It is difficult to come up with an exact number of the ships that were sunk in the Second World War. There were at least 19,000 of all sizes with the potential for many others that have yet to be accounted for. Plotting these in a chart by the date on which they were sunk provides an interesting result and a small snapshot of the entire naval war.
Catastrophic events such as the evacuations of Dunkirk, Greece, Tallinn and Indonesia clearly stand out as do the scuttling of the French and Italian fleets on 28 November 1942 and 9 September 1943. But in the latter part of the war, the frequency of large numbers of ships being sunk increased so as to make singular events more difficult to pick out.
Visit the map and dashboard to get details on 14,500 of the 19,000 ships that could be mapped.
Sunken Ships of the Second World War 