Could the Axis nations have pooled manufacturing resources?

[nota]

I think they would be far better off if they CONSPIRED far more
you know actually spoke and listened to each other allowing the plans and goals of their axis partners
to have a bit of effect to their own plans

future production matters less if you are NOT going into the war with the same end goals
or even willing to fight the same nations


then there is the different problem of the occupied nations like france

who had a military industrial system basically looted and broken up but unused in a effective manor
while the numbers of t-38 tanks were used very few to no french tanks were built

[KDF33]

No matter what they did they would lose. There would be no victory in the east and no sending stuff over land to Japan. Please stick to what did happen and what could be done within reality. Any improvements made would at most cause more casualties and maybe delay the end by a short time.

Hm? IMO that's very disputable.

[MarkF617]

This is a matter of differing opinions that can never be proven one way or another but I have never seen a credible argument for German victory.

Thanks

Mark.

[TheMarcksPlan]

This is a matter of differing opinions that can never be proven one way or another but I have never seen a credible argument for German victory.

Thanks

Mark.

Unless you're unusual here, you're emotionally invested in not seeing such an argument. Thus you literally can't.

[Peter89]

This is a matter of differing opinions that can never be proven one way or another but I have never seen a credible argument for German victory.

Thanks

Mark.

What is a "German victory"?

I have never seen anyone describing a world after a "German victory" that could work for 5 years and did not begin with the word "extermination".

[KDF33]

What is a "German victory"?

I have never seen anyone describing a world after a "German victory" that could work for 5 years and did not begin with the word "extermination".

As I see it, the optimal scenario for Germany would have been hegemony over continental Europe, from the Channel to the Urals, as well as a condominium with Italy over the North African coast and the Middle East.

The former Soviet Union would have been the scene of a genocide on a scale dwarfing that of the Holocaust.

The U.S. would have maintained hegemony over the Americas, whereas the U.K., the dominions and the majority of the British colonial empire would have remained independent and aligned with the U.S.

Japan would either have survived, largely due to Germany's success elsewhere, or gone under at the hands of the U.S. In the latter case, East Asia would then have been integrated into the liberal-democratic sphere.

[Peter89]

What is a "German victory"?

I have never seen anyone describing a world after a "German victory" that could work for 5 years and did not begin with the word "extermination".

As I see it, the optimal scenario for Germany would have been hegemony over continental Europe, from the Channel to the Urals, as well as a condominium with Italy over the North African coast and the Middle East.

The former Soviet Union would have been the scene of a genocide on a scale dwarfing that of the Holocaust.

The U.S. would have maintained hegemony over the Americas, whereas the U.K., the dominions and the majority of the British colonial empire would have remained independent and aligned with the U.S.

Japan would either have survived, largely due to Germany's success elsewhere, or gone under at the hands of the U.S. In the latter case, East Asia would then have been integrated into the liberal-democratic sphere.

Yeah, this was never going to happen. No battlefield victory could make this idea survive for long. German rule was outrageous and extremely unpopular; even if everyone decides to side with the Germans, the Germans still could not rule the area and power you described. The seats of power in Europe are ancient, and ancient for a reason: they endured because they represent mutual checks and balances in power. One cannot take out Paris, Berlin, Rome, London, Moscow or Istanbul from the equatation without serious consequences. To remove all of them is a prescription for total failure. All the attempts to gain ultimate power in Europe have failed; and will fail every single time.

[TheMarcksPlan]

As I see it, the optimal scenario for Germany would have been hegemony over continental Europe, from the Channel to the Urals, as well as a condominium with Italy over the North African coast and the Middle East.

Sounds about right if, as I lean towards believing, the European war is settled before the A-bomb comes into play. Germany/Italy would probably have to give some ground in the MidEast; the Allies might prefer indefinite war to total German domination from Lisbon to Tehran.

The former Soviet Union would have been the scene of a genocide on a scale dwarfing that of the Holocaust.

It would not be pretty but I'm not sure the Hunger Plan as a specific program was more than the wetdream of radicals in the Nazi party apparatus. Various "moderate" Nazis like Goering who opined that X number of Easterners would have to starve did so during the pre-Barbarossa smash-and-grab paradigm, before the value of slave labor was fully realized. That they were fine with X starving to death doesn't necessitate that they wouldn't have preferred Y starvation deaths (X>Y) and more slave labor. There would have been, as in OTL, a tug of war between pragmatic imperialists wanting to exploit Slavs (which would still cause many deaths) and Nazi ideologues wanting only to kill them.

Of course the process of cumulative radicalization may have led to the genocide contingent winning that tug of war. And I want to be clear that - specific Hunger Plan program or not - many Slavs would starve anyway due to wartime disruption of food supply and Nazi administrative incompetence/indifference.

Japan would either have survived, largely due to Germany's success elsewhere, or gone under at the hands of the U.S. In the latter case, East Asia would then have been integrated into the liberal-democratic sphere.

I'm not clear on the end game, especially for Japan. Main variables:

• When does Germany want to end the war?
• When do the Allies?
• How much does Germany help Japan?
• A-bomb

If Germany wants - and can get - an earlyish end to war then she probably skips out of the "no separate peace" agreement (if she's made it, which isn't a given if Germany is beating SU in December '41). Then Japan is obviously screwed.

If Germany does not want or cannot get an earlyish peace then she can make Allied victory in the Pacific extremely difficult. One Germany-beats-SU wrinkle is that Japan probably ends up in war with SU by ATL mid-42. The IJA wanted this war, a collapsing SU will be the opportunity for which it continuously prepared in 1942. If Japan is fighting the SU in mid-'42, or preparing to do so, then Midway doesn't happen. That means the US offensive timetable gets pushed into 1943 or, if not, the USN probably takes a beating against then-superior Japanese carrier forces who are counter-punching instead of being counter-punched and ambushed. In either event, US probably isn't approaching the strategically-critical Marianas Islands until early '45. In that scenario, German assistance can come in multiple forms that present serious obstacles to the US:

• Piloted kamikaze V-1's (Reichenbergs). Japan had the Okha but it was short-ranged and rare. V-1 can be launched from ~150 miles, Germany can supply tens of thousands if it wants to. So either bombers or - against landings on Saipan - Guam, Rota, and Tinian can all rain devastating kamikaze attacks on any US fleet. For a Leyte landing, same goes for Samar, Cebu, etc. If a keystone US amphibious operation is defeated with heavy losses, that's feasibly game over in the Pacific and a peace that preserves at least some of the Japanese Empire.
• Cheap German fighters - Me-109 and Fw-190 - would make it very hard for escort carriers, which only operated F4F's, to establish air superiority for landings in the Marianas or Philippines. They'd also make good kamikaze platforms. And they'd make intercepting kamikazes all the more difficult.
• German land weapons - think MG-42's, obsolete Pz II/III/IV's, some trucks for logistics - make Japan able to conquer China in 1943. Operation Ichi-Go nearly collapsed Chiang's government and had only 15,000 trucks in support. Japan's large industrial base in Manchukuo is therefore secure from China-based bombers, can't be bombed from the Marianas. Japan would shift production to this base, as it planned to OTL (but China-based bombers nixed that plan). This also enables the overland route to/from Southeast Asia coming online, which reduces Japanese reliance on vulnerable sea LoC's.
• Germany can help Japanese ASW - as it did for Italy - by providing technical support and expertise.

...all of this assistance via the TSRR.

So ATL Japan is secure in continental Asia and has a larger-than-OTL industrial base there that can supply war even if the Home Islands are economically devastated. She's demonstrated that approaching her inner line of defenses will cost hundreds of ships and tens/hundreds of thousands of lives.

In that scenario, if the war lasts into the Nuclear Age, Japan probably still gets the first nuke. At that point, Hitler probably declares he will make Britain an isle of corpses via chemical/bio warfare if a bomb lands on Germany. But he probably cuts Japan loose and seeks a separate peace.

...if no separate peace the alternative ending is a nuclear campaign involving scores of A-bombs landing on German cities containing, inter alia, 15mil foreign workers. The Germans probably flee their cities when the A-bombs start falling; the zwangsarbeiter can't. And then the German chemical/bio reprisals against Britain and perhaps the US (Germany was developing sub-launched V-weapons; ATL they have more resources to get them in service). Nazi hegemony would be bad; it's at least worth asking whether sustained nuclear/chemical/bio warfare that depopulates Europe could be worse. Obviously it's good to kill Nazis; how many innocent European laborers and German children, plus not-so-innocent German adults, are worth killing to kill the Nazis? 40mil? 10mil? How would Truman/Taft or 1940's US public answer that question? I don't know.

I lean towards believing that Britain, knowing herself vulnerable to German non-nuclear WMD, would oppose a nuclear campaign and reach some sort of peace before it came to that.

The other wildcard is Sealion 44/45. All I'll say for now is it's arguably plausible.

[MarkF617]

Perhaps I should have worded my original question better. What I was meaning was was it TECHNICALLY possible for the EUROPEAN Axis nations to pool their manufacturing resources. I was hoping someone with knowledge of Axis nations manufacturing could help. I was certainly not after a fantasy what if. There is a section of this forum for that sort of thing and tjis is not it. I am not emotionally attached to a discussion about the Axis winning but I am attached to facts and every time I see a what if thete appears to be a lot of wishfull thinking and far too much where everything goes well for one side and not the other. This is why I generally stay out of what ifs.

Thanks

Mark.

[Peter89]

Perhaps I should have worded my original question better. What I was meaning was was it TECHNICALLY possible for the EUROPEAN Axis nations to pool their manufacturing resources. I was hoping someone with knowledge of Axis nations manufacturing could help. I was certainly not after a fantasy what if.

Thanks

Mark.

Hello Mark,

the answer is yes.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi TMP,

I think the fundamental problem is the nature of the Axis. Germany did not exercise the complete political mastery that some imagine. The Axis operated by fairly regular consultation between Hitler and the other Axis heads of state but even the most minor partners retained a level of local autonomy. Even the Slovaks, who owed their national state to German machinations, could sometimes frustrate German intentions.

As I outline in a few examples in Post #14 above, some progress was made in this direction by means of Germany acquiring controlling interests in other Axis military industries from 1941 onwards: "In Romania the Hermann Goering Werke took over the largest industrial group in the country, Malaxa, and renamed it Rogifer. (I think the "Ro" was for Romania, the "g" for "Germania" and "ifer" for the Romanian for iron - "fier".) In Slovakia the HGW also took over all the previously Czech-owned military industrial plants. Hungary's largest industrial enterprise, Manfred Weiss, had also been taken over from its Jewish owners by Himmler's SS-Wirtschafts-und-Verwaltungshauptamt by August 1944. (If I remember correctly, its output of aircraft was split 2:1 in favour of Germany since well before this). The Koralovag shipyard in Bulgaria, which produced MFP ferries for the Wehrmacht, was owned by the German Viking Schiffbau-Gesellschaft."

However, I would suggest that while it was very probably technically possible for the Axis nations to pool more of their industrial resources earlier, political obstacles regarding sovereignty and autonomy would first have had to be overcome and the Axis was a collection of ideologically prickly, nationalistic states each initially pursuing their own autarchy.

The most valuable addition would presumably have been the industries of northern Italy. However, Hitler's tolerance of Mussolini's parallel war and personal regard for the Duce may well have stood in the way of closer integration on the model evolving in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. In his memoirs, Kesselring says he hoped to make the Italian front largely self sufficient in 1945, but I haven't noticed any moves to produce German weaponry there - just attempts at continuing existing Italian production.

Cheers,

Sid.

P.S. This JSTOR article might contain something of interest: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26274547?r ... b_contents

[Peter89]

I think the fundamental problem is the nature of the Axis.

Hello Sid,

that sums it up.

The most valuable addition would presumably have been the industries of northern Italy. However, Hitler's tolerance of Mussolini's parallel war and personal regard for the Duce may well have stood in the way of closer integration on the model evolving in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. In his memoirs, Kesselring says he hoped to make the Italian front largely self sufficient in 1945, but I haven't noticed any moves to produce German weaponry there - just attempts at continuing existing Italian production.

There were plans to produce Panthers in Ansaldo factory, and the Hungarians wanted to buy it as well. The Germans asked 200m RM for the license, thus the deal was never struck.

The British had the proper mindset for a coalition warfare, while the Germans hadn't. The best qualified pilots from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, etc. were not retrained, equipped and integrated into the Axis war effort as the Czech, Polish, Greek, etc. pilots who made up a respectable percentage of the fighter pilots in the BoB. The same goes for merchant marines - the Brits were not the shining examples of chivalry with the Norwegians' merchant marine, but the way the Germans acquired eg. the Hungarian merchant shipping was outrageous, and would leave any but the most stupid "ally" without doubts about the German intentions.

[ljadw]

I did hear on an audio book (on a knifes edge by Prit Buttar) this morning that 2 reasons Germany didn't supply the satellite nations with too much equipment was that until Stalingrad they thought they would win do it wasn't necessary.
The second being they didn't want to arm potential future enemies. With this sort of thinking no real co-operation is ever possible.

Thanks

Mark.

You forget that Germany was supplying Italy with 12 millions of tons of coal per year .

[MarkF617]

No, I haven't forgot that or tje Romanian oil passes on to Italy. I was thinking more along the lines of manufacturing rather than raw materials. I don't know if they did but I bet Germany gave Italy iron as well.

Thanks

Mark.

[MarkF617]

The main reason I started this was because I read somewhere (can't remember where) a while ago that some of the satellite Axis powers simply couldn't build anything too heavy so had to rely on light tanks. My thoughts were that these countries could build light vehicles for the Axis while Germany concentrated on the heavy and complex stuff.

I think one of the reasons for the British accepting foreign pilots into the RAF etc was simply that after the fall of France Britain was out numbered so any additional numbers were welcome. The Germans were accepting all sorts into their armies once it started to go bad in Russia.

Thanks

Mark.