On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

Discussions on the economic history of the nations taking part in WW2, from the recovery after the depression until the economy at war.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#46

Post by Guaporense » 11 Aug 2016, 22:13

I found data on ammunition expenditures by the armies of Germany, USSR and US. From here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads ... w2.308559/, originally written in Russian by Igor Kurtukov.

Interestingly, the author estimates ammunition consumption of 3.4 million metric tons of mortar and artillery shells over 75 mm by Germany from 42 to 44 and 2.25 million metric tons by the USSR over the same period:

USSR / Germany
1942 - 446.133 / 709.557
1943 - 828.193 / 1.121.545
1944 - 1.000.962 / 1.540.933

Note: German consumption includes Italy and the Western front.

He also estimated US consumption of 680,000 tons for the 11 months in the Western front in 1944-45. Similar to German consumption in 42. In per capita terms he estimated in 1944 a consumption of 13.8 tons per day for 10,000 men in the fied army for Germany, 5.0 tons for the Red Army and 15.4 tons for the US in 44-45.

Using the data I estimated German ammunition consumption in the Western front in 1944 as 1,150 tons of projectiles per day compared to US's consumption of 2,000 tons per day for 44-45. Since the US field army in the ETO in 44-45 was about 1.5 times the size of the German field army in the Western front in 44, per capita ammunition consumption was slightly higher for the US by a difference of about 10-15%. The Allies as a whole spend about 3,000 tons a day in 44-45, or about 2.5 times more than the Wehrmacht in the Western front, a figure matching the difference in numerical strength.

Overall, the idea that the Western Allies spent much more ammunition than the Germans is false, as per capita consumption was rather similar around 13-15 tons per day for 10,000 men. While the Red Army spent way less than both.

In terms of "efficiency" how much ammunition is spent to cause to kill or wound an enemy soldier, the Germans spend about 200-250 kg of artillery and mortar projectiles in 44 against the Red Army to cause a KIA or WIA and about 500 kg in the Western front to cause a KIA or WIA on the Western Allies. The Red Army in turn spend about 700 kg of artillery and mortar projectiles over 75 mm to kill or wound a German soldier and the Western Allies spent about 2,000 kg of ammunition to kill or wound a German soldier.
Last edited by Guaporense on 12 Aug 2016, 03:18, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#47

Post by Richard Anderson » 11 Aug 2016, 23:14

Guaporense wrote:He also estimated US consumption of 680,000 tons for the 11 months in the Western front in 1944-45.
The problem with estimations. 1,446,400 long tons (1,469,610.2489 metric tons) of artillery ammunition were expended by the U.S. Army in Europe. Rounds for the 105mm Howitzer M1 accounted for just 34.5% of the total, 498,200 tons (506,194.56996 metric tons). History of Planning Division ASF, App. 18-A, p. 93. :roll:

Never mind you have of course also almost completely reversed the thrust of the original article. :roll:
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#48

Post by Guaporense » 12 Aug 2016, 03:17

Richard Anderson wrote:
Guaporense wrote:He also estimated US consumption of 680,000 tons for the 11 months in the Western front in 1944-45.
The problem with estimations. 1,446,400 long tons (1,469,610.2489 metric tons) of artillery ammunition were expended by the U.S. Army in Europe. Rounds for the 105mm Howitzer M1 accounted for just 34.5% of the total, 498,200 tons (506,194.56996 metric tons). History of Planning Division ASF, App. 18-A, p. 93.
680,000 tons is projectile weight which usually is half of the total weight of ammunition hence it fits your data. For instance, German production of ammunition 42-44 was 7.3 million metric tons while projectile weight of expenditures of arty and mortar was 3.4 million metric tons.

Your data includes expenditures in Italy as well? Or just the Western Front?
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#49

Post by Richard Anderson » 12 Aug 2016, 05:37

Guaporense wrote:680,000 tons is projectile weight which usually is half of the total weight of ammunition hence it fits your data. For instance, German production of ammunition 42-44 was 7.3 million metric tons while projectile weight of expenditures of arty and mortar was 3.4 million metric tons.
It is bad enough you continue to "estimate" data. Now you are making up "data". STOP it. It is infantile on your part. :roll:

The weight of the 105mm M1 HE Projectile was 33.0 pounds. The total round weight, i.e., projectile, casing, and propellant, was 42.07 pounds. The projectile was 78.44069408129308% of the total round weight.

So then, have you any idea how Kurtakov arrived at his estimate? I thought not. :roll:
Your data includes expenditures in Italy as well? Or just the Western Front?
No. That is ETO. MTO is page 104 and is 766,999 long tons of artillery ammunition. Expenditure of 105mm M1 HE was 282,594 long tons, which was 36.8% of the total.

BTW, average monthly production of ammunition for le.F.H. 18 was 200,000 rounds in 1941, 1,500,000 in 1942, 2,400,000 in 1943, and 3,100,000 in 1944 according to Speer's Schnellberichte of 15 February 1945, so a total of 59,400,000. I remain unclear as to how they managed to produce an average of 3,840,000 per month in the 15 months from September 1939 to January 1941, which is what would be required to make up the remaining 57,600,000 necessary to achieve the figure of 117,000,000 in your unsourced claim of 07 Feb 2015. :roll:
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#50

Post by Guaporense » 13 Aug 2016, 01:04

Richard Anderson wrote:
Guaporense wrote:680,000 tons is projectile weight which usually is half of the total weight of ammunition hence it fits your data. For instance, German production of ammunition 42-44 was 7.3 million metric tons while projectile weight of expenditures of arty and mortar was 3.4 million metric tons.
It is bad enough you continue to "estimate" data. Now you are making up "data". STOP it. It is infantile on your part. :roll:
No, I am not making up anything. Its infantile of your part to just insult and scream like you are doing now instead of actually engage in conversation and understand what I am saying.
The weight of the 105mm M1 HE Projectile was 33.0 pounds. The total round weight, i.e., projectile, casing, and propellant, was 42.07 pounds. The projectile was 78.44069408129308% of the total round weight.
In tank ammunition the fraction of projectile on weight is much smaller than 78%, more like around 45-55%.
So then, have you any idea how Kurtakov arrived at his estimate? I thought not. :roll:
Its in the link I posted.
Your data includes expenditures in Italy as well? Or just the Western Front?
No. That is ETO. MTO is page 104 and is 766,999 long tons of artillery ammunition. Expenditure of 105mm M1 HE was 282,594 long tons, which was 36.8% of the total.
You said Europe before, Italy is in Europe by the way.
BTW, average monthly production of ammunition for le.F.H. 18 was 200,000 rounds in 1941, 1,500,000 in 1942, 2,400,000 in 1943, and 3,100,000 in 1944 according to Speer's Schnellberichte of 15 February 1945, so a total of 59,400,000.
3.1 times 12 is 37.2, 2.4*12= 28.8, that already is 66 million.
I remain unclear as to how they managed to produce an average of 3,840,000 per month in the 15 months from September 1939 to January 1941, which is what would be required to make up the remaining 57,600,000 necessary to achieve the figure of 117,000,000 in your unsourced claim of 07 Feb 2015. :roll:
Your data is incomplete and you made a mistake in arithmetic.

The 117 million data comes from "The Sinews of War: Economics, Production and Logistics during the Second World War, by Jason Long" website section Weapons and Ammunition, 1939-1945, by year, data for 1940-1944 period only. Though that site was taken down I have all it's data.

According to the USSBS Report on the German War Economy, in 1944 production of 105mm was 41 million rounds:

Image

So total production of 75mm rounds and over for the army was 108 million rounds in 1944, 41 million (i.e. 38%), and 312 million for 1940-1944, which would imply in 118 million 105 mm rounds for the 1940-44 period.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#51

Post by Richard Anderson » 13 Aug 2016, 06:20

Guaporense wrote:No, I am not making up anything. Its infantile of your part to just insult and scream like you are doing now instead of actually engage in conversation and understand what I am saying.
[Edited to remove "insulting" language"] Actually, yes, you are making up things. Sucking up "estimates" and regurgitating them without knowing the basis for the estimate or how correct they are is in fact "making things up". Furthermore, you have been corrected too many times on these data and yet simply repeat the same false data over and over again, which is also making things up on your part. In either case I understand very well what you are "saying" and I suspect most others do as well.
In tank ammunition the fraction of projectile on weight is much smaller than 78%, more like around 45-55%.
Were you talking about "tank ammunition"? No, of course not, you were talking about artillery ammunition. Why do you constantly deflect onto tangents instead of answering questions or simply acknowledging your faulty data?

BTW, projectile weight, 37mm M80 AP is 1.66 pounds, total round weight is 2,31 pounds...71.86147%
Projectile weight, 57mm M86 APC is 7.27 pounds, total round weight is 13.88 pounds...52.37752% finally in the ball park.
Projectile weight, 75mm M61 APC is 14.96 pounds, total round weight is 20.02 pounds...74.72527% oops, there you go again.
Projectile weight, 3" M79 AP is 15.00 pounds, total round weight is 24.24 pounds...61.881188%, gee, something seems to be amiss with your assumptions.
Its in the link I posted.
No, it isn't. I suggest if you think Kurtakov's methodology is in the link you posted that you post an excerpt from it that demonstrates that.
You said Europe before, Italy is in Europe by the way.
Yes I said Europe. As in the European Theater of Operations. Are you ignorant of that nomenclature? I was simply repeating the nomenclature used in the reports, rather than changing it to suit my requirements. In either case, instead of arguing the nomenclature, why not correct your figures instead, since the data you are drawing your theory from has been falsified. That is the scientific method after all.
3.1 times 12 is 37.2, 2.4*12= 28.8, that already is 66 million.
Oh, dear, I multiplied incorrectly in my head.
Your data is incomplete and you made a mistake in arithmetic.
Oh, no, my data is very complete and yes I made an arithmetical mistake.

Total production of 10.5cm le.F.H. ammunition:

1939 - 2,113,100
1940 - 10,948,700
1941 - 2,551,700
1942 - 18,459,800
1943 - 29,440,600
1944 - 38,055,700
1945 - 3,226,400
Total - 105,795,000
The 117 million data comes from "The Sinews of War: Economics, Production and Logistics during the Second World War, by Jason Long" website section Weapons and Ammunition, 1939-1945, by year, data for 1940-1944 period only. Though that site was taken down I have all it's data.
Ooo, goody, then you know where Jason got it from? Or what your data for "117 million" includes? That it includes Czech production of the Granate 30(t) and 35(t)? That it includes the Granate 19 for the 10cm FK18? Neither of which are comparable to the 105mm howitzer. If you want to compare captured Czech production, then you want to look at the 25-pounder ammunition produced by the US for Canada and the UK, part of the 291,844,000 rounds of light field, tank, and antitank gun ammunition produced for them. If you want to compare the standard divisional counterbattery piece considered a companion to the 15cm s.F.H., then you are looking at the U.S. 4.5" Gun and 1,969,000 more rounds produced. Or just count the 105mm Howitzer M3 and 7,920,000 more rounds.

You are choosing very selectively to make your comparisons. Try comparing apples to apples - a comparable subset - or compare totals. For example, in 1944 Germany produced 38,055,700 rounds of ammunition for the 10.5cm le.F.H. In 1944 the U.S. produced 33,995,000 rounds of ammunition for the M2 and M2A1 105mm Howitzer. That is a direct comparison. Or another: in 1944, Germany produced 8,343,800 rounds of 15cm s.F.H. ammunition and the U.S. produced 6,108,000 for the M1 155mm Howitzer.
According to the USSBS Report on the German War Economy, in 1944 production of 105mm was 41 million rounds:
Actually, 41,365,000...if you count everything, which you are, then trying to compare it to a subset of US production, which you are, in order to generate the data required to fit your thesis, which you are. If you use all U.S. 105mm production and 4.5" production, then the total is 38,091,000.
So total production of 75mm rounds and over for the army was 108 million rounds in 1944, 41 million (i.e. 38%), and 312 million for 1940-1944, which would imply in 118 million 105 mm rounds for the 1940-44 period.
Why imply, when we know what the data is, 100,456,500?
Last edited by Richard Anderson on 13 Aug 2016, 16:40, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#52

Post by David Thompson » 13 Aug 2016, 07:34

Richard Anderson & Guaporense -- This is your last warning. It's time to end the insults. This forum has no room for churls. You have a choice -- be civil or be gone.

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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

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Post by Guaporense » 14 Aug 2016, 03:42

Thanks Tassy. :wink:
Guaporense wrote:For UK in the revised portion I used price data from that 2009 paper on real wages in Germany and UK to get a more sensible figure for UK's GDP than Maddison's because Germany's non-agricultural labor force was more than 1.5 times the UK in 1939 and productivity in German manufacturing and services was similar to the UK's, combined with the much larger German agricultural labor force would imply in a Germany's GDP about 1.58 times the UK's (I just multiplied the labor force size in each sector by it's relative productivity), instead of 1.43 times implied by Maddison's per capita income figures. Using the price data the ratio between Germany/UK's GDP was about 1.57 times in 1939 against 1.58 times using the labor productivity data.
I would like to post how I calculated the relative GDP of Germany and UK in 1939 and 1943:

Broadberry (2009) has this data on productivity of the German worker relative to the British in 1937:

Industry ------ 96%
Services ------ 90%
Agriculture -- 59%

Other estimates for German industrial productivity put it above British level (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4501156?seq ... b_contents, estimates German manufacturing productivity at 105-107% of the British level).

This was Germany's employment in thousands in 1939 and 1943:

Germany ----------- 1939 -------- 1943
agriculture --------- 5,424 ------- 5,501
industry ------------ 10,960 ------ 10,643
services ------------ 18,382 ------ 14,903

Where I excluded 5.8 million agricultural laborers because they are classified as "unpaid family helpers" which are usually the wife and children of rural families. Although I might hypothesize that the very low productivity of German agriculture might be explained partly as being an statistical mistake of dividing output of German farming by the unpaid family helpers besides the paid ones, however I think this statistic does not suffer from such a distortion because German farmers were paid much lower real wages than British farmers or even German manufacturing or service workers and so it reflects the average productivity of paid agricultural workers.

Therefore German employment in "British worker units" was 30,254 thousand workers in 1939 and 26,882 workers in 1943.

While British (civilian) employment was 19,113 thousands in 1939 and 17,644 thousands in 1943. A ratio of 1.58 in 1939 and 1.52 in 1943.

This is a much higher ratio than those in Maddison's estimates (even correcting for the added German territory). Interestingly, using Broadberry (2009) and Fukao, Ma (2007) data on prices of food of UK and US respectively I arrived at an exchange rate of 5.1 dollars per pound using British basked weight, converting the British GDP to 1990 dollar prices using the CPI the GDP I arrived was the revised figure in the post I quoted (interestingly, it deviates from Maddison's figure by less than 10%) and more interestingly the ratio between Germany and UK using these figures for UK and Maddison's figures for Germany (the 1943 figure is index in Klein (1957) cited in Harrison (1988)) was 1.57 in 1939 and 1.52 in 1943, almost the same as computed using the labor productivity data.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#54

Post by Marcus » 14 Aug 2016, 09:21

A post by Tassy pouring fuel on a fire was removed.

Come on guys, discuss the topic at hand and avoid personal comments.

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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#55

Post by Guaporense » 29 Aug 2016, 23:56

On relative productivity of German Metalworking

Williamson (1995)* estimated a PPP of 1 = 2.38 marks in 1927, this PPP has been used in Broadberry (2010) in estimating GDP levels of Europe.

Using that data on Tooze's and Ristuccia data on Germany and US machine tools (where they estimated US/Ger productivity per machine using an exchange rate of 4.20 = 1) we actually get very close ratio of capital productivity between the two countries, reflecting their similar technology: US machines were 1.03 as productive on average as German machines in 1929 which means output of Germany's machine tool using sector was 65% of the US's in 1929. Using these values and the indexes of metal working output in Restuccia and Tooze's (2013) we get German output of 125% of US's level in 1939 and 55% in 1944.

Although the indexes they use suffer from the usual inflation of output caused by the learning process involved with the shift of an economy from civilian to war goods: German output was so high in 1939 because it was already producing military goods while US output was civilian. Still it makes some sense given that Germany's stock of machines and employment in metal working were about 20% higher than US's in 1939.

*http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/Williamson1995.pdf
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#56

Post by Guaporense » 30 Aug 2016, 00:20

Guaporense wrote:This was Germany's employment in thousands in 1939 and 1943:

Germany ----------- 1939 -------- 1943
agriculture --------- 5,424 ------- 5,501
industry ------------ 10,960 ------ 10,643
services ------------ 18,382 ------ 14,903

Where I excluded 5.8 million agricultural laborers because they are classified as "unpaid family helpers" which are usually the wife and children of rural families. Although I might hypothesize that the very low productivity of German agriculture might be explained partly as being an statistical mistake of dividing output of German farming by the unpaid family helpers besides the paid ones, however I think this statistic does not suffer from such a distortion because German farmers were paid much lower real wages than British farmers or even German manufacturing or service workers and so it reflects the average productivity of paid agricultural workers.
Apparently I was right:

Image

German agricultural productivity was similar to UK's at 104% in 1930 per "male worker". Thing is that German censuses included the wives and children of agricultural workers as "unpaid family helpers" which lead to an agricultural labor force of 11.3 million in 1939 (almost 10 times larger than the British which was ca. 1.2 million), although the agricultural population of Germany in 1939 was only 14.9 million and they included 3/4 of it in the labor force:

Image

This also implies that German agricultural output was ca. 5-6 times larger than Britain's and hence the difference in total economic size is even greater than I previously estimated.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#57

Post by Guaporense » 04 Sep 2016, 00:43

Estimating GDPs

It's good to do a test whether Maddison's figures can be regarded as correct or not based on existing research.

So, using the PPPs from Willianson (1995) for Western countries and from Fukao, Ma, Yuan(2007) for Japan I have converted figures of countries' GDP's (or GNP's in terms) in national currency units into British pounds. For Austria-Hungary, Russia and the USSR I couldn't find estimates of PPPs so I used official exchange rates, apparently in 1910 exchange rates closely matched PPP's: for instance, the Mark-Pound was 20.45 exchange rate and PPP was 20.63. And exchange rates didn't change before WW1:

exchange rates to the pound --- france ---- germany
1905 ------------------------------- 25.15 ----- 20.45
1913 ------------------------------- 25.24 ----- 20.47

These are the PPPs for 1927 and the raw prices used to compute them:

Image

I did for countries in 1913 and in 1939, before the two world wars for all major countries in both wars and a few smaller European countries. Here are the results:

Image

For WW1, figures refer of GDP figures from for 1910 for US, UK, 1911 for Italy and 1913 for Germany and France:

Image

*edit I made an error in the table forgetting to include Italy in the second column but I am to lazy to correct that.

These are the figures for the territories in each coalition:

Image

These figures closely match Maddison's estimates, however the US, Japan and Belgium appears to have ca. 10-15% lower relative GDPs than Maddison's estimates using these PPPs. Maddison's figures for 1939 would imply, for the same countries in the set above, about 1,070 billions for the Axis and 1,430 billions for the Allies.

In Japan's case since the PPP conversion is made to dollars and the dollars are then converted to pounds there is the possibility of distortion so I also counted the prices of goods in Japan and UK: milk, bread, eggs, sugar, beef, pork, flour and rice and did the geometric average of the prices, the difference between this average of 8 goods was of only 4% from the double PPP conversion.

Notice first that in WW1 the difference in economic strength between the coalitions was higher than in WW2. This is allowed the Entente to win WW1 without the US mobilizing it's full potential. Although WW2 was won by the USSR which, because many of it's territories were occupied, was the weakest economy in the Allies, but they inflicted nearly 90% of German battle deaths from 1941 to 1945.
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#58

Post by Guaporense » 04 Sep 2016, 01:11

Estimating the size of machine tool stocks

Metal working machines are essentially the tools used by metalworking industries to transform raw metals into things like shells, tanks, aircraft, ships and other kinds of stuff made of metal, they represented the bulk of the value of industrial machinery made in the war by most major powers. Therefore, they are of prime importance for determining a country's potential capacity to produce munitions.

From this dataset we get an idea of the relative size of machine tool stocks among belligerent countries:

Image

And these data from Ristuccia and Tooze (2013) comparing stocks from a subset of types of tools, pre-war means 1938 for Germany and 1940 for the US, notice how they match well with the data above regarding metal cutting tools:

--------------- Pre-war stock ---1945 stock
US ----------- 940,829 --------- 1,517,518
Germany ---- 989,852 --------- 1,565,394

In terms of value using 1942 German prices in RM, this was the value of the respective country's stocks:

--------------- Pre-war value ------ 1945 value ------------ value additions
US ----------- 8,444,620,566 ----- 14,102,516,345 ------- 5,657,895,779
Germany ---- 7,987,002,660 ----- 12,220,114,070 ------ 4,233,111,410

German tools added were only 3/4 of the value of US tools added using German prices, which indicate that US tools were more modern and productive on average.

These are output figures for machine tools from 1940-44:

UK --------- 373,418
Japan ------ 271,000
USSR ------- 115,400

The USSR's stock of metal working tools appears to be a small fraction of Germany's, but I lack very precise data on it but metal working lathes in particular were 303,884 in Germany in 1938 and appear to be 54,000 in the USSR in the same year (https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunaye ... y/ch01.htm). but from 1932 to 1938 it was growing at a rate of 20% per year, so one would expect about 80,000 lathes by 1940, or about 1/4 of Germany's stock.

While Japan's stock was 646,600 machines in 1940 for all types of tools (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id= ... up;seq=216), similar to France's 1945 stock or about 40% of 1938 Germany's total metal working tools figure (meaning, ca. 1/3 of 1940 Germany's stock), while UK's figure appears to haven be about 44% of Germany's stock in 1940 from the table above, although the USSBS gives 35% of Germany's stock in 1943 and I don't think Germany's relative investment in machine tools were higher than the UK's while the US's stock in 1940 was about the same size and value as Germany's in 1938.

So this would be a crude estimate for an index of machine tool stocks in 1940:

Germany ------ 100
USA ------------- 95 (in terms of value, in terms of quantity it was ca. 80% of Germany's stock)
UK -------------- 40
Japan ----------- 30
France ---------- 30
USSR ------------ 25
Italy ------------ 12

aggregating the stocks under territorial control of each coalition:

Axis ------------- 172
Allies ----------- 160

So while in terms of pre-war GDP figures, the Allies appear to have enjoyed a slight superiority in terms of 1940 machine tool stocks they were inferior and that's just counting the stock of the 7 major powers.

Although this is a mostly numerical count and doesn't take into account the QUALITY and type of tool (with except of the US's index): US's stock were not much larger than Japan's in 1940 (I would guess about 1.7 million units to .65 million for Japan) but they increased quickly during the war and the quality of US tools was higher (usually the value of an addition to the US's stock was 40% higher than Germany's and given Japan's cheap labor force I would expect the level of capital intensity to be lower than Germany and hence for tools to be of much cheaper types in Japan). Well, according to the USSBS in 1936 the average cost of a Japanese machine was 2,000 yen which was about 1,300 dollars in PPP and 600 dollars at exchange rates, meaning about 3,500 RM in PPP using Willianson (1995) PPP's of dollar/RM, compare that to the average price of 7,355 RM in Germany from 1938-1945 and 9,811 RM in the US machine tool sales.

Variation in prices of machine tools: at 1942 German prices a bench lathe cost as little as 1,500 RM, an all-purpose engine lathe was priced at 6,000 RM, a multiple-spindle automatic cost on average 27,900 RM. (Risttucia and Tooze (2013)).
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#59

Post by Guaporense » 09 Sep 2016, 01:27

Richard Anderson wrote:
According to the USSBS Report on the German War Economy, in 1944 production of 105mm was 41 million rounds:
Actually, 41,365,000...if you count everything, which you are, then trying to compare it to a subset of US production, which you are, in order to generate the data required to fit your thesis, which you are. If you use all U.S. 105mm production and 4.5" production, then the total is 38,091,000.
No all German output of ammunition of calibers 105 cm and 122 mm in 1944 was 45.0 million and not 41.4, that's what I would think the comparable figure to the 38.1 million for the US's output of 105mm and 4.5 inches. Unless you exclude the 4.5 inches from the comparison. :wink:
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Re: On estimating the warmaking potential of the world's regions

#60

Post by Richard Anderson » 09 Sep 2016, 18:48

Guaporense wrote:No all German output of ammunition of calibers 105 cm and 122 mm in 1944 was 45.0 million and not 41.4, that's what I would think the comparable figure to the 38.1 million for the US's output of 105mm and 4.5 inches. Unless you exclude the 4.5 inches from the comparison. :wink:
You still have that limited a knowledge base on the subject matter you've prattled so confidently on about for seven years?

The 105mm Howitzer M1 was the standard divisional direct support field artillery weapon in the US Army. The 10.5cm leichte Feldhaubitze was the standard divisional direct support field artillery weapon in the German Feldheer.

The 10cm schwere Kanone was a the standard counter-battery weapon in the Feldheer. It was a general support field artillery weapon normally assigned to echelons above division (except in late-war mobile divisions) in separate field artillery battalions. It was actually 105mm but was designated as 10cm to avoid confusing its ammunition with that of the 10.5cm le.F.H. Ammunition was not compatible between the two. It was mounted on the same carriage as the 15cm s.F.H., which was the standard divisional and non-divisional general support field artillery piece of the German Feldheer. It was developed from concepts of "complimentary" field artillery pairings of howitzers and guns after the Great War.

The 4.5" Gun M1 was the standard counter-battery weapon in the U.S. Army. It was a general support field artillery weapon only assigned to echelons above division in separate field artillery battalions. It was actually a British weapon, which was taken in hand and produced by the U.S. because its own design, the 4.7" (120mm) gun development was never considered satisfactory (although it did eventually lead to the excellent 120mm AA Gun). It was mounted on the same carriage as the 155mm Howitzer M2, which was the standard divisional and non-divisional general support field artillery piece of the US Army. It was developed from concepts of "complimentary" field artillery pairings of howitzers and guns after the Great War.

In similar fashion, the heavier artillery pairings were the US 155mm Gun M1 and the 8" Howitzer M1 and the German 17cm K18 and 21cm Mrs. 18.

German production of ammunition for the 122mm s.F.H. 396(r) and K. 390(r) was simply a product of desperation and has little to do with the discussion.

Sixty-six months of production (all during wartime) for the 10.5cm le.F.H. resulted in 105.795-million rounds. 1,605,955 per month.
Sixty-two months of production (45 during wartime) for the 105mm Howitzer M2 resulted in 85.482-million rounds. 1,899,600 per month.
Sixty-six months of production (all during wartime) for the 10cm s.K. resulted in 7.0648-million rounds. 107,042 per month.
Thirty-six months of production (all during wartime) for the 4.5" Gun M1 resulted in 1.969-millon rounds. 54,694 per month.

That despite the misguided, Congressionally-mandated, reduction of ammunition production in 1943 resulting from the "iron mountain" scandals after the end of the North African campaign. After achieving production peaks exceeding 1.3-million per month in July and November 1942, production of 105mm ammunition was effectively halved from January through August 1943. The production peak was actually January 1945 when 4.813-million rounds were produced. Without Congressional interference, it is likely another 38-42 million rounds of 105mm ammunition would have been produced. The production peak for the 4.5" Gun ammunition was February 1945 when 178,000 rounds were produced. From October 1942 through February 1943 no rounds were produced.

The German production peak for the 10.5cm le.F.H. was April 1944 with 3.6-million rounds produced. For the 10cm K18 it was July and August 1944 when 304,000 rounds each month were produced.
Richard C. Anderson Jr.

American Thunder: U.S. Army Tank Design, Development, and Doctrine in World War II
Cracking Hitler's Atlantic Wall
Hitler's Last Gamble
Artillery Hell

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