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aspqrz02 -> RE: Italy Oil (12/31/2019 10:02:23 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tigercub
Hitler wanted to go south for the Oil from the start...was talked out of it, Oil was the biggest problem the Axis had and was the reason for the lose of the war in Russia by 1942 the Russian people were staving and only just held on, food way more than combat losses was bringing Russia close to its knee's one study i have been looking at.
Hitler wanted so many things. He was never, ever, clear on the details of what he wanted, however, and doesn't seem to have ever been able to settle on any coherent idea of his aims ... have you ever tried to read Mein Kampf or the even more turgid 'Second Book'? If you can get anything coherent out of either you're better than pretty much anyone else, ever.
The US War Department Pamphlet I gave the link to in another thread just last night is also interesting in its lack of any specific and coherent goals beyond 'take all of European Russia' ... and the initial primary (insofar as Hitler articulated them) aims were to take the Industrial and Bread Basket areas west of the Volga.
Thereafter he dithered. Repeatedly.
Even if he had concentrated on the OIL in the Caucasus, the evidence is disastrously clear ... he would have gotten diddly squat.
1) The Russians destroyed any wells and refineries before the Germans could capture them.
2) The Germans had exactly ONE 'Technical Oil Brigade' whose capacity for repairing such and getting them back into production was such that it managed, IIRC, to get one or two wells back into production and up to a massive 200 bbl or so a day before they were thrown out.
At that rate they would have taken a decade or more to get the fields back into production. Great in the long run BUT they wouldn't benefit in the short term, which is when they needed the oil.
3) German Tanker Car capacity for moving Oil by rail was short of what was needed merely to move POL around for their existing requirements. This was not solvable during the war as the steel needed to produce more tanker cars would have had to have been diverted from producing oh so unimportant things such as planes for the Luftwaffe (aerial defence of the homeland as well as tactical use) and tanks, trucks and artillery for the Heer (taking on the rest of Russia) ... and, NO, the resources captured in European Russia did NOT change the shortage materially. The Germans were short of tanker cars for the ENTIRE WAR.
(I could go into chapter and verse as to why, but it boils down to the fact that they started the war in a deep hole trying to dig their way out the supposedly cheap way of stealing goodies they needed... and found out the hard way that all they were doing was digging the hole deeper because the costs of stealing those goodies was far greater than actual peaceful trading)
4) The Russian rail net was ****ed. Wrong gauge. Worse, not enough coaling, watering and, more importantly, repair and maintenance facilities ... and German planning had not taken into account the fact of the latter ... and that all of the equipment needed for the latter was special order stuff that had a long lead time to manufacture AND also took steel and capacity from the oh so unimportant aircraft for the Luftwaffe and Tanks, Trucks and Artillery for the Heer.
So theoretical capacity was never reached.
5) Nope. Can't ship it across the Black Sea either. No indigenous merchant marine with the needed tanker capacity ... heck, no indigenous merchant marine with the needed ship capacity if you tried to ship it in 44 gallon drums. No shipyards to manufacture such ... and, yes, you guessed it, to attempt to do so would have taken steel from the unimportant Luftwaffe and Heer requirements.
In any case, none of the Russian Black Sea ports had the physical wharf and pumping capacity to handle the number of tankers or other merchantmen that would have been required even if they HAD existed. Expanding Port Capacity would have, again, taken steel from the unimportant Luftwaffe and Heer needs.
Likewise, the Romanian and Bulgarian ports didn't have the physical wharfage and pumping capacity.
Then it gets worse, even assuming you get any oil across the Black Sea the Romanians were ALREADY at capacity for their Ploesti oil being shipped back to Germany ... in fact, they couldn't send all they produced because their RR links and Barge capacity on the Danube were inadequate. The Germans, from memory, were trying during the war to run a pipeline from southern Germany down to Romania and, to a limited extent, managed a bit ... but the pipeline head never went far enough to solve the problem. To do so would have diverted high pressure extruded pipe (expensive in terms of Reichsmarks, but more so in terms of production facilities and steel needed by the oh so unimportant Luftwaffe and Heer) was also needed to repair ongoing bombing damage to the German Oil refineries and Synthetic Oil plants and would have had to have been diverted from that.
Look, I know you'll just pooh pooh all this and claim you're a better planner than Hitler ... but these were real world constraints that even the General Staff and, later, Speer simply COULD. NOT. OVERCOME. Hitler may have been clueless, but neither the General Staff Planners nor Speer were ... they tried their hardest to make bricks without straw ... and found out the hard way you can't.
So I suppose it boils down to how much of a fantasy game you wish WarPlan to be?
Phil McGregor
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