Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "The Paradox of Germany’s WW2 COAL Problem" video.

Germany never motorised its army. 650,000 horses invaded the USSR. The Royal Navy blockade prevented rubber being available for tyres for vehicles, and also oil to run the vehicles, preventing the German forces being fully motorised. If the forces took to the roads there would not be a problem. Incidently, the world's first fully motorised army was the BEF in France, and later the US army. So they had to use rail for the armed forces, clogging the rail network, depriving industry. Nothing to do with socialism. You cannot create what you do not have - rubber & oil. They needed to look ahead, expanding the rail network when they had the chance pre-war, also anticipating supply shortages. But I doubt anyone thought of rubber and oil shortages until it happened - military men rarely would do that. A privatised railway would not have forecast the situation, that can only come from government. It is just that no one thought it through.
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In 1939 the normal seasonal problems were compounded by the mass movement of troops, first to their jumping off positions along the eastern border and then to the western frontier. Bottlenecks and jams radiated across the system. Crashes multiplied, with two major disasters just before Christmas claiming the lives of 230 people and shaking public confidence. Over the winter of 1939-40, Gestapo informants on platforms across the country reported public outrage at delays and arbitrary cancellations. The rail administrators struggled to ease the problems of freight traffic by cutting passenger services wholesale. But even drastic measures could not prevent a crisis. By early 1940, tens of thousands of freight cars were frozen in kilometres of traffic jams. By January, turn-around times had risen to more than a week. The effective carrying capacity of the Reichsbahn's rolling stock plummeted and the immediate result was an interruption to coal supplies. .. .. In January 1940 Goering described transport as the problem of the German war economy. - Wages of Destruction - Adam Tooze.
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