Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
Could Germany have won the war if they hadn't had to intervene in Africa? Tough to call, since Africa would later prove to be essential for air and sea bases as well as a logistical base for later operations in Italy and Southern Europe. Without invading Russia, the Germans should have been to send in additional troops and support making the British operations much more difficult...hmmm how would Eighth Army performed against one of the first line field marshals?
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There are, as they say, only three things that matter in War.
Logistics, Logistics and Logistics.
For a good understanding of why the Germans simply
could not have done better (
or supplied more troops) in North Africa than they did historically, read Van Creveld's "Supplying War" which details all the insurmountable problems.
Some of which include ...
* Inadequate Port Facilities throughout the operational area. Not enough wharf space, not enough harbour space etc. Even in the main ports. And that applied both in Italy (it could take over a month to load a Merchant Ship in the ports the Italians were using) and in North Africa ... and was vastly worse in North Africa. The main Italian port could handle, IIRC, 4-8 ships at a time ... and there was usually in excess of a month backlog to unload cargoes.
* Inadequate Merchant Shipping. The Italians lost something like 60% of their Merchant Marine (which was tiny, anyway) at the outbreak of the war ... and almost all of their tankers.
* Inadequate Fuel. The reason the Regia Marina did damn all was because it had no oil. What it did have had to be, and this had to be ordered by Hitler directly, taken out of Kriegsmarine Stocks ... most Italian ships had barely enough bunkerage to keep their engines ticking over in port. This, of course, had an impact on their merchant ships (they took oil away from the navy) and on escort availability.
* Inadequate Coastal Lighterage. To supply the front, use of small, extremely limited capacity, coastal ports was needed ... and the Germans and Italians didn't have more than a fraction (20% or less, IIRC) of the required tonnage of shallow draft small capacity coastal craft that could use those ports.
* Inadequate Motorised Transport. The DAK was provided with the same amount of motor transport as the Grosstransportraum of an entire
Army Group on the Eastern Front ... unless you want to strip, say, Army Group Centre of its motor transport to help out the DAK, there is no more transport.
These trucks could barely supply the DAK when it was close to its supply heads ... the closer they got to Egypt, the worse the supply situation. They wore out quickly, too, as the road net was virtually nonexistent and, worse, the Germans used something like 2000 (yes, that's right, two thousand) different makes and models of trucks, many of them war booty, which made maintaining them a nightmare.
* Inadequate Air Support. The DAK did its best work when Hitler redeployed an entire Luftwaffe Air Group from Russia (or from reinforcing Russia) ... but it had to be withdrawn
for use in Russia. After that it was all downhill.
There's more, but read
'Supplying War' of the more recent
'The Lifeblood of War' by Thompson and you'll get the full skinny, not the 'Rommel was a genius' coffee table book version.
Phil