History of Naval Aviation Combat Statistics – World War II

This book was originally prepared in 1945-1946 by the US Navy and was in the process of being printed for publication, when the order was given to recover all copies and destroy all but a few to be held in the Office of Naval Intelligence's files. Over the years, these copies disappeared, until only a single copy which had been illegally removed against security regulations survived.

It is from that lone copy that three versions of NACS, WW2 have been prepared; they are listed below.

The 1997 CD-ROM Release (2.6 MB PDF)

In 1997, for the release of a CD-ROM edition consisting of a 2.6~ MB “scan to OCR” PDF copy created using a scanner and Adobe Acrobat Capture 1.0 software; Dr. Jeffrey G. Barlow, then a historian in the Naval History Center's Contemporary History Branch wrote an introduction that was included with the scanned copy. You may read it below:

Dr. Barlow's 1997 Background on Naval Aviation Combat Statistics – World War II

From our perspective in 2021, it may seem baffling to release a CD-ROM edition of a 2.6 MB file, but back then in order to download that with a phone modem, it would have taken between 6 to 12 minutes (56K or 28.8K modem). Likewise, given that a CD-ROM has a storage capacity of 600 MB and the space for a single 8.5 x 11 inch 300 DPI, 256-color grayscale JPEG is about 1.5~ MB, you could have placed images of all 140~ or so pages on the CD-ROM for a total cost of 210 MB space.

So why didn't the Naval Historical Center do this?

I have not contacted anyone, and given that it has been nearly 25 years since this edition was done, I can only offer my own inferences as to why they did it that way.

I believe it was due to the limitations of computing technology back then. To give you an idea, back in 1997, a thousand dollars bought you a complete Packard Bell PC with a 120 MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM, and a 1.2 GB hard drive.

Given that governmental computers are usually several years older depending on which point in the hardware upgrade cycle a large organization is at, it is likely that scanning each image directly to Photoshop (or whatever was being used in 1997), would have provided an unacceptable memory overhead (that 300 DPI 8x11.5” image requires 16 MB RAM); and the 200~ MB of saved JPEG images would have consumed nearly 16.6% percent of that 1.2 GB hard drive's total space.

Another reason may have been the “target” audience. Many people were still running older PCs and Adobe Acrobat was still very new, having been released in 1993. Loading a 200~ MB PDF full of scanned images may have been seen as a “bridge too far” for the entry-level PCs at the time.

The 2005 Re-Scan – (Low Bandwidth “Net” Copy) (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) – 30.8 MB
The 2005 Re-Scan – (High Bandwidth “Master” Copy) (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) – 259 MB

At some point later, the decision was made to re-scan the document, and this was completed in 2005. This time, the scans were done as 200 DPI greyscale scans (1576x2000). This resulted in significantly improved quality; and the apparent “master” copy was 259~ MB in size.

For reasons related to file transmission, the rescan was then broken up and downsampled into five different PDF files, each no bigger than 7.3 MB; since at this time, “high speed internet” was slowly seeping into the world and large file size downloads on the order of 40+ MB were still rare.

Unfortunately, a few pages were not scanned in this version, and several pages saw their edges cut off.

The 2021 Corrected and HTMLed Version (34.6 MB PDF) (461 kb HTML ZIP)

This version forms the basis of this online HTML document, completed by Alternate Wars' webmaster in January 2021.

It is nothing “new”, as due to the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down in person research at the Washington DC Navy Yard, I obtained a copy of the 2005 version through email after contacting Naval History and Heritage Command. I then combined both the 1997 and 2005 versions into one large document to resolve missing pages and cut off edges in the 2005 version.

Why do a HTML version?

By doing a HTML version, it enables the document to be reliably indexed by image search engines such as Google, and also enables true "cut and paste" functionality from your internet browser into Excel or Word, allowing for the data in NACS WW2 to be manipulated more easily.

Additionally, by being a HTML document, it enables "in browser" automatic translation from its original english into other languages such as German, Russian, or Japanese.

It is hoped that this HTML version will enable this document to finally reach it's intended audience, some 75 years after its original incarnation.