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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28511 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Exactly what it says on the tin.

Things like the tiger tank and various "wunderwaffe" get most of the attention but the Wehrmacht and the wider German economy was still very much a horse and mule drawn affair going into WWII and this significantly contributed to thier food shortages.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...

Sure, I can buy the Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector, to the detriment of civilians, but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense. Forget about the Wunderwaffen, tell me how the horses and mules produce, in terms of raw numbers, enough tanks, fighters, bombers, and their respective munitions, to conquer France, challenge Britain, and drive deep into the Soviet Union at the same time!

but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense.

...and yet it was so. In 1938 there were an estimated 2.5 million operational motor vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors, locomotives, etc...) in Germany servicing a population of approximately 68 million. IOW a per capita rate of 0.036

Compare that to an estimated 30 million vehicles servicing a population of 130 million people (a per capita rate of 0.230) in the US.

"Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector" doesn't quite capture how heavily skewed it was, or just how hard it ended up screwing them.

Whats that old Napoleon quote? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.

One of several reasons the Germans lost is that they put lots of time and energy into developing fancy toys and a comparatively little energy into developing the ability to produce them and keep them in the fight.

Then please step me through how these horses and mules built something to the tune of 100K aircraft - roughly the same number that the Brits did. Did the Germans use some Aryan über-mules, or were the Brits fake-industrialized as well?

What is there to step through? Nothing in the design of a Messerschmitt precludes fueling it from the back of a horse-cart.

I would imagine that the sheer scale implies the use of some sort of mass transportation system, like a railway, to deliver the raw resources needed for their production. Also factories. But if Tooze says it's mules all the way down, I guess I better trust the experts.

Its not that they didn't have cars, trucks, or locomotives at all. It's that they had so few of them.

And yes a good part of the blame goes to the the steel shortage described by @WestphalianPeace but the simple facts remain.

Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.

So I'll go right back to the raw production numbers I cited, and point out they were roughly on-par with Britain. They obviously ultimately lost, but the run for the money that they gave to Europe + US would indicate that they weren't backwards or low-tech. Either that, or everyone else was as well, which makes those descriptors meaningless.

Also re: locomotives in particular, you can tell where Prussia used to end, and where the Russian Empire began, just by looking at the railway map of Europe. To be clear: not the 1930's and 40's map - the one from current year. Like, I don't know if you realize how tall the order of "Germany was a backwards low-tech economy" is.

Britain was also very primitive. They were still eating their old mine and shunting ponies in the 50s, because all through the war all their railyards were using horses. (They also didn't get the post-war infrastructure rebuild that Europe got, which accelerated their decline.)

Germany was in the situation where the vast majority of their divisions were exactly as maneuverable as in WW1 the second they got off trains and hitched their anti-tank guns to the horse teams.
My dad had an older artilleryman friend who said they were jealous of the panzer units heading east, but very grateful for the horses on the way back west because you can't eat a tank.

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The Germans had trains and barges to connect the mines and factories in their own territories and move goods and people. This doesn't help your army on the march.

I mean, even there that's not particularly backwards and low-tech for that era. Especially if you look at the amount of infrastructure in the east, and the German's chronic problems with just finding enough oil, it might even start looking like a rational choice.

But in any case, the reason I did a double-take, and an now at the stage where I'll die on this hill, is that they were talking about the economy, not army logistics.

Yeah, the consensus(?) in this chain of comments appears to be bizarre.

It's true that the British and American land armies were fully mechanized in WW2, mainly because they were relatively small. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, wasn't. And yes, the peasantry was something like a quarter of the whole German population. But to conclude from that it was a backwards low-tech economy to begin with is really far-fetched.

The Toozian argument is that, before WWII, a large portion of the German economy remained focused on 'conventional' production, matters like textiles, farm labor, mining, etc, while more advanced or complicated technologies were either unavailable or made up smaller portions of the full sector. The Nazis were very much able to exploit this; despite often tragicomedic levels of incompetence, there were so many low-hanging fruit in a country with a lot of industrial technology but not anywhere near as much industrial economy that they could pick winners.

Tooze focuses a lot on textiles as one particular example: in 1933, the German textile industry was a vast part of both German labor force and total import balance sheet, but it was also not especially advanced or unusually automated by the standards of its time. Nazi policy squeezed the entire sector hard (Tooze has a chart showing nearly a 15% drop in total employment in the sector), and at the same time pushed the remainder toward more emphasis on synthetic fibers and final productions, mostly a side effect of their autarky policies.

Similarly, while agriculture was a massive portion of the German economy in 1933, with just over a quarter of the working populace, much of these people were just barely above sustenance farming on tiny parcels of land, while agricultural automation and electrification had stalled badly post-WWI. Germany had pioneered artificial nitric acid and ammonium nitrate during WWI (and the Haber process was a good part of how Germany had been able to fight as long as it did), but there was no German 'green revolution'; these technologies were focused almost entirely into the military, industrial, and transportation sectors.

((To its credit, this lack of focus on agricultural automation and efficient use of labor is probably why some local populaces in conquered territories were supposed to be useful after invasion... as, uh... 'not-quite-voluntary labor'. So not much credit.))

By 1938, the urban areas and military matters had been heavily revamped, but large sectors were basket cases, both urban and otherwise -- Tooze highlights the extent that rural agriculture was often overlooked in the buildup with a lengthy segue about Nazi ponderings to encourage farm labor that, after politics hit, turned into a counterproductive tax on the dairy farms somehow. And while Tooze doesn't focus on it, a lot of the Nazi policies emphasizing centralized control of the electricity infrastructure pushed toward urbanization and against agricultural automation.

((That said, I do think Tooze's argument overlooks the extent this was a choice. Tooze says:

But to see [settlement inside German territories] as a fundamental solution to Germany's problems was [perceived by Hitler as] a dangerous illusion. It was one more instance of the liberal fallacy that Germany could prosper through an ever more intensive utilization of its national resources.

But, to borrow from Hellsing Abridged, if you call heads, it matters what face the coin falls. The liberal fallacy about utilization of national resources not only ended up working in Mexico, it ended up working in no small part thanks to pre-Nazi German technology!))

Ignoring the US for a moment, where else was there an agricultural sector that was more mechanized and advanced than the German in 1933?

When it comes to mechanization, he gives the US and Australia pre-WWII, which basically just means the US. I don't know for post-1938, since Tooze doesn't get into the numbers for that and I've had trouble finding any serious efforts to pull apart the results of policy from the results of everything with wheels getting blown up. Much of the productivity difference beyond that is more prosaic: German agriculture focused more than the typical country on staple crops than cash crops or animal products, run by small and often inefficient farms, which had major labor shortages, while dependent on external feedstocks of fertilizers and vulnerable to bad weather.

But Tooze's argument is more:

What is more surprising, from our early twenty-first-century perspective, is Germany's marked inferiority relative to Britain. According to Clark, Britain not only had a higher per capita income than Germany; he believed that despite the much smaller size of the British population, the British economy was still somewhat larger than that of Germany. This conclusion has been modified by more recent calculations. We now believe that the German economy in the 1930s was slightly larger. However, the claim that per capita incomes in Germany were substantially lower than in Britain has proved robust. This difference was clearly not attributable to any qualitative difference in the productivity of British and German manufacturing. In virtually every industrial sector, German and British firms were closely matched. What dragged Germany down was its large and highly inefficient agricultural sector and the substantial tail of small shops and workshops in the craft and service sectors. In the 1930s productivity per head in German agriculture was only half that in German industry, at a time when more than 9 million people were still employed in farming.

The comparison is unfair, and Tooze knows it's unfair -- the British economy shrunk its agricultural sector by having someone else do it, in a way that post-WWI and pre-Nazi Germany wasn't going to be allowed to do. But it's the argument he makes.

Correlli Barnett's works, however, paint a rather unflattering picture of the British war economy, don't they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlli_Barnett#The_Pride_and_Fall_Sequence

It's been a long time since I read the The Collapse of British Power, but I thought most of the wartime manufacturing criticism focused on pre-WWI, where British on shore manufacturing was an absolute mess of tiny shops with no serious production capabilities. By the 1920s, the Barnett highlights the development of national manufacturing as a turnaround (if with US and continental assistance) from an area where engines, steel, and basic mechanisms couldn't be produced at all. For WWII, the problem is instead political and peacetime economics, with the UK waiting until years after the last minute to start re-arming and then finding itself slow to build the tools to build the tools to get back up to parity, as well as struggling entirely to modernize aircraft work (though I remember Barnett kinda glossed over a lot of interwar British aviation work).

((There was, to return to the topic, some criticism of Churchill in the book... but more under his Treasury policies.))

To some extent, yes, both countries hard major problems moving to mass manufacturing, in different ways. Barnett highlighted some extremely powerful mills and lathes that interwar Britain had to import from Germany, as part of Britain's general issues bringing together general-purpose.... but even where 1930s Germany had as many lathes-per-metalworking-employee as the US they were largely manual work

I can definitely recall his observation that the manufacture of one Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft took on average three times as many working hours as that of a comparative Bf-109 in Germany, for example.

That's the thing, they didn't. They frequently outran their logistics, had an impossible time recovering damaged tanks, and almost never had enough of them in the first place.
The conquest of Poland resulted in a lot more casualties than normally acknowledged, and the invasion of France was a nearer-run thing than you'd expect. For the first few years of the war they managed to do wonders, but behind the propaganda reels of blitzkrieging tanks those early fights cost them a lot of their best infantry

This is all with the caveat that I barely even have a passing interest in history... but it's just not adding up.

You can tell me all about how they outran their logistics, and couldn't recover their tanks, but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case. Either all of them are, and the fight went the way it did, for as long as it did, because they were more or less evenly matched, or this portrayal is itself propaganda.

My understanding is not that Germany was some sort of backwards pre-industrial nation. Germany was a technological innovator in many fields. It was a steel producing giant with a highly industrialized economy. German economy had some unique, and other not so unique, financial issues following WW1 but I don't know quite as much about that.

The German military more heavily relied on horse power due to oil shortages and supply allocation compared to its peers. All nations were limited by fuel to some extent. Germany to such an extent that it structured major parts of its strategy around the acquisition of oil sources and did lots of science to help alleviate fuel concerns. This author has written a dissertation on oil, Germany, and WW2. If Nazi Germany was built on Texas, or modern Saudi Arabia, it would have had lots of more motorized elements and supply. It could have fed its offensive operations for much longer, committed to more of them, and the big picture strategy may have be different.

It would have built a lot more trucks and had less horses. Whether more fuel and trucks wins the war for them is up to whatever fanciful counter-factual you'd like to imagine.

I see nothing objectionable in what you said here, but it doesn't sound to me like this is what the other posters were getting at.

but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case.

You allude a couple times that you don't believe Germany was an "economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case." I believe you are correct. Oil and fuel shortage is one alternative explanation for "why does this technologically advanced nation still uses horses when its peers do not?" It is one of the most straight forward explanations, even.

Maybe it fits better elsewhere, or nowhere at all, but you say you have no interest in history so you're a juicy mark for information you did not ask for.

To be clear I do find the general topic interesting, but I don't want to portray myself as someone who spends his free time studying these things. I definitely appreciate the information!

Only three certainties in life: death, taxes, and WW2 counterfactual discussions with Well, I'm A Bit of a History Buff's on internet forums

Both Germany and the USSR primarily used horses and mules for logistics in WW2 (about 2.5 million horses were used by the Germans, about 3.5 million used by the Soviets). This is why the US providing tons of trucks to the Soviets (and tons of fuel) under Lend-Lease was such a huge deal. Both sides tended to film their more highly mechanized divisions for their propaganda videos, which is why you don't see the horses in WW2 footage too much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_World_War_II

Both Germany and the USSR primarily used horses and mules for logistics in WW2

Yeah, and so did France as per your own link. The UK got early on the mechanization train - good for them - but that does not mean that everyone who didn't is a primitive economic basketcase, because that would include practically the entire rest of the world, and the word loses it's meaning. The second issue is that all that mechanization somehow didn't seem to help them significantly outperform Germany in terms of production. Those numbers should not be possible if this portrayal was accurate.

but that does not mean that everyone who didn't is a primitive economic basketcase

Ah, well I don't agree with those other posters' assessment there. I was just pointing out that Germany (and the Soviets) used far more livestock for their logistics than you would be led to believe from just seeing random photos/footage of their militaries in WW2

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