonnes of data isn't good enough - key points need pointing out - in this case, key battles and main themes (lots of data-vis these days just throws data at the wall and asks you to ‘play’ with it, without direction – which is why most people don’t.) Take a Tour.

Out of interest - the featured carrier is the USS Intrepid - which is in New York City - go and see it - I'll return after doing this with new stuff to look at for sure.  

Comments

[Rod McLaren]

"I sought to show the changing balance of planes - from anti-ship torpedo and dive bombers in the early days when the main objective was destroying other ships - to fighter planes, whose main job was to defend against the kamikazes in the final months."

Max, Midway is pretty much the final act of anti-ship carrier warfare, right? If you follow Keegan and Churchill, it's the critical turning point in the Pacfic war - there's a wonderfully readable description of Midway in Keegan's The Price of Admiralty.

[Max Gadney]

Midway was certainly the turning point. One could argue that there were IJN carrier planes involved in subsequent (anti-carrier) hostilities in the Pacific campaign - but not of too much scale. The remaining majority of Japanese aerial power came from land based aircraft. Some IJN carriers continued to operate, as the graphic shows, but to little effect.
Midway (like Moscow for Hitler) was the big chance to establish Japanese territorial and numerical advantage that would have hemmed the US in for a while. (tactically and politically perhaps)
But - defeat at Midway put them on the back foot sooner than they would have hoped, exposing their lack of resources before they had time to properly exploit their new conquests.