The carrier thing was in referance to Germany, I fixed that.
Early in the war Germany had England in a very bad way, U-boats could basically attack at will and they had a lot more aluminum to fly to England (and it was better stuff as a whole too) It wasn't until we figured out how to defend against submarines that the threat went away. I do not think they would have held without the US's backing. If nothing else Germany could have starved them out. It was incredibly stupid to try to fight both Russia and the US at the same time though.
I love to play Silent Hunter 3 (WWII U-boat game) Early in the war was awesome for a u-boat captain, late in the war you can barely surface without being dive bombed. And then them late destroyers... they just don't play fair at all.
Early in the war, there weren't many U-boats. Before the way, in about '36 when the Germans were still exploring scenarios, the German Navy commander, Admiral Raeder, had given Hitler two choices--a heavily weighted U-boat navy (Raeder's choice) or a fully balanced navy. Hitler chose a balanced navy (none of them thought naval aviation was important) and so the Bismark, Tripitz and the pocket battleships were built instead of focusing on u-boats. When Poland was attacked in '39 and Britain honored her allaince and declared war, the Germans had not finished all of the surface ships. Instead, they began to outfit armed freighters--they did 9 in total--and sent the pocket battleships and the few U-boats they had to attack shipping.
I won't spend a half hour on this, but you know the Bismark was sunk in May '41 and that ended the German surface presence in the Atlantic. The pocket battleships met similar fates, the Tirpitz was the sister ship to the Bismark and was restricted to Norway attacking the Mumansk route. The merchant raiders disappeared into the Pacific and Indian Oceans until they died off in late '43.
The subs became the last chance. If Hitler would have selected subs earlier, it would have been horrible and possibly Britain would have been done earlier. Fortunately, though a brilliant politician, if military brains were skunk oil, a hound dog couldn't have smelled Hitler. He always interefered, made the wrong choice and then only when the cause was already lost, reluctantly went along with the recommendation of his military commander. This happened during battles in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Russia and in every major weapon decision--tanks, fighters and ships.
The subs, once they were constructed in the required numbers and deployed into cooperative woldpacks, were devastating. The German submariners called that period of time "The Happy Time." The Allies had forgotten all of the lessons from the first world war and it took them almost too long to re-learn them. Once they did, the Happy Time quickly ended. If you were a German submariner, you didn't write an autobiography. You died.
The American way of war was a brand new concept to Europe and Japan. We learned it from General U. S. Grant. War isn't about secret weapons and shit--it's a simple math equation. We are mathematical savages. We build more of everything than you can and attack you everywhere and you run out of things to fight with and people to use them. Whenever we follow that equation, we win. We aren't very good at other types of war. In World War 2 we decided the Sherman was a good tank, and we build billions of those. It was better than the average German tank, worse than their best--which mostly broke down because they went to battle too quickly with it--and we won. We build the Liberty ships, and then the Victory ships, in thousands in pre-fabed sections like pre-fabbed houses. It was the trailer-park ship, but there were so many of them, the Germans couldn't sink enough to matter.
Our tactics were different than the British because we could replace everything. We didn't wait around to have everything in the best possible situation--we attacked. We got there the firstest with the mostest. The German things that bothered the British didn't bother us. We didn't mind the U-boats.
We had a total of 110 aircraft carriers in World War II. We built them so fast that CV-5 was the Yorktown and CV-10 was also the Yorktown. Most of the carriers were escort carriers which were not battle carriers but had enough planes for convoy escort duty, but we had a lot of battle carriers by the end.
The arsenal of democracy.We were simple, brutal and numerous. Nobody had a chance. Hitler had given his navy orders not to piss us off. Yamamoto, who had lived in the US, tried to convince his goverment that an attack on us was a bad idea. He stated, correctly, that for 6 months he would run rampant, but that after that, it was over. After he learned that the four US carriers in the Pacific were not at Pearl Harbor during the attack, he knew Japan was done for. The Japanese, by the way, attacked pearl Harbor with 6 battle carriers and 2 escort carriers. They definitely loved the weapon, but had no means of keeping up with us.