Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "The MAIN Reason Why Germany Lost WW2 - OIL" video.
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@averige
You're splitting dogmatic hairs.
Both of the tyrants wanted to run a despotic empire ... and run it on new-wave Socialist principles -- so scientific they would be.
Both rejected the idea of INTERNATIONAL Socialism/Bolshevism/Naziism/Hitlerism/Stalinism.
Both tyrants wanted total 'brand control.'
As for Marxism, no-one can really say what that is.
Out in the real world, it kept being re-defined by this or that tyrant: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, ... et. al.
In its essentials, Applied Marxism has always entailed massive coercion of the population. (totalitarianism) and centrally planned economies that opt for extreme militarism; usually directed internally at first, with it turned outwards the moment the correlation of forces are favorable.
Hitlerism was of this nature with a few personal twists. He was a Socialist that hated racially incorrect Socialists. Lest you not know, Hitler absorbed virtually EVERY Socialist in Germany into the Nazi Party. (They were given 72 hours to do so.) They didn't object. Other than a handful of fleeing Socialists, everyone signed on the line that was dotted. It was quite a sight to see. Today, this has largely dropped down Winston Smith's Memory Hole.
Conservatives fled the Nazi Party. They usually simply dropped out of politics. So long as they did, Hitler looked the other way. Many Weimar officials survived clean though the war, staying in retirement.
Many German Socialists rose to VERY high rank in the Nazi Party.
This is something that post-war German Socialists can't bear to admit, to see brought up with the younger generations.
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@averige
The scary thing is that Lenin had Stage IV syphilis by the time he gained power -- and died from it.
The Russians admitted this during Yeltsin's presidency. They coughed up Lenin's medical records. It's significant that Lenin's last personal physician was brought in because he was Russia's national expert on syphilis. He had a towering reputation based on his expertise with this killer.
The so-called stroke that Lenin had was nothing more than Lenin ranting and raving from the ravages of syphilis. These rantings continued until the day he died of syphilis.
As you might imagine, Stage IV syphilis is famed for triggering raving paranoia. Lenin was not only warning his Bolshevik pals about Stalin, he was warning Stalin about his Bolshevik pals.
By that hour, Lenin was paranoid about everyone and everything. His mind was collapsing.
By the end, the spirochetes just eat the brain alive, parasitically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis
MANY of Lenin's tyrannical decisions were obviously driven by his syphilis.
Other famous syphilitics:
Adolf Hitler -- with proof ( heart murmur ) in the American national archives + the testimony -- in writing -- of both of his last physicians. Like Lenin, Hitler sought out Germany's top expert in syphilis and made him his personal, attending, physician. (Dr. Morell ) Hitler not only went insane due to Stage IV syphilis -- he was addicted to meth ( speed ) courtesy of Dr. Morell. This addiction was totally out of hand during the summer of '42. Adolf's antics were so extreme that Himmler had his 'medicine' analysed by expert chemists. It was a frightful concoction. He was being poisoned. His addiction caused him to flip-flop his panzers all through Case Blue.
Napoleon Bonaparte -- with proof in the diary of his personal attending physician. This diary was kept hidden until late in the 20th Century. The sole and only reason that the French did not march on Waterloo, June 17, 1815 was because Napoleon's organ was on FIRE from a fresh syphilitic infection. It cost him everything. Later, he died from it on St. Helena. Penicillin hadn't been discovered yet.
Winston Churchill's father. He broke down from Stage IV syphilis right in front of Parliament. He was the Defence Minister at the time. No wonder Winnie had a life-long compulsion to become Defence Minister -- and Prime Minister. We tend to forget, but Winnie was his own Defence Minister. Of course, Winnies father died from the disease.
Just like Stalin -- who was his own Defense Minister, too.
And here I thought that the Spanish Flu was the big killer.
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@Steven
Nope, Nazi Germany was already in a two front war -- had been since June 22, 1941
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Von Rundstedt was right, Rommel was right.
The Americans were impossible to stop at the beachhead;
the Americans were impossible to stop once they got inland.
Yup. They were both right: you're not going to stop the Americans.
Neither FM was concerned about the British.
Their army was just too small.
It was landing in France only because Big Brother, USA, was landing at the same time. Shortly after D-Day the British Army just started to fade away. London just couldn't // wouldn't provide replacements for losses. Everytime you turned around, another British infantry division was being broken up -- entirely.
In contrast, the Americans needed the entire front, from the sea to the Swiss border to get all of their troops into action. This was finally achieved, April 23, 1945. ( Handshake day.)
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@josephking6515 FORGET? !!! My Uncle is likely the ONLY survivor from DORA -- the hell factory that manufactured said wonder weapons.
You'll see it named anything BUT Dora because it was so secret that the Allies didn't even know its name !!!!
Typically it'll be termed Nordhausen, after the nearby smallish town. This is flatly wrong.
It was 'Dora' because it was Camp D of the Buchenwald Camp. ALL of its paperwork was addressed to Buchenvald, Camp D, and then a motorcycle courier would bring the mail up the road to Dora. Dora had no lights at night, no outside lights at all. It had no phone connection to the outside, either. No-one in Dora was EVER in contact with Nordhausen. This is why the civilians there played totally dumb to the US Army interrogators. They really didn't know anything. (!)
No guns were worn in Dora. All death was by TRUNCHEON. Yeah, real up-close-and-personal. Most of the time, there were no huts for the labor force. You slept on open ground -- under the trees. I could go on and on. I'd publish, but there's no market for a book that just makes you throw-up and then have nightmares -- forevere.
My Uncle was in the USAAF and because he was hiding in civilian clothes waiting for the US 1st Army to advance, he was given a RED triangle and sent to die at Dora. Specifically, he was a compelled grave digger. No bodies were burned at Dora, lest the RAF spot the factory.
)Yes, the RAF had largely figured out where Dora was, but not to the point of knowing enough for a bombing strike.)
The RAF was Super-Motivated to stop the V-2. But, of course.
His life was saved because of the bridge at Remagen. When it was captured, Goering and Himmler knew the Americans could not be stopped at the Rhine -- and would be in Berlin PDQ. So they mutually began negotiating to trade 100,000 camp victims for their own skins. Yup. At the end, Adolf found this out. He whacked his brother-in-law over Himmler's betrayal. He sentenced Goering to death -- by radio. He was only days from death, himself.
So my Uncle was transferred out of the death detail -- over to Buchenwald. There he was rescued by the US Army Medical Corps under Patton. He was so weak that he could only whisp his name rank and serial number. He was the ONLY American in that - so-called - hospital.
It took him half-a-year in England before he was well enough to even travel to the USA. (!!!!!)
He did send one French traitor to the gallows -- with his testimony. She'd killed off all other witnesses to her Gestapo collaborations. (!!!!)
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@Xander Turon
Let's stick with the facts. WHEN IT COUNTED, Hitler held back his armies and let Goering's Luftwaffe have bombing practice. THIS is when most of the French and British soldiers escaped.
There was VERY low cloud cover, and both armies were largely fleeing at night.
This gambit fooled the Germans very well.
ONLY AT THE END, when it finally became apparent that the BEF was getting away, did Hitler send in the infantry to mop up.
Yes, he still held the panzers back. They were needed to get to Paris.
The above sequence entirely explains why Hitler let the BEF escape... he actually didn't... he thought that they were hopelessly trapped from the first... that they COULDN'T get away.
Later, after their escape turned into a PR disaster for Hitler, he came up with "I was not really interested in capturing the BEF."
[ I really didn't want that cookie, mother. ]
Another in a LONG line of patented Adolf Hitler lies.
Ever since analysts have imputed to Hitler some bizarre desire to see the BEF get away. That thought NEVER crossed his mind.
To repeat, the BEF snuck away, right under his nose; something that he could not possibly imagine. It's not for nothing that the whole escape was then and now regarded as a national miracle. That's how SHOCKING it was that the BEF got out of Dunkirk.
Worse, the French army replicated the British escape. This is something that is normally new news to moderns. Today's man-in-the-street has no idea that the French escaped the Dunkirk perimeter, too.
The problem was that they had to leave ALL of their weapons behind. Even their rifles.
France simply didn't have enough weapons to re-equip all of the men who had escaped. And all of the best gear had been captured by the Germans in that pocket. ( front line tanks, artillery, FLAK, etc. )
Consequently France threw in the towel June 22, 1940.
22 is, of course, the magic number at Rick's Cafe. Heh.
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@beacon
Guderian, himself, laid all of this out in 1953 in his own book. Others have weighed in on the issue. The 'prof' is correct. The condition of the panzer arm had NOTHING to do with the decision.
Guderian protested right on the spot and at that time.
The decision to let Goering loose was the world's worst kept secret as the Nazis used it in their propaganda at the time. (1940) You'll see it referenced in Allied newsreels of the period... endlessly.
The British-French escape was all detailed years ago -- before YouTube even existed by a British author. Dang if I can't locate my copy any more. It's his work that under-pins the recent film. It's been sitting around for decades, BTW.
That author was stunned as to how much spin the Churchill administration put on the BEF story. Prior to his writing, the larger public never knew about the BEF escaping over the mole.
The actual mechanism was one of the deepest secrets of the war - at that time. Every Tommy was sworn to secrecy about every aspect of the fiasco. Naturally, no-one wanted to ruin the chances for their buddies -- so every Tommy kept his mouth shut.
And Britain had ultra-hard line censorship, too. So nothing leaked into the press. The Press wasn't even let near the debarkation piers, either. The outer image was one of Tommies coming back to England all kitted out in spiffy uniforms, rifle in hand, too. That's what the public saw. Actually, the BEF came back without even small arms, ... and the UK had to re-equip every lad from the boots on up. (typ)
The BEF became the cadre for the massive build out of the British Army that soon took place. So its escape from Dunkirk was the ruination of Nazi Germany.
It was at Dunkirk that Brook and Monty made their bones. Both were destined to the highest rank. Monty proved to be a step-ahead of every other commander. The entire BEF would've been lost without him. Yup. He plugged all of the holes. The man had ice-water running in his veins.
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@John Burns
Every German opponent only achieved success when they went with the Broad Front strategy.
The Germans "owned" the narrow front technique.
Broad Front = attacking German infantry -- not panzers.
Further, it meant attacking horse drawn infantry with you're own motorized formations. You'd pin their infantry with your own infantry, then punch through with tanks and half-tracks and race deep.
This was a consistently winning solution.
Panzers would merely back up as fast as you could ever advance, then they'd counter attack -- most inconveniently.
(This was the correct German solution for both Stalingrad and Kursk, BTW. During Uranus, the panzer formations should've fled west, leaving 6th Army behind, on the Volga to interdict it. Then, having reached the German supply network east of Rostov-on-Don the panzers would've wheeled around and begun counter attacking the most extended spearheads of the Soviets. It would've been a rout. By that time most T34s had broken down just motoring westward. Most Red formations were reduced to light infantry, without any heavy weapons. When the Russian north wing met the south wing, no-one carried anything but small arms. The big stuff was MILES to the rear.)
The German infantry could never quite back up fast enough to avoid being pocketed. Usually they, the infantry divisions, came apart in a shredded manner, with individual companies being swept up by on coming motorized formations.
The horses were particularly vulnerable. Once they were in the bag, all heavy weapons had to be left behind. Then the entire division lost its defensive cohesion. ( Artillery can't be pointed in every direction at once, so the simple trick was to come at it from an off angle. )
It wasn't too long before the German Army had a full blown horse crisis. It started in the late Autumn of '41 and never let up for the rest of the war. It's the reason that the Ostheer was restricted to the southern front. ( Case Blue ) and why 6th Army had no horses up with it at Stalingrad.
( They were short on horses in the first place. They had to get their horses back out of the winter weather -- which meant that they had to pull them back -- way back -- to where horse stalls still existed -- that is, had been newly built. The Russians had destroyed everything standing by such a time.)
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@Kristina
WRONG.
Britain defeated Germany the same old way she did in WWI.
Resource denial.
Indeed, that's TIK's main point.
London simply throttled Berlin's economy by denying it access to its critical war imports:
Crude oil ( imported from the USA )
Met coal ( imported from the USA )
Rubber ( imported from the British Empire )
Chrome ( imported from the British Empire )
Tungsten ( imported from China, Russia, British Empire )
Nickel ( imported from the Commonwealth// Canada or France )
Aluminum ( same as Nickel )
Magnesium ( imported from the USA, others)
Copper ( imported from the USA, others)
Canada was a MAJOR exporter of Aluminum and Nickel at that time. The RAF was built out of Canadian Aluminum.
Virtually all of these war-critical imports were dominated by British, American or Canadian firms.
The Americans also had all of the Gold in the world. The figures astonish. You name it, America had it in spades.
Some of these items could also be imported from South America -- however the firms involved were either American or British. If it came from the Westen Hemisphere, the Americans ran the show. If not them, then it was the British. ( Shell Oil, et. al. )
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@TDavid
Blinded by grand statistics -- and wholly off base.
1) LendLease solved CRITICAL Soviet economic nightmares long BEFORE Uranus.
1a) The US bought Swedish Tungsten Carbide tool bits -- paying in gold -- and flew them on to Russia. THESE would appear to a guy like you to be insignificant. They just happened to increase the output of machine tools EIGHT TIMES OVER.
You need to sit down with a machinist to grasp what I'm laying on you.
2) Critical war goods arrived BEFORE Uranus that decided the whole campaign:
2a) Radio tubes -- the Germans managed to destroy Stalin's ONLY radio tube factory, November 1941. This was kept ultra-secret then and for years afterward. The USA FLEW IN radio tubes to end the crisis. These came the LONG WAY -- via Alaska, Siberia, etc. This back-door route cost a fortune, but was the only way that America could bail out Stalin in 1942. Because the weights involved looked puny compared to oceanic traffic, they get over-looked in the stats.
Because of the extreme secrecy involved, radio tube transfers are usually MISSING from the official reports.
3) The US gave away the latest generation of oil drilling rigs -- the rotary stuff -- PLUS provided Hughes Tool and Baker drilling experts to instruct the Russians. ( Just three guys ) Previously, the Soviets used classic drilling methods that can be seen in the film: "There Will Be Blood." The rotary rigs were 25 times as fast. These were the fount of new Soviet oil that buried the Nazi state from 1943 onwards.
[ One of these fellas was interviewed on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour circa 1979. He was astounded to report that since he left them in WWII, the Russians hadn't changed A THING. They were still stuck in 1940's drilling methods.]
4) The Americans also solved Russia's crappy refinery techniques. Like their drilling, their refining techniques were of the 19th Century. In Western terms, the Soviets didn't refine crude oil -- they merely distilled it -- something that America left behind forty-years earlier.
This is no place to educate you WRT chemical engineering applied to refinery process streams. Suffice it to say, the knowledge required is equal to rocketry and atomics. Stalin just skipped it. Making gasoline to support cars for the average Ivan was just not on his agenda.
I'll stop here.
Your knowledge is false knowledge -- made false by deliberate deceptions crafted by the Soviets to hide their dependencies. They never admitted to the world that they had lost their radio tube factory -- then or ever.
And so forth.
BTW, ALL of Stalin's mainline locomotives were produced up in Leningrad -- the original start point for the entire rail net -- as it was imported from the West. ( IIRR, from France, as Britain was a hostile power to the Tsar way back when, but don't quote me on that.) The USA had to shunt 2,000 main line locomotives to Stalin before the war was over. ( from the Baldwin works -- all of them )
America provided ALL of Stalin's front line military trucks: Studebakers. Even today, the Russian slang for 'truck' is 'Studebaker.' Yeah, they cloned the design.
Soviet trucks looked like Studebakers for decades after the war.
Look at the photos, you'll believe.
Uranus was a success solely because of American land-lines. These permitted STAVKA the luxury of staying off the air. Previously, the Germans were always able to spot Russian counter-moves merely by analysing radio traffic. Such German methods are mimicked today by ALL combatant powers. They were totally novel back then, and responsible for countless early war German victories. (North Africa)
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@Peorhum
Nope. Not a chance.
The ONLY shot that the Germans had in North Africa was by way of a drilling campaign.
Astoundingly, it never occurred to either the Italians or the Germans to drill for water in Libya. It's not as if it had been tried and the holes came up dry.
Virtually the ENTIRE nation sits atop a massive aquifer, with the biggest deposits in the deep southern desert. Still, it had water virtually right up to the coast.
This water actually comes from the Nile river... by way of Sudan. You see the Earth is splitting apart there, so the ground gives way to an immense, bottomless swamp. And I do mean bottomless. Attempts have been made to find the bottom, and the drill string just kept going and going until the crew ran out of pipe. (!)
Then, with the passage of millions of years, the swamp water wicked its way north to create an immense aquifer from western Egypt all the way to the west. IIRC, it's the biggest ever discovered.
Underneath that lens of water lies the best crude oil ever discovered. It's practically gasoline. ( okay it's only 40-50% gasoline ) A single well could've supplied the DAK and the Italian fleet.
The Nazis and Fascist Italians could've pumped 2,000,000 bbl per day out of Libya -- if given enough time to build it out. ( Think fifteen years. )
What a gaff. They never looked, not even once. After the discoveries under Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- why didn't they get curious?
This option was available BEFORE Barbarossa. With a modern rig, water would be hit after about three-days, BTW... oil would take another week, week and a half.
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@Peorhum
andrew is largely correct.
The assets used for Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete came from Army Group North almost exclusively.
This had a DRASTIC impact during Barbarossa.
1) The British SUNK 2nd Panzer Division -- not the men -- just the panzers. The Germans were shipping all of its equipment from Greece to Italy -- thence to be rail roaded back to Army Group North. They all ended up under the Adriatic.
This one panzer division counts as TWO, as it was still based on the TO&E of 1940. It hadn't been divided in half for Barbarossa. ~400 panzers were sunk -- in two ships. So, until the Battle of Moscow, the most elite, powerful German panzer division, Guderian's favorite, was cooling its heels back in Germany, being totally rebuilt.
2) Crete was the end of German airborne operations. This proved to be HUGE, HUGE, HUGE. The German parachute arm was the instrument of victory time and time again. It was originally intended to assist in the conquest of Leningrad. ( one scheme out of many ) The idea was to parachute it on top of the rail line leading off to the east and Archangel. This would entirely eliminate support to the defenders of that city. The plan would be to rip up the rail road and retreat back to German lines while the panzers surged forward to meet the paras. It could've worked.
3) The rail net of Yugoslavia and Greece was a travesty. So rail road repairs sucked down all of the SUPPLIES and tooling and troops intended for Army Group North. This was to have knock-on effects during Barbarossa. The Germans simply couldn't repair the rails as fast as originally planned. This was a MAJOR screw up that directly fed back into burning too much gasoline -- to replace the missing steam locomotives.
4) Greece also kept the 1st SS Brigade in the south, and much else. This was the wrong place for such an elite unit. The Romanian front did not move until Army Group South peeled the Soviets backward. This process took more than a month. Until then, 11th Army just sat on its azz... with two Romanian armies to keep it company.
5) Greece and Crete continued to be a drag on German resources -- especially oil. For you had to keep supplying the Crete garrison with motor transport ( no grass for horses ) and air cover and shipping to and fro. None of this was in the 'original military budget' for 1941. It was a total bleeder.
What proved to be a fiasco for the British Empire proved ultimately to be the utter downfall of Nazi Germany. But no-one saw that at the time. Indeed, most don't comprehend it to this day.
But Greece and Crete is where Nazi Germany really went off the rails. Germany couldn't afford to even enter this campaign. It was that much of a bleeder. Greece is probably the ONLY time in Churchill's life that he made a correct military decision of a strategic nature.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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@gr-s2143 You're going to have to read more widely.
Up until Tehran, the British ALWAYS got their way -- strategically -- vis a vis the Americans. They saw themselves as the Senior Partner and MUCH more savvy than the Colonial Upstarts. When Americans spelled out their production and mobilization schedules -- from Winnie on down -- they DID NOT BELIEVE such fictions. In the event, the Americans exceeded every one of the dis-regarded schedules. The reality of this was flatly attested to by Winnie, himself, in Missouri after the war. This admission was behind closed doors and not set to print for many years. I don't think his admission has ever been circulated in the UK. It's just too embarrassing.
In my post I omitted the reality that the 49th UK division was broken up to feed other UK infantry divisions. Winnie was. actually refusing to ship more blood over from the home islands. The primary reason so many of British 1st Airborne were guardsmen was that Winnie flatly refused to commit HRM's Imperial Guard. He was, however, more than willing to commit the IRISH GUARDS. You might note that they were at the head of XXX Corps during Garden.
After years of warfare, Britain simply had reached the end of its manpower. Winnie, unlike Adolf, was not willing to commit teen aged boys to the fight. By Overlord's success, Winnie knew that the war was going to terminate with total victory. FDR insisted on Unconditional Surrender all the way back at Casablanca. (A stunned Winnie dang near swallowed his cigar. Check the film footage.) [It was a forced 'choice' as there was no way in he!! that Adolf could be allowed to survive his war on humanity. No way that the Nazi Party could exist any longer in any form.]
Britain and Canada had CRITICAL roles in WWII -- but supplying manpower wasn't one of them.
Canada's Dieppe blood paved the way for Uranus and the death of Germany's 6th Army. Somehow decades have passed and Canadians don't connect Dieppe with Uranus.
Here's the connection. Zeitzler was the MG who defeated the Dieppe raid. Adolf boosted this two-star general up to run OKH -- and the Eastern Front -- at a single stroke. He canned Halder. Once in his new seat, he was screaming about Army Group B, ie 6th Army. He begged for reinforcements -- from where ? His old command, is where. That's right he wanted to bring the boys from the Channel into the northern wing of Army Group B. (The boys he knew best, of course. He was buddies with all of the commanders of same. Duh.) Adolf denied Kurt. Instead, Dieppe convinced him that the Channel needed MORE troops -- not Army Group B. So, during all of the weeks leading up to Uranus, Army Group B was starved of reinforcements -- they went to Kurt's old command -- staring at the sea, instead. Zeitzler wanted those troops to replace the Hungarians, Italians on 6th Army's left wing. It was THAT obvious to him, and everybody but Adolf, that the Soviets could just open the door and walk though. And they did so.
It was the BRITISH that informed STAVKA that they just HAD to grab their own Enigma machine ASAP if they wanted to stop Hitler. This they did so -- one was stationed -- against Hitler's explicit order -- with the Hungarian army up north. During a total-white-out the NKVD Special Forces captured that machine -- WITH all of its paperwork AND its operators!!!! This reality has never been admitted to by the USSR/Russia even to this day. You KNOW that they did so because they immediately started to use it to spoof Adolf Hitler's command instructions straight away. Even while he was on his train returning to HQ -- and totally out of communications -- STAVKA broadcast Fuhrer directives to 6th Army -- the most important being that the 29th Motorized Division was to stop its southernly counter-attack AT ONCE because the Soviets had broken across the Volga even further south and that the 29th needed to be committed further and down and away to be stopped. This was pure BS, of course. The 29th was actually a totally fresh, OVER STRENGTH motorized division, that had been held in reserve all during the previous months awaiting just this development. In its early going, it was just cutting the Soviets to shreds. They had not yet gotten their heavy weapons across the Volga, Those karst ridges were a bit$#@.
Manstein DID dope all of the above out PDQ. He counter-spoofed STAVKA to pull of his Winter Miracle.
Brits and Canadians almost always post errantly about their real contribution to the war. They keep looking over their shoulders at the Americans -- and benchmark against them. That's just stupid. The production miracle of the Americans is nothing that any nation can benchmark without looking very, very badly. Ditto for the US Army.
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@timobrienwells
Lastly, manganese IS a very important element, metal, BUT, is not anywhere near as critical as nickel.
I've never heard of any nation panicking over manganese -- even though it's essential in dry cell batteries and much else -- but virtually every modern power is obsessed with nickel.
There are just so few workable deposits, and even those are a bitch. It's a tough critter.
Russia, Canada, New Caledonia (France), were the big players back in WWII.
Speer was freaked out when the jet engine demanded so much nickel.
BTW, they STILL DO.
In the USA, nickel demand went through the roof during WWII.
It was the critical item in stainless steel -- THE limiting element in the production of PENICILLIN. Yup. Most nickel went for this drug.
The second priority: the diffusion plant at Oak Ridge. It was built entirely around nickel 'sponge' filters.
This technology is passe, but still can't be discussed. So we'll stop here.
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If he was to invade in 41, Adolf should've stayed out of Ukraine. The grain there would've automatically been harvested and stored in Kharkhov. Stalin built a MASSIVE food storage complex there, right on the Russian-Ukraine border. From Kharkhov up to Moscow Stalin built the ONLY double-tracked and ballasted rail line in the whole nation.
So the obvious play is to never send 1st Panzer Army into Ukraine, just block the Red 5th Army with the German 6th Army -- and send the 1st PA up with the 4th PA to Leningrad.
Why? ALL of Russia's locomotive production came from a super factory in that city. It took the USA to replace the lost production ~ 2,000 full sized locos by war's end. How can Stalin survive without trains ? He can't.
Everyone on the planet knew the factory was there, because it was imported, and Leningrad is where the ENTIRE Russian rail net originated. It went straight to Moscow and then branched out.
The route to Leningrad was greased: the Baltic nations hated the Reds. During the actual campaign, all of the locals would rat out the Red Army, and solve every 'map problem' for the lost and corn fused Germans. That's why the leap to Leningrad was so FAST.
Further, the Baltic sea solved German logistical nightmares. They did a chitty job of it, but they actually did use barges to ship everything up the Baltic coast -- the barges worked fine even without reaching port. There were tons of calm small bays that proved suitable.
Once Leningrad caves, both panzer armies could be fed from that port -- and then race south for the rest of the campaign.
No attempt at bombing Moscow, or Leningrad should've been attempted. Why destroy what you'll soon own? The Bismark and Tirpiz should've been buddied to take out the Russian BBs at Leningrad. They would've totally out classed anything there. They were totally over matched against the British. Forget the propaganda, they were dead meat in front of the Royal Navy.
All four panzer armies should've slammed into Moscow. Unlike Napoleon's day, CRITICAL war industries vital to the Red Army were right there. One stands out: the Germans actually destroyed Stalin's ONLY RADIO TUBE FACTORY. It was so small that the Germans didn't realize what they'd done. This fiasco was one of the deepest secrets of the USSR. They conned FDR in to prioritizing Lendlease raido tubes. Until these arrived the Red Army actually pull radio sets out of front line tanks -- to save what they had for command sets. (!) This fiasco explains why the Red tanks were so pathetic during 1942. It took that long for this matter to be corrected. (They basically had to redesign their radios to use American tubes. They were too embarrassed to take complete radio sets.)
As you might grasp, the same radio scavenging hunt occurred in the Red Air Force.
So, Moscow WAS important... think tank optics... etc.
The Red Army in Ukraine is parallyzed. It HAS to hold down the furious locals and collect the harvest. Attacking Moscow forces Stalin to force feed all of his best units straight into the maw of the panzer force... that's four armies side by side.
Then it's off to Kharkhov to pick up food rations, repairing the rail net ASAP -- like a maniac. ( The American Army did so at every occasion. They rebuilt the rail net in Northwest Africa for 7th Army... filmed it even. )
Then it's off to the oil fields racing away from the winter cold... leaving the infantry armies well behind.
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I see that Joseph Layton has a German Coal to Gas Program WW2 lecture linked in the YouTube side bar.
Man is that lecture full of both fact and error.
The PRIMARY error -- shared by the Nazis and their industrial chemists -- was to use the statistics ( chemistry results ) seen with the coking process of Met Coal with the same process when Lignite or Bituminous Coal is processed.
The shift in feedstock is ALL IMPORTANT. Met Coal is prized because it has LOW contamination from Ash, Sulfur and Phosphorous. ( The latter is even more trouble than sulfur, BTW. )
[ In a reducing environment ( iron smelter ) one is always at risk for creation of H3P and H2S -- BOTH are intensely toxic -- way, way beyond HCN -- the stuff used to execute criminals in the gas chamber. This is why Met Coal commands quite the premium. It doesn't create process headaches.
( 5 to 10 times by weight of inferior coals -- indeed many coals just can't be used in iron reduction no matter how cheaply they can be purchased.)
( Lots of ash also just gums up the works something awful. )
In contrast, the vapors that one can drive off of bituminous coal make for IDEAL crude oil feedstock. They HAVE to be light. They don't become vapors any other way.
Where the Nazis went totally off the rails: trying to muck around with the residium -- to convert it into synthesis gas. That's doable only if you're willing to just BURN money.
It just takes TOO MUCH equipment -- very high pressure equipment. It's these high pressure steels that the Nazis couldn't manufacture in sufficient amounts. They never ran low on low performance steels.
The correct solution was to set up a co-generation plant that would burn the residium to rais steam and to generate electric power. No attempt should've been made to muck around with the 'heavies' // aka 'bottoms' // coked out cr ap that the process generated.
Further, the correct device for coking bituminous coal can be seen in mass use: it consists of slots for the coal which are purged by a hydaulic ram after each cycle.
In normal coking the product desired is the coke. For the Nazis, the product desired was the off-gas. The remainder should've been shoved into rail road cars and shunted off to an adjacent power plant.
This kind of gear does not require exotic steels, nor tricky construction. It just needs to eat a LOT of bituminous coal.
To get even MORE syn-crude one should process Lignite. It will, however, produce a totally rotten heat value in the cr ap left over. The vapors will be WET... lots of steam in them. Fortunately, steam is very easy to condense out of the process stream. A wet stream will also largely cleanse the fluid of most acids and bases. They'll be so ionic that they just partition into the water phase. Poof, no longer a problem.
( Don't bring this up with the EPA. )
The kicker with the above scheme is that it dates from the 19th Century.
The ego-problem for German chemists was that they just couldn't bear to live with the energy waste required for maximum through-put and lowest cost. They, the CHEMISTS kept pitching processes that just SUCKED DOWN steel and capital -- as if they were still living in a peace-time economic equation.
It's notable that most of the Nazi plants were schemed up during the pre-war era -- with not one of the key players being told of the larger picture.
As for Diesel fuel ( aka middle distillate for those in the refining trade ) -- it should've been the OBVIOUS target -- never gasoline. Germany had the world's best Diesel engines. Herr Diesel was a German inventor in the first place. Practically every Diesel improvement was initiated in Germany as a result. They, the engineers, had received MASSIVE funding from the Kaiser for Diesel engined U-Boats going back two-generations earlier.
So it's astounding that Guderian and Hoepner ever designed the Mark III and Mark IV panzers to use gasoline. No nation uses gasoline powered tanks these days. They were abandoned, wholesale, during the 1950's. ( And those tanks were left-overs from WWII.)
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