Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "Countering Plan Z - What would the Royal Navy have done?" video.
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Shipbuilding is a complicated, synergistic practice that requires multiple sources of materials supply, skilled labor and government funding support. Warship building even more so, and the bigger warships require extraordinary effort. It can be built up over time with concerted government-business effort, but it cannot be thrown together overnight. It took the Japanese 20-30 years to build up their own capability to build small ships, and another 10-20 to transfer the advanced building techniques from UK to Japan for boilers, turbines, armor and guns for battleships. Commonwealth countries such as Canada had been encouraged to build commercial ships and small warships, sometimes by supplying vital components like turbines from the UK. Drydocks and naval support yards had been established in Canada, South Africa, India and Australia as well.
The other element of consideration is that the bottleneck items such as turbines, guns and armor plate were being manufactured at a rate that could support the existing building ways in the UK, so there was little excess that could be diverted to supply building ways overseas, and starting new manufacturers of those items would take longer to bring up to speed than the war was likely to last.
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The UK had significant commitments in Asia - the Persian Gulf, India/Pakistan, Burma, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, all of which it owed some measure of naval & military protection to. Yes, the homeland was in Europe, but it planned, budgeted and allocated forces to all of those areas in addition to the Atlantic and Mediterranean theatres. The fact that so many of it's military and naval assumptions (in particular, the continued contribution of France) went wrong in 1940 forced it to pull back forces from Asia to cover gaps back home. As tensions increased in Asia it was beginning to swing some forces back, but "too little too late" was an ongoing problem. Another erroneous assumption was the impregnability of the fortress of Singapore, whose fall in early 1942 laid bare the lack of alternatives and forced the fall back to India.
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