Hi Jon,
as I briefly said in the earlier post, huge thanks for sorting out that table for me. I'll have a play with the instructions you linked so that I'll be able to put in future tables without straining everyone's eyes
Otherwise I’ll follow LWD’s advice and post as a picture. As ever, I'm slowly working my way through the links you've kindly provided. I’ve tried to address similar issues together under headings so please forgive snipping and joining together of both of your posts. We’re ranging quite widely but it is very good to do so as it allows us to link related subjects far more easily than if we segmented things. This is something of an epic post, so apologies for that.
Just as a quick guide to sources used in this post:
Glantz = David Glantz, Before Stalingrad, Tempus, 2003, paperback
Murray = Williamson Murray, Strategy for Defeat, 2000, available for download from link posted by Jon G earlier in this thread
Tooze = Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, Allen Lane, 2006, hardback
Motor Vehicles
True, but the German vehicle inventory was in a terrible state on November 1st 1941 due to the autumn mud period. Incidentally, Tooze also makes an interesting remark about that when he writes that the OKH blamed the poor standards of the Wehrmacht's drivers for the high breakdown rates - drivers were certified with a mere 15 km under their belts. As a consequence, they may have droven their vehicles too hard, and, perhaps, they would often not have been able to repair a broken down truck themselves.
The blanket '30%-of-trucks-out-of-service' at any given time does seem pessimistic to me. If there are ten random cars parked in the street where you live, would you assume three of them to be out of order at any given time?
Fair point about the state of the Ostheer on 1/11/41. However, I'm not certain whether or not one can solely blame the mud for this. There is a tendency when talking about the Heer to play up the effect of 'uncontrollable' variables and downplay all others (eg bad command decisions, being outfought). Perhaps this is a legacy of the biographies of the senior German commanders after the war? I’m not doubting that the mud added to the problems and certainly would have caused logjams and shortages but I do wonder whether it has been used as a ‘deus ex machina’ to explain more fundamental underlying faults.
To illustrate this, I'd like to draw a comparison between the Russian campaign and the French campaign. According to Glantz (p.156/7), on 1/11/41 Panzer divisions were at 35% strength. According to Murray (p.39), the French campaign cost Germany 30% of its frontline tank strength. So in a campaign lasting roughly twice as long, the Germans had taken just over twice as many tank losses. So as far as tanks are concerned, the mud really didn’t have that much of an impact. I appreciate that the difference between tracked and wheeled forms of vehicle means a great deal in such circumstances, but I find it hard to reconcile with some of the quotations which you have provided demanding substantial motor vehicle requisitions after relatively short periods of time even in the French campaign.
Perhaps the QM staff were basing their predictions on a formula with a set time period in mind? As a blanket statement, 30% inoperative would imply that spare parts were the main problem and I wonder whether the Heer was suffering as much as the Luftwaffe did in this regard? Murray makes much of how instead of 20 to 30 % of industrial capacity being devoted to spares (p.14) almost no industrial capacity was used for this. This allowed for an increase in frontline strength but no ‘staying’ ability. This tallies well with overall German strategy which seemed to have been predicated to short and powerful blows to overcome foes but with the knowledge that a long war was beyond their means. Add in the knowledge that the logistical arrangements in the SU were going to mean severe shortages even if spare parts were available from stock, and 30% inoperative still seems optimistic to me.
I take your point that at first glance it appears to be exceptionally high as a blanket figure but I’m still unconvinced that it was an excessive figure, and I’m more and more persuaded that it represents something of an optimistic appreciation if one looks at the rate of attrition in the campaigns in Poland, France and then the SU.
Glantz cites a study (apparently unpublished) by Heinrici called The Campaign in Russia (1954, US Army G-2). It’s found in the US archives with an (apparently unpublished) translation by Joseph Welch. I’m wondering whether it has been published in the six years since Glantz originally wrote Before Stalingrad. The conclusions Heinrici makes which Glantz cites seem to indicate that it might be of great interest in so far the logistics of the invasion of the SU is concerned.
The Tooze comment on the state of the oil situation and it applying to drivers is very amusing as he points out that this approach to driver training was happening when Germany had achieved its peak stocks of oil after the fall of France. I believe you’re right to state that such drivers would have little to no experience of actually repairing their own vehicles and thus add to the problems of serviceability. Tooze highlights that skilled mechanics were subject to the push-me pull-you effect of being needed both by the armed forces and the war industries. And given the limited motorisation of Germany in the 1930s, I’d imagine that there would be a fairly limited number of them.
I briefly skimmed Tooze over the weekend to refresh my memory. One thing really struck me with regards to horses. P.212 gives some details of Fromm’s 1936 mobilisation plans. For a force of c.102 divisions (roughly 12 armoured and fully or partially motorised), Fromm set out 120,000 trucks (most to be requisitioned from civilian purposes) and 630,700 horses. It makes for an intriguing (albeit rough) comparison with the Ostheer of 1941.
Trains and transportation
The Ostheer rolling stock numbers strike me as exorbitant. Perhaps the figures pertain to the Ostheer's needs for the entire war, rather than at a particular point in time? I am away from my books as I type this - forgive my sloppy references on that score - but I should be able to dig some numbers out from Potgiesser's book on the German railroads in the east later this week.
Your general point stands, though. The German Reichsbahn were in a pretty run-down state already prior to the war - one thing was servicing an economy running at full speed from re-armament; chronic under-investment actually meant that the stock of rail cars and locomotives was falling through the 1930s
Glantz’s exact words are ‘Moreover, the successful evacuation of the Soviet railroads forced the Germans to commit 2,500 locomotives and 200,000 railcards to support the troops in the east’ (p.65). He cites Klaus Reinhardt, Moscow: The Turning Point in the only note in that paragraph.
Not sure what to make of it to be honest – it could well be just wrong (Glantz is somewhat weaker on the German side of things in comparison to his compendious knowledge of the Soviet archives), so I’d welcome any correction from specialist literature when you are able to post it ?
Certainly, the needs of the Wehrmacht would have stressed an already problematic situation in the distribution network of Europe. Germany itself would have been shielded to a large extent by requisitions from elsewhere in the Grossraum but even fairly early in the war we start to see problems striking the periphery with regards to even basic transportation of goods and materials. The Nazi focus on road links and motor transport were fine when oil was available but the underinvestment in the Reichsbahn certainly played a role in the problems of the war years.
Well, as an only very mildly related point, Britain's infrastructure had its own problems - the U-Boat campaign forced Britain's imports to be funnelled through ports on the west coast, meaning that the well-developed ports of eg. London and on the channel coast stood unused. In turn, that meant that Britain's whole transport infrastructure - notably the railways - had to be re-aligned in order to primarily service ports on the west coast, rather than ports all over the country.
True, this certainly raised turnaround times for shipping (if I recall Churchill’s 1940 notes correctly they were doubled). I have to confess I’ve not seen any literature which discusses problems in Britain’s wartime transportation infrastructure. One can point to problems with shipping (eg I believe parts of India suffered famine as a result of not being able to ship in sufficient extra food from outside the subcontinent) but on the British Isles themselves I haven’t heard of anything like the problems of Germany in 1939/40.
Food
Well, Franco's demands for 400-700,000 tons of grain (the figure stated in the Avalon document which my Spanish post links to) seem quite outrageous, perhaps deliberately so. It is after all Hitler explaining the situation to Mussolini in the Avalon document, so he may well have had an interest in overstating his case a bit. The Spanish oranges exported to France may very well have been compensated in kind by exports from French North Africa to Spain.
I didn’t want to say oranges, but I’d kind of assumed that it would be them.
Interestingly Tooze says ‘In Spain, the situation over the winter of 1940-41 approached famine conditions and the inability of Germany to guarantee sufficient grain supplies was a major factor in persuading Franco not to declare war on the German side’ (p.744, note 94 citing Hernandes-Sandoica and Moradiellos, ‘Spain and the Second World War’, 1939-1945’, in Wylie{ed}, European Neutrals and Non-belligerents During the Second World War, p.241-59.)
As I’ve not read the essay in question, although I’ve placed an order with the British Library for the book today, it’s hard to say whether the argument that Franco placed his demands deliberately too high or not is also one of the issues which should be considered as being up for revision.
That also strikes me as rather speculative planning on the Germans' part. They appear to have expected to add the Ukrainian granary to their food deficit right away, starving the Ukrainian urban population to death, and then proceed to re-colonize the Ukraine to the tune of 100 people per sq. mile if my memory of Tooze serves me - despite previous disappointments in Poland, and also in the Ukraine in 1918. The small detail of beating the Red Army almost looks like an afterthought in an economic/resource-management context.
Tooze speaks of the almost casual nature in which adding an advance of 2000 miles was talked about within the German high command. It does seem absolutely crazy but if one accepts that WW2 was fundamentally about the last great European ‘landgrab’ of the colonial era than one can see why it was so essential (in the minds of the Nazis) to obtain the lebensraum to give Germany self-sufficiency. But even allowing for this ideological context, I’m very surprised that there isn’t more evidence of people like Thomas pointing out the absurdities of the enterprise. The ‘greatest commander of all time’ effect I suppose. There does seem to have been a severe dislocation between the strategic and operational plans for Barbarossa and although Hitler does have to shoulder the majority of the blame, one cannot but help look at the General staff and wonder what on earth they were up to in not noticing the problem far earlier.
Well, the overall picture emerging from the food dependence figures is that Europe was a net food importer pre-war if viewed as a whole. But that may in fact be the limit of these figures' usefulness, particularly because it is not clear how rationing may affect individual countries' degree of dependence on food imports. The key problem, I think, is that war cancels normal market functions. Greece was starving during the war, as you say, and so were the Netherlands; conversely the Germans in fact imported food to Norway during the war, to prevent a serious food shortage turning into outright famine.
That’s a reasonable point but one which seems to be persistently ignored in the literature on World War 2. The economic blockade imposed by Britain on the Grossraum had devastating consequences. However, I’m not certain whether the key problem is one of war cancelling normal market functions or that a particularly ruthless regime decided that the only way to last out a long war was to starve everyone else first. Perhaps this was one of the key lessons ‘learnt’ by the Nazis from WW1? That the home front must be secured and the key to this was ensuring adequate supplies of food. And with a net food deficit, this meant taking food away from other countries whether or not this meant starvation for the rest of Europe.
Just as a sample overview of ration levels in German occupied areas in 1940/41 (calories per day only – so protein/fat etc deficiencies are not shown but ought also to be considered), Tooze (scattered throughout the book – cf the appendix under ‘food rationing’) gives the following:
German soldier: 4000
German civilian: 2570
Norwegian: 1600
Czech: 1600
Belgian: 1300
French: 1300
Pole (General Government): 609 (later 938)
Polish Jew (General Government): 503 (later 369)
Belorussian Jew: 420
One can see a clear hierarchy in food rationing which corresponds to Nazi ideology rather than any pre-war self-sufficiency figures. Just to put the ration levels in context, the British government says the average adult should eat around 2000 calories per day (which is, of course, assuming a modern sedentary lifestyle).
As I mentioned, this ignores the problem of protein and fats in the diet which come primarily from meat. If grain is being diverted for human consumption, then that means fewer animals and a smaller meat ration. One of the horribly black moments of humour in Tooze is found on p.539 (taken from the IMT proceedings) when Goering suggests feeding the Ostarbeiter on horsemeat and cats. Backe consults his figures and reports there aren’t enough cats and the Germans are already eating all the horses they can spare.
Sweden (at 91% food self-sufficiency) plus Bulgaria (at 109%) doesn't mean that Sweden and Bulgaria put together have enough food for the totality of Sweden and Bulgaria's needs.
At any rate, the pre-war food figures can be found in the League of Nations statistics which I linked to earlier. It would be a tedious and laborious task to piece together food stocks for each country from these statistics, but at least theoretically it can be done. Post-1940 harvest figures are conspicuously absent for Grossraum countries (and sadly also for the Soviet Union), but already the absence of figures should tell us something.
I think the figures for the Grossraum are available if one has the time (and relevant language skills) to go through the specialist literature. I personally don’t and, as you say, it would be a long and laborious task to try and piece everything together. Tooze does give some indications of the problems (eg p.419). The French harvest of 1940 was half that of 1938. 1940 was also a bad year for Yugoslavia and Hungary with exports to Germany reduced by 3 million tons – although how far it hit the countries themselves, Tooze does not say. Even if substantial stocks were available pre-war, would a single bad harvest be enough to totally reduce them? That’s if any survived requisitioning.
Just to correct/clarify an earlier point I made, the Soviet grain imports effectively represented half the net surplus of imports. In early 1941, the Soviets agreed to double exports to 2 million tons per annum by utilising their own reserves of grain. Of course, gross imports were much greater than shown in the table from Tooze.
Aeroplanes
Well, if Tooze is to be believed, I am in fact rather surprised how easily the spring 1943 RAF raids against the Ruhr can be read against German armaments production figures, given the many years of fruitless debate over the effect (or non-effect) of the RAF's bombing raids. In fairness, Tooze then goes on to critisize the RAF for switching its efforts over to the battle for Berlin.
It is rather shocking. And one can add in the impact of the blockade to this impression, which one gets in most works on WW2, of ‘minimal impact’. Tooze does point out that the RAF hit the right target almost by mistake in severing the Ruhr from the Reich. The graph on p.600 (figure 22), which shows a counterfactual progression of the German armaments industry, is very persuasive. It also supports the contemporary documents of the likes of Speer and their reports on the impact on German industry. There is definitely room for a revisionist work solely on this issue which takes up the baton from Neilland and Tooze to examine again the impact of Bomber Command. The issue of bombing has been very much muddied by the likes of Irving over the past few decades and it would be nice to see it placed within a strategic context with a broader overview than I’ve yet read.
Well, yes, but Tooze's (& Murray's) argument seems to be that the greatly increased aircraft production came about because Germany was already looking ahead to the next war - the war against Britain and the USA. All those extra aircraft came in handy anyway, but Milch probably didn't expect them to be defending the Reich against USAAF and RAF bombers
I’d like to disagree with you a little here. The range of the Me-109 and the emphasis on fighter aircraft over bombers (compared to earlier production) in Milch’s production plans indicate to me that Germany was preparing to hunker down for a war of attrition against British and US bombers. Tooze (p.582) points out that the order for more He-111 bombers was a horrifying prospect for the Luftwaffe pilots as the plane was considered unfit for use over Britain even at night – it’s unlikely that Milch was unaware of this and so one wonders whether he had abandoned any thoughts of bombing Britain into submission in favour of at least having an aircraft which could be used in support of Heer operations. Add in to this plans for substantial investment in the navy and I get the impression that the idea may well have been to fortify Europe for a war of attrition while trying to starve Britain out and/or striking out to link up with the Japanese via India.
Certainly quantity seemed to be the only priority with the prospect of war with the US approaching ever closer, although even in the absence of actual war with the US the plans of summer and autumn 1941 were drawn up in the knowledge that Britain had just received the equivalent of 2 years spending on the Wehrmacht via a loan from the US, in addition to the 12-18 months which it had spent by using its foreign reserves.
Tooze is rather wicked to point out the role of Speer (and Messerschmitt) in derailing plans for mass production of the jet aircraft (p.621). One wonders at how worried Willy must have been when asked to produce this new aeroplane which he had been claiming as ‘nearly being ready’ since the late 1930s, and one can imagine Speer grabbing the opportunity to intrigue against the only real rival left in the domestic armaments spheres and placing Messerschmitt in his debt. In fairness to both Speer and Messerschmitt, Tooze does point out that no matter the obstructions, the engines weren’t ready and wouldn’t be ready for even limited production until summer 1944, which would mean that any attempt to mass produce the 262 would have led to lots of airframes standing idle until engine production caught up.
As for the Luftwaffe absorbing 40% of Germany's war effort, I recall seeing a similar (but unsubstantiated) figure for the RAF. Then again, Göring's interest as Four Year Plan tsar can be hard to seperate from his interests as head of the Luftwaffe. I'd love to see how much of German synthfuel went to the Luftwaffe and how much went to the Heer, for example.
Tooze gives the following percentages in his download Arming the Reich (available free from his website) :
Britain:
Code: Select all
1941 1942 1944
Ministry of Supply (Army) 37 40.7 36.5
Ministry of Aircraft Production 39.5 37 43.1
Admiralty 23.4 22.3 20.4
(Table 6, citing M. Harrison, A Volume Index of the total munitions output of the UK, 1939-1944, Economic History Review 4 (1990), 657-666)
Table 4 gives German percentages from Wagenfuehr which confirms that Luftwaffe spending was roughly 40% throughout the war.
The distribution of synthetic fuel is something I’ve not seen. Would it perhaps be covered in Birkenfeld’s Der synthetische Treibstoff? I’ve not got access to that work but perhaps someone with access to a German language library or who owns the book can perhaps comment. I seem to recollect 1941 figures of 1 million tons of aviation fuel being produced (Tooze?) with plans to increase to 1.5 million tons.
Goering’s role in the armaments industry is intriguing. Officially, Speer was Goering’s representative in the armaments industry. My gut feeling is that there would be little room for playing inter-service games with the fuel supplies – especially the high octane required for aviation fuel.
I’d best leave it there!
All the best,
Zeb
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I just wonder if Tooze allows some double standards to creep in for he describes (according to statements above) the Bf 109 an obsolete design and surely it should follow that he rates Soviet fighters the same way. After all, if the practical in-the-field performance (achieved by average production airframes vs. ideal figures quoted by some pro-Soviet authors) of the Bf 109 is considered obsolete, that of the Lagg-3s, Mig-3s, La-5s, Yaks and so on is über-obsolete.
Just to add to what Jon G has said, Tooze points out that Soviet industry managed to go for quantity one year earlier than German industry. He comments this was not a failure on Germany’s part but a ‘success’ for Soviet industry. Both countries were ruthless in their industrial production drives with regards to the human cost and so ‘success’ in this context is somewhat qualified.
As Jon says, Tooze does not really comment on Soviet aircraft although I personally would tend to agree with your assessment of the implications. One could get further support for your line of thought from the amount of day-fighter aces made on the Eastern front versus the Western front and the difficulty Eastern aces had when transferred to face the Western allies’ fighter aircraft. This would seem to be also borne out by Murray’s descriptions of the airwar on the Eastern front. However, I know next to nothing about Soviet aircraft and their performance and I’ve yet to read Harrison’s work on the Soviet war economy to place the German economy in perspective.
The point about the 109G is that by the stage of the war when the effects of mass producing it were starting to really show results, it was little match for the western Allies fighters The decision to mass produce it had been taken in Autumn 1941 and by 1943/44 (when the maximum efficiencies had been reached) the 109 was just no longer viable as a combat aircraft in anything but straightline speed.
Tooze’s comments on the 109’s combat effectiveness (specifically the Gustav) are based on the testing carried out and reported by Col.Carson in ‘Best of Breed’, Airpower, 1976, 6, 4.
