>>36810
>a You tube video from the Tank Museum
Could you link it here?
>so he must be getting a completely different view of it from the same source.
Tooze's verdict is "the idea that the German
home front was 'under-mobilized' in the first months of the war is really nothing more than a myth" (p.431) and, on the France-Barbarossa period, "Armaments production and economic policy were linked to a strategic war plan and when the data are analysed carefully, the evidence suggests that this strategy was successful in producing a very substantial further mobilization of the German economy" (p.432). To add:
>What mattered was not the total number of tanks, but the number of combat-worthy medium tanks - Mark IIIs, IVs and Czech-made 36- and 38-ton tanks. If we focus on this group, German tank strength doubled between May 1940 and June 1941, exactly in proportion to the number of tank divisions. There was also a proportional increase in half-tracks
>The tank production drive of 1940-41 is also significant because it created one of the most durable organizational structures of the German war economy.
>The combination of industrial and political authority provided by Rohland and Saur energized the existing members of the tank cartel as well as enrolling new capacity. By 1941, the Mark III medium tank, which was now replacing the Mark II as the mainstay of the Panzer divisions, was being produced by no less than four different factories - MAN in Nuremberg, MIAG in Brunswick and the Alkett and Daimler-Benz facilities in Berlin.
P. 433-4. The tank industry is the one that can least complain during this period.
>For the majority of calibres, there was enough in hand to cover more than twelve months of heavy fighting. Though it did not look good in the armaments statistics, halting the overproduction of ammunition was clearly a first priority of rational armaments strategy. Given the huge ammunition stocks accumulated by the summer of 1940, steel could be reallocated away from the immediate production of armaments without reducing the effective striking power of the German army. Between the second quarter of 1940 and the second quarter of 1941, the army's steel ration was cut by more than a third, whilst its striking power increased by roughly the same percentage. The steel released from the army was not reallocated towards civilian consumption.
>In the second half of 1940, the reduction in the army's steel supply was almost exactly matched by the increased allocation to exports.
P. 435-6
>Another clue to interpreting German military-economic strategy in anticipation of Barbarossa can be found in the management of the labour force. As in the case of steel, this was arranged so as to allow the army to complete its programme, whilst at the same time releasing resources for other uses. What certainly did not happen was any reduction in the overall level of mobilization.
P. 436
>to take the rationalizing rhetoric of men like Werner and Frydag at face value and infer that the Luftwaffe industries suffered before November 1941 from a peculiar level of inefficiency would be naive.
P. 580, on wastage in metalworking due to existing production methods.