Interview with Richard Overy

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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#31

Post by 1st Cavalry » 09 Nov 2012, 18:05

Jenisch wrote:
Look the number of operational B-29s by the wars end, these could have been alocated to Europe if necessary: http://www.315bw.org/328_wing.html

Conclusion: LW would not stop the USAAF, let alone it together with the RAF.
Very well , there were 3764 b-29 produced until the end of the war, number of aircraft at hand at the end of the war 2865 .
unfortunately to draw any meaningful conclusion from the above figures , calls for some speculation. :)

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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#32

Post by Marcelo Jenisch » 09 Nov 2012, 23:15

The facts are that: Germany was the priority for the Allies. The bombing of Japan and other offensives against it could have been postponed after Japan was contained.

2000 more American heavy bombers would be already something that would send shivers in the spine of Göring. However, 2000 more very heavy bombers, the case of the B-29, would be much worse. The B-29 could carry more than the double of the payload of a B-17, and it's self-defense capability was appreciably superior to the ones of the B-17 and B-24.
In wartime, the B-29 was capable of flight up to 31,850 feet (9,710 m),[20] at speeds of up to 350 mph (560 km/h) (true airspeed). This was its best defense, because Japanese fighters of that day could barely get that high, and few could catch the B-29, even if they were at altitude and waiting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress

The Focke Wulf 190 from the A series, the main Luftwaffe interceptor, would sweat a little to fight the B-29.


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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#33

Post by 1st Cavalry » 10 Nov 2012, 09:23

sorry but this is no even an argument .
there were not 2000 B-29 available in 1943 or 1944 to support the ground forces with or without JAPAN.
And there is not such thing as miracle very heavy bomber either, the allies need to keep up the pressure constantly with what they had from 1943 onward, otherwise by 1945 they would end up facing a completely different LW ,without the historical fuel shortages and large numbers of jet fighters produced in underground facilities.
And do not assume that everything else in the west remain the same. Faced with little threat from the east the production of German bombers in 1942 and 1943 (5500 and 6800 respectively ) would likely be curtailed to make room for more fighters , just as they did by 1944. And that is just one of the choices available you need to consider .

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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#34

Post by Marcelo Jenisch » 11 Nov 2012, 05:10

The floodgates in Luftwaffe planning finally opened in the summer of 1941 with the completion of the army's Barbarossa programme and thelong-awaited decision to shift priority to the air war. In June 1941 the Air Ministry proposed a doubling of output to 20,000 aircraft per yearover the following three years.

72

To implement this expansion, Göring' staff came to an agreement with Fritz Todt to carry out the reallocation of resources from the army to the Luftwaffe in a 'consensual fashion'.Todt himself was to oversee the identification of spare capacity and to ensure continuity of employment for army contractors.

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Days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Luftwaffe revealed the full urgency and ambition of its new plans. At a meeting with representatives of the OKW, State Secretary Milch announced that, as of 1 May 1941, German intelligence believed that combined British and American output had exceeded that of Germany and Italy. The United States alone was turning out 2,800 high-performance aero-engines per month. On current trends, Anglo-American output would be twice that of the Axis by the end of 1942. 'There is not a minute to lose...', Milch declared. By the summer
of 1942 Germany needed to increase its production of aircraft by 150 percent, to roughly 3,000 planes per month.

74

The precise target set by Milch was new, but not the basic thrust of his comments. As we have seen, the expansion in productive capacity had already begun in the autumn of 1940. Milch's new target of 3,000 aircraft per month, however, requireda further scaling up. Since earlier in the year Krauch had been envisioned a medium-term increase in the production of air fuel from 1 to1.5 million tons. Now he raised his target to no less than 3 million tons. Given the cost of the hydrogenation process, it was unrealistic to assumethat this could be produced from German coal. Hydrogenation was simply too expensive. Krauch's promise therefore hinged on the assumption that the Wehrmacht would conquer the Caucasus in the next few months and that Germany by 1942 would be importing Russian oil at the rate of at least one million tons per annum.

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Here was the perverse logic of Barbarossa in a nutshell. The conquest of the oilfields of the Caucasus, 2,000 kilometres deep in the Soviet Union, was not treatedas the awesome military-industrial undertaking that it was. It was inserted as a precondition into another gargantuan industrial plande signed to allow the Luftwaffe to fight an air war, not against the Sovie Union, but against the looming air fleet of Britain and the United States. However optimistic the Wehrmacht may have been in the assessment of its own capacities, the sheer size of the task facing them in the Soviet Union could not be denied. Most fundamentally, the Germans were grossly outnumbered. Even allowing for the unreliability of Stalinist statistics, the population of the Soviet Union cannot have been less than 170 million in 1941. The population of Germany was less than half that: 83.76 million people in 1939.

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Though the German army tha tinvaded the Soviet Union probably outnumbered the Red Army troops stationed in the western sectors, the Germans had already conscripted virtually all their prime manpower. By contrast, the Red Army could call up millions of reservists. From the outset, therefore, it was clear that the Wehrmacht must not be sucked into a battle of attrition. And this imbalance of manpower was compounded by the enormous expanse of Soviet territory and the sheer impassability of the terrain. If the Red Army were able to withdraw in good order this would present Germany with insuperable problems. If on the other hand the coherence of the Soviet force could be broken, then the difficulty of maintaining com-munications would hamper their efforts to restore coherence no less than it impeded the German advance.

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Everything depended on decidingthe battle, as in France, in the first weeks of the campaign. This was the assumption on which Barbarossa was premised.

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A massive central thrust towards Moscow, accompanied by flanking encirclements of theSoviet forces trapped in the north and south, would allow the Red Army to be broken on the Dnieper-Dvina river line within 500 kilometres of the Polish-German border. The Dnieper-Dvina river line was critical because beyond that point logistical constraints on the German army were binding.

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These limitations on Germany's new style of 'Blitzkrieg' had not been obvious in 1940, because the depth of operations required by Manstein's encircling blow (Sichelschnitt) had never exceeded a few hundred kilometres. The entire operation could therefore be supplied by trucks shuttling back and forth from the German border. On the basis of their experience in France, the Wehrmacht's logistical staff calculated that the efficient total range for trucks was 600 kilometres, giving an operational depth of 300. Beyond that point the trucks themselves used up so much of the fuel they were carrying that they became inefficient as a means of transport. Given the vast distances encountered in the Soviet Union, an operational depth of 300 kilometres was absurdly restrictive. To extend the range of the logistical system, the Wehrmacht therefore split its motor pool into two segments. One set of trucks would move forward with the Panzer units and would ferry fuel andammunition from intermediate dumps that would be resupplied by the main fleet operating from the borders of the General Government. By this expedient, it was hoped that the initial logistical range could be extended to 500 kilometres. By happy chance, this coincided exactly with the Dnieper-Dvina line. Halder, the army's chief of staff, was clearly aware of the fundamental importance of this constraint. In his diary at the end of January 1941 he noted that the success of Barbarossa depended on speed. 'Speed! No stops! Do not wait for railway! Do everything with motor vehicles.' There must be 'no hold ups', 'that alone guarantees victory'.

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If serious fighting were to extend beyond this initial phase of the assault, it was clear from the outset that the Wehrmacht's problems would progressively multiply. If the Red Army escaped destruction onthe Dnieper-Dvina river line, the Wehrmacht would not be able to engage in hot pursuit, because it would first need to replenish its supply bases closer to the front line. After that, all operations would ultimately depend on the capacity of the Soviet railway system and the speed with which the Wehrmacht could build up forward supply bases to support a second 500 kilometre advance. The problems the Germans encountered in adapting Russia's narrow-gauge railway lines are well known.To make matters worse, the retreating Red Army became extremely proficient at evacuating rolling stock and sabotaging bridges, tracks andother railway installations. However, the problems were more fundamental than this and were evident already at the planning stage. The existing Russian rail infrastructure, even if it had been captured intact,was insufficient to support the German army. As a rule of thumb,German logistical experts liked to assign at least one high-capacity railway line to each army-sized unit. But for the ten armies with whichthey invaded the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht was able to assign only three main railway lines, one for each army group.

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And the situation for Army Group Centre, where the bulk of the German forces were tobe concentrated, was particularly bad. From the outset, therefore, the German army had to assume that not all units would be equally well supplied. Critical stores were to be reserved above all for the main strikeforce of 33 tank and motorized infantry divisions. If the battle extended much beyond the first months of the attack, the fighting power of the rest of the German army would dwindle rapidly. Red Army might escape beyond the Dnieper-Dvina line. What wouldhappen in this eventuality was the key question. One of the earliest wargames done to test the Barbarossa plan concluded that unless both the destruction of the Red Army and the capture of Moscow could be accomplished within a matter of months, Germany would face a 'long-drawn-out war, beyond the capacity of the German armed forces towage'.

92

Generalmajor Marcks, the officer commissioned to prepare the first draft for the plan of attack, also prepared a wide-ranging strategic assessment of the campaign, in which he considered the possibility that the Red Army might be able to prolong the battle beyond the autumnof 1941. Then, Marcks conceded, Germany would need to prepare itself for a war on two fronts against a coalition consisting of the Soviet Unio and the British Empire, backed by the economic potential of the United States. Faced with this unappealing prospect Marcks consoled himself with the belief that if Germany could take possession of the grain lands of the Ukraine and secure complete control of the Baltic, it would have little to fear from the overwhelming economic might of its enemies.

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It is at this key point, however, that the real fragility of Barbarossabecomes apparent. Following the same logic as Marcks, Hitler consistently prioritized the need to secure the industrial and economic resourcesof the western Soviet Union at the earliest possible opportunity.

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Forthis purpose he envisioned the possibility that large elements of Bock'sArmy Group Centre might have to be diverted both north to secure theBaltic coastline and south into the Ukraine. Only after these essential economic objectives were achieved would the main body of the Germanarmy turn eastwards towards Moscow. This was the priority inscribedin Hitler's Weisung Nr 21, which reached final draft on 17 December1940. Prioritizing economic objectives, however, was seriously at oddswith the plan of the campaign as envisioned by Haider. For Haider, thepriority of Moscow was absolute. Only by concentrating all forces onthis objective, he believed, could the Red Army be brought to battle anddecisively defeated. So fundamental an issue was this for Haider thatHitler's decision to water down the priority of Moscow caused him toquestion the rationale of the entire campaign. On 28 January 1941,Haider noted in his diary: 'Barbarossa: purpose not clear. We do nothurt the English. Our economic base is not significantly improved. Risk in West should not be underestimated. It is possible that Italy mightcollapse after the loss of her colonies, and we get a southern front in Italy, and Greece. If we are then tied up in Russia, a bad situationwill be made worse.'

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As in the autumn of 1939, therefore, Hitler andHaider were fundamentally at odds. As in 1939-40, Germany's entirefuture was at stake. But unlike in 1939, Haider did not force the issueto the point of near mutiny. After the spectacular success of the Frenchcampaign, the army high command could no longer assert absoluteauthority in military matters. Hitler could claim at least as much creditfor the victory in France, and Haider knew it. He may also have believedthat, once battle was joined with the Red Army, his version of thecampaign would prevail. Above all, however, everyone agreed in hopingthat the main work of destruction could be done on the Dnieper-Dvinariver line.Another latent disagreement is revealed by Haider's comment thatthe conquest of the Soviet Union would not 'significantly improve'Germany's 'economic base'. This is remarkable because it flies in theface of Hitler's fundamental assumption about the profits to be gainedfrom conquest, particularly of the Ukraine. Until the middle of February1941, however, it was Haider's pessimistic assessment that reflected themainstream view in Berlin. The army's military-geographic study of theSoviet Union, finished on 10 August 1940, expected much from the con-quest of the Ukraine, but it ruled out any consideration of the Caucasusoilfields as being beyond the immediate reach of even the Panzer divisions.It also emphasized the considerable Soviet industrial potential beyondthe German reach in the Urals.

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In October, a staffer at the Moscowembassy, Gebhardt von Walther, forwarded an even more pessimisticassessment to Haider. This warned against expecting any immediateSoviet collapse following a German attack and played down the benefitsto be expected from the Ukraine. The territory was even more overpopu-lated and impoverished that it had been when it fell into German handsin 1917, and it had been a disappointment then.

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In January 1941, boththe military-economic staff of the Wehrmacht and the offices of the FourYear Plan were hard at work on negative assessments. On 22 January1941 General Thomas's staff pointed out that an invasion would inter-rupt deliveries of alloy metals such as manganese, for which the SovietUnion was currently Germany's only source of supply.

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Furthermore,any major offensive would accelerate the depletion of Germany's alreadyinadequate stocks of fuel and rubber.

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Similar conclusions had beenreached by the offices of the Four Year Plan. The only significant exception was State Secretary Backe of the Agriculture Ministry, who had long been an advocate of expansion towards the east. What precisely Backe said to Hitler in January 1941 was not clear even to insiders such as General Thomas. As one OKW memo put it: 'It is said that StateSecretary Backe has informed the Fuehrer that possession of the Ukraine would relieve us of any economic worry. Actually what Backe is sup-posed to have said is that if any territory could help us, it was the Ukraine.Only the Ukraine was a [grain] surplus region, European Russiaas a whole was not.'

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As we shall see, this distinction was soon to takeon an ominous significance. In any case, in the light of reports he was receiving about Hitler's own view of the campaign, General Thomasengineered an abrupt about-turn in the view taken by his staff.

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On 22 January 1941 Thomas had informed his boss, Keitel, that hewas planning to submit a report urging caution with regard to themilitary-economic benefits of the invasion. Now he reversed direction.As it became clear that Hitler was justifying Barbarossa first and fore-most as a campaign of economic conquest, Thomas began systematically working towards the Fuehrer. He instructed his staff to collaborate closely with Backe in formulating plans for the agricultural exploitation of the Soviet Union, a decision that was vindicated in the second week of February by the Fuehrer's initial response to staff papers on possible shortages of fuel and rubber. The Fuehrer let it be known that he wouldnot be swayed in his strategic judgement by such short-term concerns.In 1940, too, he had been warned of the impending exhaustion of Germany's stocks and his high-risk strategy had been triumphantly vindicated. The attack on the Soviet Union, with the Ukraine as its immediate objective, would go ahead regardless. Responding to this lead, Thomas submitted a report to Hitler on 20 February that was completely unprecedented in its optimism. The OKW now claimed that in its first thrust the Wehrmacht would be able to seize control of atleast 70 per cent of the Soviet Union's industrial potential. This would render long-term resistance by the Red Army hopeless. And the profits of occupation would be huge. Together with Backe, Thomas's staff hadworked out a plan to 'free up' at least 4 million tons of grain from the Ukraine. And Thomas went further than any previous analyst in insisting that the conquest of the Caucasus was a natural complement to the occupation of the Ukraine. In fact, without the conquest of the Caucasusthe Ukraine would be of little value, since Germany would need a huge fleet of tractors and trucks to bring in the harvest, for which the fuel could only come from the Soviet Union itself. Astonishingly, Thomas made no comment on the logistical and operational considerations involved in extending Germany's invasion 2,000 kilometres to the east.
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi-Economy.

I got tired of this discussion. Overy's point is interesting as it points the basic (rather obvious) need that a country must always be prepared to not count with other. Having said that, what he says doesn't have much to do with WWII. WWII was the bloodest conflict in history, but wasn't a war were the outcome was decided by little. The Axis defeat was predestined. They were simply counting that the enemies would act in the way they painted them, and they didn't. This was much more a factor of their military-industrial conditions (as well as those of Germany), than of decisions made during the battles. In actual fact, the decisions made in combat were totally connected with the industrial-military supremacy enjoyed by the Allies. For example, the Russians using their numbers and mobility to attack at several places and deny the Germans hability to effectively respond.

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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#35

Post by 1st Cavalry » 11 Nov 2012, 11:26

Yes , that is pretty much the point .
There are too many variable to consider, in the end the outcome is rather difficult to establish, if the allies did not enjoy such a overwhelming numerical superiority as they did historically .

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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#36

Post by Marcelo Jenisch » 11 Nov 2012, 19:07

There's a very praised book just about this, which some people already recommended me: Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War. I want to buy it. It can be said it's a complementation of Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction.

Here's an interesting review of the book:
I just finished John Ellis' magnificent Brute Force. Ellis' thesis is that the key factor in the Allies victory over the Axis powers was primarily the result of overwhelming economic power which they were able to apply to the battlefield with their immense industrial potential.

Ellis' book is replete with examples and statistics that prove his point, including a fairly comprehensive set of charts and table in the appendices that are worth the price of admission all by themselves. The result of all this is, to this reader at least, utterly convincing.

In addition to proving his central thesis, Ellis provides several interesting insights in the balance of his work, not the least of which was that the average rate of mortality among Bomber Command aircrew actually exceeded the mortality rate of Kamikaze pilots! Another interesting finding is that the level of motor transport necessary to fully supply Rommel's Afrika Korps at the end of its 900 mile supply line from Tripoli would have required the Wehrmacht to commit roughly 75% of all the trucks it possessed, leaving the forces on the Eastern front more or less immobile [my emphasis].

I recommend it very highly to pretty much anyone who wants to gain some insight into the results of WWI. If you're interesting in WWII, you've pretty much got to read this book.
I will not accuse Overy of that, but since the Axis situation was so difficult, I found difficult not to see claims like those of him not being connected with politics. The Communists for example, like to say: "the Soviet Union saved the world, you can't criticize Stalin, because without him you would be speaking German now!". I really don't like from this kind of BS. You pick a situation, make it incomparably worse or alter something that you think it would radically change it, and then say: "if X didn't act in such way, then Y would be f*****". You just create a big drama in a situation that wasn't so dramatic, and try to sell the idea (literally). People like to see WWII as a closely decided conflict, and books, documentaries, movies, etc, were the Axis ALMOST win, but in the last momment are pushed back by the "smarter" Allies, make a lot of success. Most people belive that just a little more of pressure from the LW in the British airfields would lead to a RAF defeat, and a succesfull German invasion of Britain, or that had the Germans advanced a bit more and taked Moscow, they would won the war (Zhukov's troops coming are totally desconsiderated, as well as the hundreads of new Soviet divisions), or that it would be just question of the Japanese sunk the American carriers had they been in PH, and Japan would be victorious. It's a romantization of history, simply that. To defeat the Allies, either the Axis would need to be more stronger, or the Allies weaker. As the war happened, they were virtually predestined to failure.

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Re: Interview with Richard Overy

#37

Post by KDF33 » 21 Nov 2012, 06:11

Some data on the Allied and Axis avgas supply:


1942:

United States: 4 753 thousand tons (home production)
Germany: 1 472 thousand tons (home production + imports from Grossraum)
USSR: 912 thousand tons (home production)
British Empire: between 683 and 961 thousand tons (UK, Canada and Middle East production)
Japan: 462 thousand tons (home production and imports from occupied areas)

1943:

United States: 9 332 thousand tons
Germany : 1 917 thousand tons
USSR: 1 007 thousand tons
British Empire: between 767 and 1 080 thousand tons
Japan : 712 thousand tons

1944:

United States: 19 155 thousand tons
British Empire: between 1 530 and 2 155 thousand tons
USSR: 1 334 thousand tons
Germany: 1 105 thousand tons
Japan: 747 thousand tons


The British production is an estimate based on known 100 octane avgas production (the lower figure). The higher figure is estimated total production if the % of 100 octane avgas in total production is the same for the British as for the Americans. British 100 octane production for 1942 is itself an estimate based on 4th quarter data.

Japanese production and imports are also an estimate dervied from stocks and consumption. The figures for the United States, Germany and the USSR are hard figures.

I used the following sources:

American and British production.

German production and imports.

Soviet production.

Japanese production and imports.

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