Regarding the proportion of the world's Merchant Fleet operated by each country at the outbreak of war in 1939, I had a quick look at Roger Jordan's excellent reference "The Worlds Merchant Fleets 1939", and the relative proportions of pages devoted to each country is interesting. The pages are all formatted the same way, so the numbers of ships in each country's fleet is very, very roughly proportional to the number of pages in the book devoted to each country.
Denmark: 12 pages
Finland: 8 pages
GB & Dominions: 119 pages (!) (Unfortunately, the countries are all mixed in alpha order of the shipping company name, so impossible to easily differentiate by each Empire country)
Greece: 22 pages
Norway: 50 pages
Netherlands: 21 pages
USA: 55 pages
By contrast, The main Axis countries:
Germany: 32 pages
Japan: 21 pages
Italy: 22 pages
Mike C
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