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Notes -
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.
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