How much capacitive Alexandria port each month?

[Urmel]

I'll look into it. Considering that 18,000 tons/month is under 600 tonnes per day though, that seems very low.

[David W]

Thanks,

All the origianl figures appear to be on the low side.

[PMN1]

Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War – C B A Behrens

Page 210/211

The principle ports concerned – Alexandria and Port Said at the Northern end of the Suez Canal, and Suez at its southern entrance – were not only the terminal points of the convoy routes that converged on the Middle East, and the sources of supply of the battle area; they also had to handle the civilian imports and exports of Egypt, and much of the imports of Syria, Cyprus, Turkey and Palestine which were delivered to Port Said for transhipment. Alexandria, much the largest and best equipped of the three, handled in peace, a volume of dry-cargo tonnage that must it seems, have been considerably smaller than that handled by Glasgow, and it was now the base of the Mediterranean Fleet and its use by merchant ships restricted. Port Said was less than half its size, while in Suez, it was estimated in the Spring of 1941. even with efficient management, only about 40 ships could be discharged a month. None of these ports were equipped to deal with the kind of military cargoes that now began to arrive, and all of them for this and other reasons, contracted much more serious forms of the war-time diseases from which the UK ports had suffered a little while before. For the cargoes were awkward cargoes, weighing up to seventy tonnes and despatched before the days when it became established principle that the ships destined for outlandish parts must be provided with derricks capable of getting the contents out of the holds or else service by crane-ship on arrival. The cargoes were stowed un inconvenient ways, or in ways that did not suit the needs of the military authorities, who had often experienced many unforeseen vicissitudes between the dates of despatch and arrival and wanted in a hurry things which were at the bottom of the holds. The battle areas were a long way off and the roads and railways connecting them with the ports inadequate, so that here as elsewhere the most intractable of the difficulties was inland clearance.

Page 213

‘I believe’ (said a visiting ship owner at Suez), ‘I am right in stating that in one instance, to obtain 3,500 to 4,000 tons (half the capacity of a single ship) discharge took place on 61 ships at the same time’. The cargo discharged during this process was then hurled into lighters (for most of the ships in Suez had to be discharged overside) ‘to the detriment of the cargo and the waste of lighter capacity’. From the lighters it was ‘thrown out onto the quay’ without any attempt at proper stacking, until the moment came when all the quay space was filled with objects impossible to remove (for apart from all the confusion, there was not the transport to clear such an accumulation), all the lighters were full, and 117 ships were waiting outside Suez through which only about half a shipload could be moved a day.

[Urmel]

Thanks,

All the origianl figures appear to be on the low side.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 2#p1715402

[David W]

Got it.

Thanks.

How about Suez & Alexandria? Presumably both better than Tripoli?

[Gooner1]

"During the same period of seven months [January - July 1941] over a million tons of military stores, ammunition, weapons, aircraft, and vehicles were off-loaded at Egyptian ports, an average of nearly 5,000 tons a day."

http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/U ... -2-11.html

[David W]

Gooner.

That figure for all the Egyptian ports sounds very low, it's only as much as Tripoli alone.

[Gooner1]

Gooner.

That figure for all the Egyptian ports sounds very low, it's only as much as Tripoli alone.

Hi David, from Urmel's entry here: http://crusaderproject.wordpress.com/20 ... ours-1941/ on an ideal day 5,000 tons could be unloaded at Tripoli but from May to August '41 they managed an average of 1,964 tons per day.

[David W]

Hi Gooner.

I think we are all happy with the veracity of the Axis port figures.
The ones quoted above for Egypt just seemed too low to me. (But they might be right, and I may be wrong!)

[David W]

Does anyone know roughly how many tons or tonnes of material were present at Alexandria on 10th June 1940?

[Carl Schwamberger]

Part of what people are wresting with here are differences between what might be unloaded from ships in X time, the clearance capacity of the port, and its storage capacity.

The first item has a limit of how many ships can be docked +any lighterage capacity. Lighterage being offloading the blue water ship onto barges that discharge ashore across small docks or a beach. This limit is modified by the number of cranes or derricks, size of the labor force on hand, and support like a industrial grade electric plant ect...

Clearance capacity is the rate the cargo is removed from the docks and adjacent storage areas. ie: in December 1945 the ship discharge rate at Antwerp dropped to near zero because the cargo was backed up on the docks. Antwerp was a through port, lacking a large storage capacity.

A large storage capacity is important as many items require dry storage. If there is none available ashore then either the material is at risk of spoilage, or it must remain on the ship for a extended time.

Variations in these items can alter a ports actual weekly or monthly average up or down from its nominal capacity.

Just the difference between peace time average and actual designed maximum capacity can vary. I've observed data from 1930s years on actual average discharge is usually well below numbers claimed for full capacity.

[jwsleser]

Also remember that the data you are reviewing is based on tonnage shipped to those ports. A port can have a 10K ton monthly capacity but only unloads 5K ton because that is all what was shipped and hence reported/recorded. That is why the complete Italian records are valuable as they include tonnage shipped, tonnage received.

Pista! Jeff