German strategy regarding the maritime flanks of the USSR

[glenn239]

But one should not make the mistake by arguing that without a war in the Balkans, Libya would have received an additional 918000 men and 1,972,000 tons of supplies ,as this was logistically impossible and as there was no reason and no need for it .

Agreed, but if one were to say that without Greece the Italians might have moved another 300,000 troops and 600,000 tons of supplies to Africa, I wouldn't think too poorly of such an idea.

[glenn239]

Anyway, none of this is really important, because you are moving the goal posts. I never said that Germany could not provide the "minimal" resources needed to keep Spain "working", whatever that may mean. I said that Germany could not provide what Spain asked for, which was conceded by the Germans themselves, and that Franco had no need to join the Axis if his demands were not fullfiled and nothing else happens.

It all comes down to Barbarossa. If Germany invades the USSR Franco had the luxury of staying clear of the war. If Germany does not, there wasn't much Franco could do.

[glenn239]

The Soviets were also not in a dire need for joining the Axis (to put it mildly), that's why they overplayed their hand during the 1940 negotiations. They would certainly not agree to a treaty that would lead Germany into a position to control the Soviets in any way. They might not even agree to one which would make Germany markedly less dependant on Soviet imports.

The Soviets would have happily pile driven the British Empire into the history books and installed communist regimes from India to everywhere had the Germans been willing to set the political preconditions. So, any historian that says that a German southern strategy had no chance to knock the British out of the Middle East is, quite simply, wrong. The danger for Britain was that if the Soviets start moving south after seeing Axis advances, the entire British position collapses like a house of cards. The USA will not move a finger - this entire region was of no interest to them.

[ljadw]

The Soviets were also not in a dire need for joining the Axis (to put it mildly), that's why they overplayed their hand during the 1940 negotiations. They would certainly not agree to a treaty that would lead Germany into a position to control the Soviets in any way. They might not even agree to one which would make Germany markedly less dependant on Soviet imports.

The Soviets would have happily pile driven the British Empire into the history books and installed communist regimes from India to everywhere had the Germans been willing to set the political preconditions. So, any historian that says that a German southern strategy had no chance to knock the British out of the Middle East is, quite simply, wrong. The danger for Britain was that if the Soviets start moving south after seeing Axis advances, the entire British position collapses like a house of cards. The USA will not move a finger - this entire region was of no interest to them.

It is very doubtful that in 1941 the Soviets had the manpower and the logistical means to move south. And this applies to all other powers .Distances were too great, no roads,an invasion would result in a partisan war .
40 years later, the Soviets went south : to Afghanistan....
And, as the Soviet advance to the south was depending on Axis advantages which could never happen ....
When Rommel advanced,before Barbarossa, to the border of Egypt, the Soviets did nothing .

[Counter]

Data are very serious and can tell us quite a bit.

Data are very serious, but you are not.

The most important factor is numerical superiority. If you have 100 but only 50 operational, and the enemy has 100 and 90 operational, then you send 300 -150 operational- and you have won...

Um, no. If both sides have 100 aircraft, but one side has a sustained operational capability of 60% and the other 90%, who is superior? The one with 90% aircraft operational, right? Or not. If the side with 90% operational capability can only manage one sortie per day, but the other side with 60% operational capability can manage three sorties per day, then which is superior? I'll do the math for you. 100 X 90% X 1 = 90. 100 X 60% x 3 = 180.

According to you, if the LW would have moved to the Lybian desert 1000 aircraft units, the RAF could have won with only 200...

Your "maths": only 500 LW operational/ 180 RAF operational (90%)
then, LW only one sortie / RAF three sorties per unit
so... 500 LW missions per day/ 560 RAF missions per day

According to your "serious" data, Rommel could have never won the battle of Gazala, because the RAF would have destroyed all the Panzerarmee by the air...

yes, no serious book addresses the "unfeasibility" [sic] of the Axis conquering the Mediterranean

That´s the point. Adopting the "Raeder strategy" was evidently workable. They could have called off the Blitz in January 1941 and moved two Luftflotten to the Mediterranean. Sure, they would have coped with problems of improvised airfields, air-filters, temporarily low operational rate and so on... If you are attacking and the other is defending those differences are usual, but numerical superiority is always the capital factor. What LW actually did is proof more than enough for that, particularly in the conditions of early 1941 (UK fighting alone).

So Andreas Hillgruber, Hitler's Strategie, is not a serious book? There he argued that no defeat in the Middle East or Mediterranean could have driven Britain out of the war, so long as Churchill retained the support of Roosevelt

That is discussion on strategy. Maybe what mr Hillgruber wrote is right. Maybe even Roosevelt would have got the US Congress to declare war to Hitler in order to save the Free World. Maybe the USSR would have acted too, as realizing that they would end up surrounded by nazis and muslim nationalists (and secular enemies like Turkey, Persia and Japan, all of them assisted by the Germans).

But the choice was there: it was 100% workable, would have provided the nazis actual gains (the Blitz and the U-boot blockade produced nothing) and most probably it would have given them the victory.

Allies nearly always did good strategic choices. Germany, Italy and Japan, fortunately, did too many bad ones. Maybe there was a reason for that.

[Counter]

What raw materials do you think they could win? In order to ship Persian Gulf oil to Germany, the Germans needed to control the Arab peninsula, Báb-el-Mándeb, the Red Sea and the shores of the western Indian Ocean. This was of course impossible, and far from any concept of Mediterranean strategy, so we are talking about one 12 inch pipeline.

According to what I read here, it was not so little oil from the pipeline in the Mediterranean refinery: between 2 and 4 million tons annually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAZAN_Group The company's beginnings date back to the British Mandate for Palestine when Consolidated Refineries Limited (CRL), a joint venture of Shell and the Anglo-American Oil Company (now Esso),[7] started constructing a sprawling refinery complex which sat at the end of the British-built Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline which stretched from the oil fields near Kirkuk in then British-controlled Iraq.[8]

Construction of the first refinery unit started in 1938 and was carried out by the M. W. Kellogg Co. with assistance from Solel Boneh, with an annual capacity of two million tons of crude oil. Construction was completed in 1944, increasing the annual yield to four million tons of crude oil

There was also some oil in Egypt.

And, as it seems that the "Raeder proposal" didn´t imply war to the USSR, the soviets would keep providing raw materials to the nazi Europe... and everyday at lower price, as they would be heavily threatened by nazis (and new allies) all around them.

Japanese, for example, could be interested too in getting oil from the Persian Gulf too. Remember the US embargo... And they had a powerful Navy.

[Richard Anderson]

Data are very serious, but you are not.

No, I'm quite serious. I suspect that shoe is on a different foot.

According to you, if the LW would have moved to the Lybian desert 1000 aircraft units, the RAF could have won with only 200...

Do you understand "example"?

BTW, you still seem unable to comprehend that the Luftwaffe could not and did not move "1000 aircraft units" to the "Lybian [sic] desert". They never had the basing for a fraction of that number.

According to your "serious" data, Rommel could have never won the battle of Gazala, because the RAF would have destroyed all the Panzerarmee by the air...

The Germans had a flying Panzerarmee? Neat.

Meanwhile, try to argue what is actually said rather than what you imagine was said.

That´s the point. Adopting the "Raeder strategy" was evidently workable. They could have called off the Blitz in January 1941 and moved two Luftflotten to the Mediterranean. Sure, they would have coped with problems of improvised airfields, air-filters, temporarily low operational rate and so on... If you are attacking and the other is defending those differences are usual, but numerical superiority is always the capital factor. What LW actually did is proof more than enough for that, particularly in the conditions of early 1941 (UK fighting alone).

Where are they going to put those two Luftflotte in January 1941? The basing infrastructure simply did not exist in Sicily or Italian North Africa. They do not have Greece, Crete, or Malta, so where do they go? They can build them, take a year or so, then move them. Then what?

That is discussion on strategy. Maybe what mr Hillgruber wrote is right. Maybe even Roosevelt would have got the US Congress to declare war to Hitler in order to save the Free World. Maybe the USSR would have acted too, as realizing that they would end up surrounded by nazis and muslim nationalists (and secular enemies like Turkey, Persia and Japan, all of them assisted by the Germans).

Maybe, but first you need to figure out how the Germans, with a ground-based military, can project its power overseas.

But the choice was there: it was 100% workable, would have provided the nazis actual gains (the Blitz and the U-boot blockade produced nothing) and most probably it would have given them the victory.

You keep missing that the only thing saying it was 100% workable is you opinion, apparently based upon your belief that the Luftwaffe could operate off the bare desert of North Africa and that Panzer divisions can swim. You have yet to paint a coherent picture of how that strategy gets from A to B. Declaring the Luftwaffe is big doesn't do that.

Allies nearly always did good strategic choices. Germany, Italy and Japan, fortunately, did too many bad ones. Maybe there was a reason for that.

Wow that's deep.

[Richard Anderson]

According to what I read here, it was not so little oil from the pipeline in the Mediterranean refinery: between 2 and 4 million tons annually

You are confusing refinery capacity with the output from the Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline. The pipeline could transfer roughly 40,000 barrels per day, which is roughly 800,000 tons per year. The Kirkuk Dome produced 2 billion barrels 1934-1961 when water-injection came into use. So roughly 112 million tons or 4 million or so per year, but was at a very low rate its first years. Between 2 and 4 million tons per year is probably high and is likely double reality. The other pipeline was Kirkuk-Tripoli, which opened in 1934, but was shut down after the French Armistice. The remaining course of the Kirkuk oil was to Basrah and the Persian Gulf for refining.

[Richard Anderson]

BTW, all of Iraq produced 3.438-million tons in 1940, although Kirkuk was a major component of that.

[pugsville]

What raw materials do you think they could win? In order to ship Persian Gulf oil to Germany, the Germans needed to control the Arab peninsula, Báb-el-Mándeb, the Red Sea and the shores of the western Indian Ocean. This was of course impossible, and far from any concept of Mediterranean strategy, so we are talking about one 12 inch pipeline.

According to what I read here, it was not so little oil from the pipeline in the Mediterranean refinery: between 2 and 4 million tons annually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAZAN_Group The company's beginnings date back to the British Mandate for Palestine when Consolidated Refineries Limited (CRL), a joint venture of Shell and the Anglo-American Oil Company (now Esso),[7] started constructing a sprawling refinery complex which sat at the end of the British-built Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline which stretched from the oil fields near Kirkuk in then British-controlled Iraq.[8]

Construction of the first refinery unit started in 1938 and was carried out by the M. W. Kellogg Co. with assistance from Solel Boneh, with an annual capacity of two million tons of crude oil. Construction was completed in 1944, increasing the annual yield to four million tons of crude oil

There was also some oil in Egypt.

And, as it seems that the "Raeder proposal" didn´t imply war to the USSR, the soviets would keep providing raw materials to the nazi Europe... and everyday at lower price, as they would be heavily threatened by nazis (and new allies) all around them.

Japanese, for example, could be interested too in getting oil from the Persian Gulf too. Remember the US embargo... And they had a powerful Navy.

And How could such a pipeline be defended. You know from the various groups used to irregular warfare in desert conditions available or allied to the British> SAS, LRDG, Arab Legion, Jewish resistance?

[Peter89]

What raw materials do you think they could win? In order to ship Persian Gulf oil to Germany, the Germans needed to control the Arab peninsula, Báb-el-Mándeb, the Red Sea and the shores of the western Indian Ocean. This was of course impossible, and far from any concept of Mediterranean strategy, so we are talking about one 12 inch pipeline.

According to what I read here, it was not so little oil from the pipeline in the Mediterranean refinery: between 2 and 4 million tons annually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAZAN_Group The company's beginnings date back to the British Mandate for Palestine when Consolidated Refineries Limited (CRL), a joint venture of Shell and the Anglo-American Oil Company (now Esso),[7] started constructing a sprawling refinery complex which sat at the end of the British-built Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline which stretched from the oil fields near Kirkuk in then British-controlled Iraq.[8]

Construction of the first refinery unit started in 1938 and was carried out by the M. W. Kellogg Co. with assistance from Solel Boneh, with an annual capacity of two million tons of crude oil. Construction was completed in 1944, increasing the annual yield to four million tons of crude oil

There was also some oil in Egypt.

And, as it seems that the "Raeder proposal" didn´t imply war to the USSR, the soviets would keep providing raw materials to the nazi Europe... and everyday at lower price, as they would be heavily threatened by nazis (and new allies) all around them.

Japanese, for example, could be interested too in getting oil from the Persian Gulf too. Remember the US embargo... And they had a powerful Navy.

And How could such a pipeline be defended. You know from the various groups used to irregular warfare in desert conditions available or allied to the British> SAS, LRDG, Arab Legion, Jewish resistance?

It is a very interesting thing, but every commando action against this infrastructure failed, both from the German side and the Allied side. There's quite a literature on that from Operation Boatswain (which is still a mystery) to the Brandenburgers sent with the Iraqi mission, and to the mid-war German deep penetration raids.

The question was not so much whether the pipeline could be protected or not, but what would happen to the oil.

Richard's iraqi numbers (roughly 3.5 million tons) should be put into the context of 249 million tons produced by the Western allies and 31 million tons produced by the Soviet Union in 1941. Germany and its allies produced 8.6 million tons in the same year. (2010 Ferenc Kaiser, p. 9)
,
No one could argue that it wouldn't matter, but it would be a unlikely game changer.

[Peter89]

What raw materials do you think they could win? In order to ship Persian Gulf oil to Germany, the Germans needed to control the Arab peninsula, Báb-el-Mándeb, the Red Sea and the shores of the western Indian Ocean. This was of course impossible, and far from any concept of Mediterranean strategy, so we are talking about one 12 inch pipeline.

According to what I read here, it was not so little oil from the pipeline in the Mediterranean refinery: between 2 and 4 million tons annually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAZAN_Group The company's beginnings date back to the British Mandate for Palestine when Consolidated Refineries Limited (CRL), a joint venture of Shell and the Anglo-American Oil Company (now Esso),[7] started constructing a sprawling refinery complex which sat at the end of the British-built Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline which stretched from the oil fields near Kirkuk in then British-controlled Iraq.[8]

Construction of the first refinery unit started in 1938 and was carried out by the M. W. Kellogg Co. with assistance from Solel Boneh, with an annual capacity of two million tons of crude oil. Construction was completed in 1944, increasing the annual yield to four million tons of crude oil

There was also some oil in Egypt.

And, as it seems that the "Raeder proposal" didn´t imply war to the USSR, the soviets would keep providing raw materials to the nazi Europe... and everyday at lower price, as they would be heavily threatened by nazis (and new allies) all around them.

Japanese, for example, could be interested too in getting oil from the Persian Gulf too. Remember the US embargo... And they had a powerful Navy.

Half of the Kirkuk oil was pumped to Haifa, which the Brits owned, and the terminal, the port, etc. did not have more capacity to handle the fuel. Shipping the oil back to Germany, I mean 3.5 million tons from the Levant was essentially impossible for the German tanker fleet anyway. By the way, most of the excess refining capacities of German-controlled Europe were on the Atlantic coast, and not on the Mediterranean coast. Greece had no refineries before 1958, Spain's only refinery was on the Canaries, Yugoslavia's refineries were built upon river transport of the Romanian crude (in case of low tide, via Fiume and tank wagons). French refineries were also predominantly on the Atlantic coast, so that would leave Italy the only nation with excess refinery capacity of the MTO. What we are talking about is that the German tanker fleet should have shipped the oil to Fiume, then load it to tank cars and send it to Germany. I can't even imagine the cost of this operation.

The amount of oil in Egypt approximated that of Austria.

The Japanese were nowhere near strong enough to protect a shipping lane via the Indian Ocean; in fact, they couldn't even protect their shipping lanes in the Western Pacific, and lost superiority in half a year.

[Peter89]

Data are very serious and can tell us quite a bit.

Data are very serious, but you are not.

The most important factor is numerical superiority. If you have 100 but only 50 operational, and the enemy has 100 and 90 operational, then you send 300 -150 operational- and you have won...

Um, no. If both sides have 100 aircraft, but one side has a sustained operational capability of 60% and the other 90%, who is superior? The one with 90% aircraft operational, right? Or not. If the side with 90% operational capability can only manage one sortie per day, but the other side with 60% operational capability can manage three sorties per day, then which is superior? I'll do the math for you. 100 X 90% X 1 = 90. 100 X 60% x 3 = 180.

According to you, if the LW would have moved to the Lybian desert 1000 aircraft units, the RAF could have won with only 200...

Your "maths": only 500 LW operational/ 180 RAF operational (90%)
then, LW only one sortie / RAF three sorties per unit
so... 500 LW missions per day/ 560 RAF missions per day

According to your "serious" data, Rommel could have never won the battle of Gazala, because the RAF would have destroyed all the Panzerarmee by the air...

Sortie rate of an air force can not be converted directly into a battlefield victory. For example, the distance from the battlefield was just as important; as well as the type and quality of the aircrafts and the crews. Not to mention the ground troops...

[ljadw]

Not only would it be impossible for Germany to restart the oil production, to protect the oil fields,to transport the oil to a port of the Mediterranean, to protect pipelines and ports, to transport the oil over the Mediterranean, to transport him to Germany , but the essential question,which everyone is avoiding ,is : why should Germany do all this ?There is no proof that Germany needed the oil of the Middle East .
If the USSR was defeated ,or if there was no war with the USSR,Germany would need less oil than the 8,6 million of 1941 .
If Britain was defeated,Germany also would need less oil than the 8,6 million from 1941 .

[Peter89]

Not only would it be impossible for Germany to restart the oil production, to protect the oil fields,to transport the oil to a port of the Mediterranean, to protect pipelines and ports, to transport the oil over the Mediterranean, to transport him to Germany , but the essential question,which everyone is avoiding ,is : why should Germany do all this ?There is no proof that Germany needed the oil of the Middle East .
If the USSR was defeated ,or if there was no war with the USSR,Germany would need less oil than the 8,6 million of 1941 .
If Britain was defeated,Germany also would need less oil than the 8,6 million from 1941 .

Germany needed more oil to run the economy, the training programs and the Wehrmacht: thus, it needed more oil.

But you are right in one regard: Germany could increase its production at home: the oil production of Austria and Hungary grew over 100% between 1940 and 1943, not to mention the synthfuel program. In fact, German aviation gasoline production grew roughly 4 times from January 1940 to January 1944, motor gas and diesel roughly 2 times.