Yes, measured from 1941 to 1944 it is. However, as you well know, Abelshauser's original table sets 1939 as index=100. I am well aware of your preference for taking the lowest part of the curve and comparing it to the highest part as the basis for your crazy ideas (why else do you insist on making all comparisons based on Germany 1944??) You haven't seen me make bizarre conclusions based on the apparent dip in war production output from 1939 to 1941, have you?Guaporense wrote:From 75.9% to 160% is a 110% increase in productivity.
As for form, and in as much as I was replying to your false claim that '...Could you point me to some criticism of it? I haven't read anything about it...' you could perhaps just admit that you were wrong in that regard?Oh, I read that.
Well, you didn't exactly make a point there. You just showed your prejudices about the dynamics of productivity change while pointed out to some authors that in your opinion, showed that these statistics are wrong.
As for content, my point was not about 'productivity change', but rather addressing the validity and accuracy of the figures themselves. Measuring volume of end-product at one point in time with ditto volume at another point in time will emphatically not allow you to draw conclusions about per-worker productivity before you draw in other factors, such as the expansion of capacity taking place, roughly, until mid-1942, and also the fact that a much larger part of German war production was done by slave labourers by 1944 than it was by 1939.
I suppose I should be looking forward to that...I will deconstruct that post.
Frankly, I don't give a flying fig about how your ideas may have evolved, nor do I have any wishes as to which direction said ideas may go.I have read the objections to my "theories", I have changed my opinion on these subjects by quite a large extend. You can just read what I posted 10 months ago and now and see how my ideas evolved.
I will may not change my ideas in the direction that you wish as well.
My only beef with your posts is your continued, consistent and persistent misrepresentation of data. End of. No more and no less.
How can that be an extrapolation? Either you are wrong, or you are not.And this "showed to be wrong" is quite a large extrapolation in your part.
Then you should perhaps be refraining from parrotting his estimates.His estimates have many problems. But I don't have better ones.
...in which case you deserve all the flak you have been receiving.I may trust imperfect estimates with greater confidence than you do.
Right. I forgot to ask you why you chose July 1941 as your starting point? In order to show a more dramatic increase in production by letting your table start at the lowest point in time production-wise, and ending near the highest point in time production-wise? You are of course aware that WW2 with Germany as a participant had been going on for 22 months by July 1941, and would go on for another 10 months after July 1944?You can open it by pasting it's link on your navigator.
Where do I describe the Bf-109 as obsolete? I was merely telling you that the Germans were building it also when it was past its prime. Yes, the Americans were still building the P-40 in 1944, and the British (or at least the Canadians) were building Hurricanes into 1944, but in both cases these obsolescent types had been relegated to secondary roles and/or theatres, and in both cases production terminated in 1944. Incidentally, 1944 was the year when Bf-109 production peaked.The Allies continued to produce obsolete types by 1944-45 as well. If you define the Bf-109 as obsolete, 2/3 of the American fighters produced during WW2 were obsolete.
You misunderstood me. German re-armament in general, and specifically aircraft producerement were planned with economies of scale in mind right from the start. German aircraft producers were overwhelmingly serving one and only one customer, namely the German government; some aircraft manufacturers were in fact government owned. It's not like they started serial production of the Ju-88 in Mr. Junkers' garage...The concept of economies of scale is actually based on a type of misunderstanding of the concept of optimal scale...
That figure actually seems a tad high. More dispassionate readers may want to refer to this thread http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 78&start=0Well, my thesis was that the Germans lost air superiority over the continent because they lacked the pilots and the fuel to use the added fighter production, not because they lacked fighter production.
Single engine fighter losses, total and damaged:
1943 - 10.661
1944 - 16.150
...which is also a textbook example of the data you tend to bring to the discussion. I take it your ideas have evolved on this point?
If your point is that 1944 fighter production surpassed 1944 fighter losses, then I can agree. However, by lumping production together by year, rather than by month as the page you link to does, you're disregarding 1/that fighter production ramped up during that year, from a low of 1,016 in February, to a high of 3,031 in September, and then declining slowly for the rest of the year, and also that 2/ Germany's strategic situation, while overall bleak, was entirely different by Dec 31 than it was by Jan 1 1944.Single engine fighter production:
1943 - 9.626
1944 - 25.860
Ditto as above re yearly vs. monthly figures. Also, the fuel production figures, while interesting, do not take stockpiles (also carry-over stockpiles) into account. If you flip to the next page of the site you linked to, you will discover that German avgas stocks were in fact the highest since August-September 1940 in the spring of 1944.Aircraft fuel production, thousands of metric tons:
1943 - 1.917
1944 - 1.117
1) You can't measure any potential before you make an attempt at measuring the Allies' output of aircraft, fighters and trained pilots too.1) The potential for the exertion of air power given by the increased fighter production couldn't be harnessed due to lack of fuel and trained pilots. 2) The fundamental cause was the lack of oil reserves in Europe, with clearly bounded fuel production to low levels, impossibilitating decent training of fighter pilots and good fuel supply for a large air force capable of challenging allied air power.
2) What an earth-shattering conclusion. The Germans knew full well that they didn't have access to sufficient oil sources themselves. That's why they embarked on a gargantuan synthfuel programme; a programme whose output increased as the war went on as can also be read clearly from the figures you linked to. The Allies hit synthfuel production hard in the summer of 1944; however, the full effect of that was only felt gradually by the Luftwaffe, in major part thanks to the stockpiling of fuel I mentioned above.
Not quite. According to the table you link to, the average training times stated are for pilots of all kinds. You could argue that since the Allies were training more multi-engine types, and for longer-range missions, they also needed to spend more time training pilots in disciplines such as blind and instrument flying, night flying, navigation, formation flying and so on.Average number of hours of training for fighter pilots:
mid 1942 - 240 hours
mid 1943 - 200 hours
early 1944 - 160 hours
late 1944 - 110 hours
From the table below the one you took your numbers from, it will appear that the Luftwaffe's lowest point in pilot hours spent on fighter engines was from Oct 1942 to June 1943; after that it seems to have increased a little (if still much less than the Allies spent training their fighter pilots)
(On productivity)
Measured per-head, a leap by 32.3% is anything but small.Output per head in German Industry, 1939-1944
year -------------- 1939 ---- 1940 ---- 1941 ---- 1942 ---- 1943 ---- 1944
Primary Industry - 100 ---- 104.1 ---- 114.6 --- 113.5 --- 108.7 --- 87.6
Arms Industry ---- 100 ---- 87.6 ----- 75.9 ----- 99.6 ---- 131.6 --- 160.0
Consumer Industry 100 ---- 115.9 ---- 133.3 --- 121.1 --- 124.7 --- 132.3
source: Overy, R., War and Economy in the Third Reich, page 367
The productivity in the primary industry stagnated, while in the arms industry it increased greatly from 1941 onwards and in the consumer industry we had a small increase.
Anything but. American coal digging was massively more productive than European coal mining was; in turn, German coal mining was more productive per-head than both French and British (not to mention Belgian and Soviet) coal mining was, largely due to efficiency gains from increased mechanization.The productivity of the coal industry didn't increase while the armaments production increased greatly. Why? Simple, the coal industry was old, and had already matured. The opportunities for fast learning were exhausted.
For that reason - high mechanization demanding a more specialized workforce - per-capita German coal mining declined more than other warring countries' coal industries did; developing a new coal seam from the moment you put your spade into the ground and until you had a fully developed mine running was estimated to take no less than seven years; the Germans knew already in 1939 that they did not have that kind of time on their hands.
You are disregarding that Germany had been rearming head over heels since Hitler came to power in 1933. That largely renders the rest of your post irrevelevant: you can speculate all you like over the development of the German armaments industry from 1941 to 1944. It wasn't a case of a stable workforce meandering around on factory floors as they picked up the skills they needed. Rather, it is a case of an industry in massive fluxus - crudely put, German workers out, slave workers in - along with increased orders and increased input of raw materials.While the production of munitions was a new sector of the German economy, that sprang from the war. In this new sector millions of workers were suddenly allocated. The industry wasn't very organized and the workers didn't have much experience.
I am still not convinced how the German armaments industry could advance a full 60% in per-worker productivity from 1939 to 1944; your theoretical exercise does not explain how either, sorry.
Interesting how you use (man-) hours for the B-17 and rubles for the T-34. How many B-17s would 250,000 rubles buy you, and how many man-hours would it take to build a T-34 in 1941?...In the US productivity increased greatly between 1940 and 1944, the time it took to make a B-17 airframe decreased from 55.000 hours to 17.000 hours. The cost of production of a T-34 also declined greatly, from ca 250.000 rubles in 1941 to nearly half of that number by 1944.
You are, in both cases, mentioning weapon systems which were only just entering mass production in 1940 and 1941, respectively. As I've been trying to point out to you upthread (multiple times), the Germans attempted to capitalize on economies of scale right from the start. Sometimes it worked (Ju-88); sometimes it didn't (Me-210)