German vs. Allied war-making potential

[Jon G.]

The relevant thread about the U-Boat war can be found here:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 0&t=175281

[Piotr Kapuscinski]

Coming back to issue from page 45:

About the stocks of passenger cars (WWII Archives foundation ):I noticed some thing strange:
december 1943 :292182
january 1944 :161905
This is a loss of 130277 (more than 40% !):is there any expnanation ?

(...)

This drop is for all vehicles categories at the same time in January 1944. Either it's because the dataset is incomplete and do not compute a part of the Wehrmacht's inventory, either it is due to harsh demotorization measures. I rather believe the first possibility. Fuel savings were strict but I dont think that 40% of the vehicles were cut at once. I rather believe that data from the East are lacking at this point.

The solution is much simpler. Erroneous reports / calculations.

It was a major and long-lasting mistake in reporting casualties. In January 1944 simply a major correction of previous mistakes took place. In reports about motor vehicles of Feldheer in January 1944 a note "Bestand berichtigt" appeared. Before that, they were reporting much more vehicles than they really had. That huge drop of vehicles between December 1943 / January 1944 was not real - it was only on paper. The real drop took place during previous months, but was not reported correctly until January 1944.