Stuart on Logistics + Middle East Oil for Germany in WW2

[MKSheppard]

The potential inability to build 8th Army could also cause problems in defending Egypt later on, and that could lead to a Nazi-Japan sea link via the Indian Ocean if Egypt fell, not to mention giving them access to the middle eastern oil supplies (via trade, not conquest).

Sigh. OK, the standard North African Logistics Exercise as taught by every staff college from Azebaijan to Zululand via West Point, St Cyr, Sandhurst and Chulachomklao. Take a map of north Africa and 1941. Put your finger on Tunisia. There's a port there. Run your finger east. Next port is Tripoli, 650 miles away. Next port is Benghazi - more than 700 miles. Keep going. Next port is Tobruk, nearly 500 miles. Keep going. Next port is Alexandria, another 500 miles. That's it. Five ports all nicely spread out so that supplying one from the next is only just barely possible. Fail to capture any one of the five and any further advance is impossible. But, there is a comparative abundance of ports in Egypt. So, its easy to support a force in Egypt but very, very hard to attack one there. Now look at port capacity. Remember, one port at a time and only the capacity of the nearest port counts. Guess what, its just possible to support two armored divisions using the available support facilities. That is why the Afrika Corps was the size it was. By the way, the tanks in the Africa Korps? You destroyed them throwing them at the Dunkirk perimeter.

LOGISTICS. They make any North African Axis campaign a sideshow. The Axis isn't going anywhere. let alone to capture Egypt. All that will happen is that people amble up and down the line of ports.

But a little oil is better than no oil, which is what I'm getting at. The Germans needed all the help they could get on that front; they simply did not have enough oil. Any extra supplies they could have secured would have improved their strategic situation, though probably not by a decisive margin.

Assuming the Axis wins in North Africa, assuming they can take the Middle East quickly, assuming all the oil fields are intact. Where is the infrastructure to move the oil to Europe going to come from?

Is Italy going to magically be able to build a fleet of tankers? Would a hypothetical Turkey joining the Axis cause an oil pipeline to Germany to spring up from the desert? Will a fleet of thousands of trucks appear on Hitler's birthday to give him a gift of oil?

It would take years for the Axis to construct the necessary infrasctructure for it to be worth a damm, and in having to do so they'll be using up what oil/fuel they have that is already needed elsewhere.

Point; at the time most of the infrastructure that existed in the oil regions flowed south, not north, as I understand it. I am honestly not sure whether there were, say, usable rail lines that could have brought fuel to the Mediterranean coast, or how much tanker capacity the Italian merchant marine had available, or any such specific points.

I think that the Axis could probably have jury-rigged together enough transport to at least come away from the situation with more oil than they burned getting it, but that is a purely intuitive guess, and not a serious statement that I intend to hold to in the face of someone who has actually studied the problem.

Have you?

Have you?

Oh yes. In fact I have maps that I use quite frequently that show the oil transmission and electrical power generation grids across the entire region. Very detailed maps

Now, there are four ways one can move crude oil (or refined oil products) around in bulk. These are

• Pipeline
  Ship
  Rail
  Truck

If we go to 1940, there are two pipelines that run from the oil fields in Persia (the only ones that matter at this time). One goes across Iraq and northern Syria to Haifa, the other follows the same route mroe or less (it's further north) and ends up in Beirut. The first was built and run by the British, the second by the French. Botha re dependent on a chain of pumping stations that are numbered along the line (for example, on the southern line they are H-1 to H-9, the H standing for Haifa). Over the years these have developed into significant communities, H-5 is - or was - for example a major Iraqi military base area. Note that these pipelines terminale on the extreme eastern edge of the Mediterranean. It is a rock solid certainty that neither pipeline would survive a German invasion. Both would be blown up along with their pumping stations. As a casulat estimate, it would take at least five years to rebuild them and the oil still only gets to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. To get the oil any further, the Germans would have to build a pipeline through Turkey, around the Black Sea, through the Caucasus and then hook up with the existing pipeline net. This would take at least ten to 15 years and predicates the conquest of the appropriate areas of Russia - which is, as the Germans found out, easier said than done.

This takes us to ships. Specifically tankers. These were rare commodities in the 1940s, in fact tankers were a major bottleneck for everybody except the German. Why were they not a bottleneck for the Germans? Because they didn't have any and one can't have a bottleneck in a supplyline that doesn't exist. The few real tankers the Germans had were being used as supply ships for their fleet. So, the Germans would have to switch most of their naval construction effort to building tankers, lots of them. That clobbers their warship construction programs very hard and there isn't much slack. About the only programs that could be cut would be the U-boat effort and the minesweeper effort. So, to get the tankers the Germans need, they would have to slash the U-boats and that takes the pressure off the Brits and their minesweepers and that means their ports get dangerous to use. Having accepted that cost, how do the tankers get used (and, by the way, we have to decide that before building them - I'll come to why later). The oil is in Persia. To tanker it back all the way means going down the gulf, down the coast of Africa (one can take for granted teh Suez Canal is either blocked or access denied), around the Cape, back up the coast of Africa, around Europe, through the Channel or North Sea and then to ports either in France or Germany. The Royal Navy mighty have something to say about that. In fact, a handful of submarines stationed in South Africa would cut that lifeline stone dead. The other option is to pipeline the oil to the east coast of the Mediterranean and tanker it from there to ports in southern France and Italy. Now this is a lot shorter and simpler. It's probably less dangerous. But, here's the catch. It needs a fundamentally different type of tanker. Going around the Cape needs a big, long-range ship with large fuel supplies and a sea-kindly hull. That kind of ship is limited in what ports it can use. To work in the med,w e need a small tanker with very limited own-fuel supplies and limited crew facilities. It doesn't go far after all. It's a much cheaper tanker to build and use, only it cannot do the Cape run. So teh Germans have to decide which type of tanker to build - and they have to decide that a year of so in advance. If the Germans opt for the Cape tankers, they have a small fleet of large ships that are very uneconomic to operate in the Med. If they go for teh Med tankers, they have a large fleet of small tankers that cannot operate anywhere else. Then the pipelines get blown up. Ouch. We also have a "number of tankers" problem

From the Gulf to ports in Northern France is 8,283 nautical miles (that right there means a big tanker just to carry the fuel for the trip). The return trip, therefore is 16,566 nautical miles. Back in the 1940s, a tanker did around 8 knots, some fast tankers did twelve but they were expensive beasts and most of them ended up as unreps or got converted to carriers. So, to do the round trip required 16,566/8 = 2,070.75 hours or 86 days. Say, one trip every three months allowing for loading and unloading. According to "The Strategic Bombing of Germany", Germany required to import 968,000 tons of oil per month. One of these big tankers carries around 25,000 tons of crude oil. Therefore, German needed 38.72 tankers per month to arrive in its ports. But, each tanker needs three months to do a round trip. So, a total fleet of 116.16 tankers is needed to keep Germany supplied with oil. Call it 120 to allow for down time and retrofits. It takes around a year to build each tanker and there are ten shipyard slips in Germany and France capable of building ships of this type. So, it will take twelve years to build the tanker fleet.

So, let's try by rail. Problem. There are no rail lines. They'll have to be built. This is not easy. We're not speaking of jury-rigged lines here for passenger transport. Narrow-gauge singkle track lines will do for them. We're talking about heavy-duty, double-track lines a capable of carrying massive freight loads. Those who live in the States, look at an American freight train; that's the consist we're talking about. This will be a massive construction effort. The lines have to be driven north to hook up with the existing freight network and there's rough ground in the way.

Roads next. There aren't any. There are tracks and gravel roads but they won't take the hammering handed out by heavy trucks (again, remember this is 1940). Heavy trucks back then carried 10 tons of cargo, equal to 73 barrels of oil or 4,015 gallons of oil. Now, it's roughly 1,250 miles from the oilfields to the rail network. That's a 2,500 mile round trip. Trucks that existed then on that kind of road got around 8 miles to the gallon (if they were lucky. So, they burned 300 plus gallons of fuel just to make the trip, reducing deliveries to around 3,750 gallons or 9.3 tons of oil. This means 104,086 truck loads of oil need to arrive in Germany every month. However, to make the 2,500 mile round trip, a truck takes 10 days (driven continuously). In fact that can't happen. Truck availability varies but assuming its 1/3, we can assume that each truck makes one round trip per month. So, we need a total of approximately 100,000 trucks to keep the supply line open. But, trucks wear out. (Ships and trains don't, not in the timescale we're looking at). A truck lasts, on average, 100,000 miles and given the hammering we're talking about here, that's really generous. That's 40 trips or 40 months. So, to support the truck fleet, Germany is looking at building 2,500 heavy trucks per month just to keep the supply line running. German heavy truck production was around 7,000 per year or just under 600 per month. So, they would have to quadruple their heavy truck production and derpive the army of all its heavy transport just to get the oil from the oilfields to the railways.

Aha one says. Why use heavy trucks, why not use smaller ones? Well, the cargo capacity of a medium truck is around 2.5 tons or roughly 1,000 gallons of oil. That means they can deliver only 700 gallons or 1.75 tons of oil. The fleet needed would be 553,142 trucks and a production rate of 13,828 medium trucks per month. German medium truck production was around 28,000 per year or (very approximately) 2,500 per month. (By the way, the German Army lost 109,000 trucks during the Battle of France 1940). So teh medium truck shortfall more than five times production.

So, teh Middle East oilfields do Germany no good at all. They can't get here from there.

[quote"Stuart"]

You're not the you I addressed the question to, but I'm happy enough to hear about it from you.

Ah, sorry.

This was one of only two methods my vague intuitive guess even bothered to consider. I hadn't quite thought through the full magnitude of the catch, which revolves around the pipelines to the Mediterranean being wrecked to the point where they'd take years to repair.

The pipeline problem is an interesting one; essentially pipelines are extremely vulnerable and when damaged, they take a long time to repair. Iraq found that out the hard way. Technically, the pumping stations are the best targets, just blowing up a section of pile is fun and causes a serious pollution problem, but they can be fixed relatively easily. Take a pumping stationout and the result is a world of hurt, not least because nearly all the replacement kit comes from the United States

What's an unrep?

Underway replenishment Ship; a fast tanker that runs with the fleet and keeps the warships topped up. Most fast tankers ended up doing this.

Note that I am not seriously considering Germany importing enough oil from the Middle East to fully meet its own needs; only the possibility of it slightly easing their crippling fuel shortages.

The 968,000 is the difference between minimum needs and internal production. Just slightly easing the fuel shortage is't going to help matters. What that will constitute is a massive military operation for very little gain. The only way to justify a military operation that big would be completely filling oil demands and that's got a world of problems.

This was the other possibility my guess took seriously, not knowing the state of the rail lines in question. In your opinion, would putting in the rail capability be a "this would take two or three years of massive effort" thing, or a "this would take a decade of massive effort" thing?

Probably three or four years of massive effort, then another massive effort to run it. By the way, I did a quick BoE calculation and running trains of oil from the Persian fields to the Ruhr would require 35 percent of Germany's total rail rolling stock and 25 percent of its locomotives.

At least, not in sufficient quantity to solve the German oil import problem. Which I expected. What I'm not sure about is whether it could provide a reasonable return on investment on a small scale- supplying some oil, if not enough. The truck option sounds like a joke; I never would have guessed it could be done. I would expect them to try rail, but that was based on my not knowing the state of the railroads, and not being in a good position to estimate how much effort it would take to install them.

The real killer is the scale of the operation involved; it's every bit as massive as Barbarossa and it has to be run through a handful of ports that are little better than fishing villages. Even getting an Army as far as Alexandria is going to be really rough; there is a reason why Rommel stopped at El Alamein. Getting the rest of the way from Alexandria to Persia is a nightmare to contemplate. Every pound of food, gallon of water and round of ammunition would have to be trucked from Alex. By the way to give you a handle on the problems involved, it took five times as many trucks to support an armored unit in North Africa as it did in Russia. Now, to suggest that undertaking an operation that massive in order to effect a margin change isn't going to go down well. The proponent would have to push a "total solution" and is going to run head on into logistics calculations get very scary very quickly.

Would conquest of the Caucasus actually alleviate the German oil problem?

Short answer: depends on how much they took. Taking only Grozniy, with devastated and pre-damaged oil wells wouldn't solve the problem. Taking over Azerbajan? Would solve the German oil problem completely. It was the largest source of all Soviet oil (~70%). And the USSR produced more oil than Germany, and had greater capacities for oil production too. If Germany managed to take over the fields and actually keep them long enough to exploit them for several years, it would solve it's oil issues.

The Caucasus would solve the issue for 3-5 years only though. After that the damage to wells caused by extreme level of exploit would lead to dwindling supplies, but not earlier anyhow.

So yes, it would. If they did it in 1942, the damage caused to wells would probably disallow them from making anything more than 10 million tons by 1943, but that's still a massively huge boost to Germany's oil needs. In fact, per Stuart's given estimates of Germany's excess oil needs (which I believe are quite sane) 10-12 million tons per year would completely solve the German oil issue.

Stuart covered the problems with transport, but there's something I'd like to add about the use of pipelines: Graziani had a ridiculous amount of manpower devoted to building and maintaining a pipeline to extend across Libya and had rather piss-poor results that continued even after the Germans joined in the fighting in North Africa. In fact, the additional German troops added more strain to a system that never did meet the needs of the Italian Army.

That pipeline system was for water.

The result was that Axis troops suffered from all sorts of diseases as hygiene took a big hit, as well as dehydration from a lack of drinking water. The idea that the same bunch that couldn't provide enough water for their men would be able to build another system -only much larger- for oil is absurd. Alexander Cockburn mentioned this in humorous fashion in his column. Money quotes:

The English have always had a soft spot for him, the Desert Fox, the Good German outgeneraled by Montgomery and then forced to commit suicide by Hitler. Actually Rommel was outgeneraled by the Matrons who ruled over matters of hygiene at the schools attended by the British officer class.

It was these matrons, so I was recently reminded by Mark Harrison in my Christmas issue of Oxford Today, who instilled in British officers in North Africa and elsewhere importance of hygiene. In the Western Desert of Egypt in 1942, Harrison writes in his essay "Medicine and Victory", because of "proper waste management" the British Army "enjoyed a marked and consistent advantage over their opponents, as sickness rates were 50-70 per cent lower than in the German forces. By the time of the climactic battle of El Alamein, the Afrika Korps carried the burden of 9,954 sick out of a total strength of 52,000." Out of 10,000, the Panzer division had slightly less than 4,000 men fit to fight.

All this gives fresh resonance to the phrase "dirty Germans". Colonel H.S. Gear, assistant director of hygiene in the British Army, claimed the Germans' defensive positions were "obvious from the amount of faeces lying on the surface of the ground the enemy appears to have no conception of the most elementary sanitary measures". The official historian of the campaign, F.A.E. Crew wrote that "It is not improbable that the complete lack of sanitation among both the Germans and the Italians did much to undermine their morale in the Alamein position." Matron won!

I don't remember much detail over why the Italians couldn't maintain water to their troops (I don't think there was much detail on the subject in the book), but I would imagine that it's simply a matter of having to cover hundreds of miles of desert, which would have been difficult even if the British weren't trouncing Mussolini's forces at the time. The British had a bitch of a time with supply in North Africa and they had (a) more ports and better ones (b) a rail system in Africa (c) a navy that could actually fight and (d) relatively secure supply lines from most of the Commonwealth and the USA. The Italians couldn't keep lines open from Italy to Libya.

Most of the problem was that the Italian Army was desperately short of trucks. Notoriously, in pre-war military parades they would rent civilian trucks due to the specified issue of military trucks not being available. Then, they lost pretty much all of what they had in 1940/41 and were behind the curve from that point onwards.

Remember there was no railway line along the North African coast so supplies have to be trucked from the nearest port (up to 600 miles away) to the troops. Now, there is no significant supply of fresh water between Tripoli and Alexandria so water supplies have to be trucked. In the North African Desert, the allocation of water per man was between two and three gallons with about a quarter of that for drinking. The German Army actually tried to enforce a ration of one liter per day which is below the minimum needed to sustain life under those conditions, the result being that troops were suffering from extreme dehydration, poioning from drinking water contaiminated with gasoline or diesel and parasitic infestations from drinking water contaminated with worms or flukes. The reason for teh low ration was that teh German high Command thought that the troops would get acclimatized to low water availability The Italians were a lot smarter, they knew how much water troops needed even if they couldn't supply it.

Anyway. Three gallons per man. That's 24 pounds in weight. The most common Italian truck was a Fiat that had a three-tonne capacity. So, completely loaded with water, that truck carried enough to supply 250 men for one day. The Italian Army in 1940 had around 200,000 men so supplying that lot with water would require 800 truck deliveries per day. The problem is the distance from ports; by the time the Italians got to Egypt they were 600 miles from a port. A truck could drive around 10 mph in convoy on the dirt roads that existed then so it's a 60-hour drive - followed by a 60 hour return drive. 120 hours = 5 days. So, teh water convoys alone need 4,000 trucks.

That's why Graziani wanted a pipeline.

Yes, that's not the hard part to understand; the hard part (or at least the part I'm curious about) is figuring out what difficulties they ran into trying to build the pipeline. Manpower? British LRDG teams raiding the line? Lack of suitable pumping equipment or pipes?

My guess would be materials (all the pipe would have to come in from Italy by ship and then be trucked forward to the pipeline head. By the way, most of the water came from Italy as well. That's another little bit people forget; Egypt is a water source. Then, the pipeline would have to be laid; pretty much flat, I don't think the pipes can undulate with terrain. Pumping stations are needed at regular intervals, probably every 100 miles or so. That's a lot of machinery and a lot of labor to put them together. I'd also guess that the heat would cause problems with vapor locking.

For all that, a pipeline is a better bet than trucking the stuff around. All of which goes to prove that the Gods did not mean humans to fight wars in North Africa

Railroads did exist in Libya in WW2, not much, but they could have been expanded had the Axis committed more air power to the Mediterranean and thus been able to get more material across safely.

Lines ran from Benghazi-Barce and Benghazi-Soluch with a total of about 200km of track. Other lines ran westward from Tripoli towards the Tunisian boarder. All track was 950mm gauge. The Italians used mostly steam engines, but a number of German built diesels were shipped over during 1942. The Benghazi-Barce line was most important and heavily used by the Axis and the British.

The British meanwhile eventually extended there own standard gauge system all the way to a point only 10km short of Tobruk harbor in early 1942 using the no ballest as the desert was hard and rocky enough to support track without it. Rommel uses this line to support his final offensive. It was estimated by the Germans that it could move 1,500 tons per day, but due to British sabotage and lack of rolling stock it actually moved more like 300 tons per day. The British were able to move 2,000 tons per day over it at the peak of use. That rail line meanwhile connected into Egypt and systems that went all the way to Syria. So if the Axis had gone all out to take North Africa, they would need to build 350-400km of track to link everything up. That’s no small amount, but its not that staggering either and I’m sure you could find plenty of old branch lines in France to loot the rails from.

BTW, this was too hilarious to pass over, while I was looking up the railroad details I found a link to the Italians airdropping live sheep into Ethiopia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0gDRKLTu00

[MKSheppard]

From a slightly different thread:

What determines the logistic support of the armies is the capacity of the rail-lines carrying those supplies. In fact, what determined the locations of Army Group North, Army Group Center and Army Group South and the axes of advance adopted by those army groups was the Russian railway network in those areas. Russian railways are a different gauge from German ones. Therefore, the Russian lines had to be converted to German gauge. The rate at which those lines could be converted is fixed. The capacity of the lines is fixed. No amount of equipment can change that. All that happens is the extra equipment stacks up behind the railhead. So, the total tonnage of supplies that an be delivered to a specific point is fixed. If there are twice as many assets using that railhead, then they use the volume of supplies twice as fast and therefore get half the distance. As it was, the Germans ran out of supplies well short of Moscow. It doesn;t matter how much they had stockpiled because they couldn't get it up to where it was needed.

This is called logistics. It determined everything an army can achieve.

Not only did Russia have limited rail lines in the directions the Germans needed, those lines that existed also tended to be short of auxiliaries like water towers, signal boxes, coal storage and loading and plain sidings. This was because the Russians had expanded the system so massively between 1922 and 1941, and no everything had caught up yet. The Russians of course blew up as much of what the tracks did have to offer as they could, and the Germans themselves bombed the rail system heavily. Missions like that were what the Luftwaffe was designed for. This all meant not only could only so many trains roll east, but it was also very hard to get them unloaded, reconfigured and sent back west. The lack of signals forces down speeds and make it very risky to densely pack trains. As a result many chunks of rail line would basically operate as one way only for a day, then only the other way the next day rather then shuffling trains back and forth constantly.

Because the German Railway system was only allocating less than 1% of their car loadings to the Eastern front even in 1943 (when manpower the strength in the Eastern front peaked):

You just literally do not get how railways work do you? This seems to be a crucial issue. How do you think the number of cars on the entire German railway system is a relevant indicator of the supply constraints imposed by the railway tracks in the western USSR? Remember the whole German system is a vast grid with huge yards and generally one of the densest concentrations of track on earth. The invasion of Russia meanwhile is following straight tracks which rarely cross connect towards Moscow. These lines also lack many facilities which are not demolished, and generally are built to low standards in the first place because the Soviets industrialized so damn fast.

It doesn’t matter one bit how many cars you have. You can not push an infinite line of train cars of supplies down a railroad end to end. Even if you could that would just cause a massive backup and blocking of the line because most Russian lines are single tracked back then. That means 50% of the time the railroad is passing empty wagons and locomotives in need of servicing to the rear while the full trains wait on sidings. Trains cannot be longer then said sidings, though realistic train length will become even lower due to poor track conditions, crudely repaired bridges after Russian demolitions. This isn't even considering partisan attacks and the need for traffic control gaps to avoid collisions. Any blocking of the line is lost transport time you cannot get back. You cannot turn the train onto a side road or the ruts to get around a wreck.

Because the German Railway system was only allocating less than 1% of their car loadings to the Eastern front even in 1943 (when manpower the strength in the Eastern front peaked)

For example, as of 01.01 1943, daily car placings in the east (excl. the Generalgouvernement) were 13,012 as opposed to 1,575,572 in the Reich (that is, not including occupied Europe) and 3,625 in the 'Gedob' (Generaldirektion der Ostbahn in the Generalgouvernement); locomotive stocks at the same date amounted to 4,671 in the East, 2,088 in the Gedob, and 28,630 in the Reich.

You don;t understand what that means do you? This actually tells you something very different from what you expect. We know that the rail network behind the German lines in Russia was strained to its maximum. Any reputable book on logistics will tell you that. So, this quote gives us a valuable piece of information; the maximum capacity of that railway network was 13,012 car-loads. Now, the Germans had the following types of railway car.

Type SSmys and Sa 705 six-axle heavy load wagon (for heavy tanks, etc) Capacity around 30,000 kg max

Type SSy "Koeln" four axle medium to heavy load wagon. Capacity around 20,000 kg max

Type R10 two axle, open stack wagon Capacity around 9,400kg max

Type R10 "Stuttgart" two axle, open stack wagon with a brake-house Capacity around 9,000 kg max

Type Ommr "Dresden" and "Linz" two axle box cars; (these are they wagons seen in movies transporting the MG or light FLAK crews in some sort of sandbagged protective position) Capacity around 15,000 kg max

"Villach" type two axle open goods wagons capacity around 10.000 kg max

Type OOt "Saarbruecken" four axle coal transporter, capacity around 20,000 kg but optimized for transporting coal

Type Om "Breslau" two axle, open goods wagon with a brake-house capacity around 9,000 kg.

In short, a good average of 15 tonnes of cargo per day per wagon for a total of roughly 195,180 tons of cargo per day. Now, a typical infantry divisional slice would consist of roughly 17,000 men. Prior to 1944 a German infantry division would include over 5,000 horses and almost 950 motor vehicles. A division of this size would need 53 tons of hay and oats, 54 tons of food, 20 tons of petrol, one ton of lubricants, ten tons of ordinance and another 12 tons of miscellaneous supplies plus ammunition and baggage (approx 150 tons total per day). This is before they do any fighting. A unit involved in active service would demand an additional 80 tons per day when largely inactive and a stupifing 1,100 tons per day when in heavy combat. An armored division has a baseline demand of 300 tons per day plus 30 tons per day when largely inactive and 700 tons per day when in heavy combat. Now, German strength in Russia varied wildly but let's take a baseline strength of 190 infantry divisional slices and 24 armored divisional slices. We can also assume that around 40 percent of the army was involved in heavy fighting at any one time. Cranking all those figures together means that we have a demand for roughly 175,000 tons per day. That leaves just 20,000 tons for everything else the Germans wanted to do in Russia including moving raw materials around.

The critical factor here is capacity of the railway lines. Each given length of track can only have one train on it. Putting two trains at once on a single piece of track has dire results. If the railway line is single track (most russian lines were), then only one train can use that track in one direction between sidings. Running two trains in opposing directions on the same track also has dire results. Also, the figures given above are optimum; they assume that all the cars are loaded to capacity. This is not possible. poor Soviet construction standards played a key role in the German decision making process. Whereas German and most western rail bed construction methods contained a multi-tiered rock and gravel foundations - Soviet rails were almost always sitting only on a bed of sand covered occasionally with rocks to minimize the inevitable dust clouds. The western regions of the Soviet Union suffered a great rock shortage. To make matters worse, the vast majority of the Soviet rail ties were made of untreated pine. This meant that their weight capacity fell way below German railway norms (38kg/m for Soviet lines vs. 49kg/m in Germany). Soviet rail ties were also placed further apart than American and German norms (approximately 1.440 ties per km in the Soviet Union vs. 1.500 ties per km in Estonia, 1.600 ties per km in Germany and 2.000 ties per km in the United States). This too added to a lower overall transportation capacity of the Soviet rail line. The way a rail is attached to a tie is also of great importance to speed limits and weight allowances. Soviet rails were attached to the tie with plain spikes. German norms called for the rails to be attached with an angled washer/base plate and screw type tie-downs. Angled base plates allow one to increase load factors and rail speeds. Because of the Soviet rail line construction technique, Soviet cargo and weight capacities were often reduced way below the official allowances. All of these factors absorb that 20,000 tons of "spare" capacity. Notice something. Simple logistics, the sort of maths any competent staff officer can perform in his head, have just eliminated the possibility that raw materials from Russia could feed the German war effort. Sure, Germany may capture them but the railway capacity needed to bring them back to the Reich doesn't exist.

Now, the importance of the relative figures for carloads inside Germany and in Russian becomes apparent. What they actually show us is how many railcar loads are required to support the German economy internally. In other words, the railway load cost of supporting teh Germane conomy at its historical level was 100 times greater than that of supporting the German Army in Russia. Now, if we do a ten percent increase in the size of the German economy, the transportation demand will go up by the same ammount. Thus, that increase will be ten times the size of the railway logistics infrastructure in Russia. That's a massive increase and it still doesn't affect the tonnage of cars that the rail net in Russia can handle.

One final complexity. To ensure that the German rail network had enough locomotives and rolling stock, the Germans cut right back on heavy support equipment such as crane trains and wreckers. They had so few that a derailed or damaged locomotive was simply abandoned. So, track repairs and train accidents cost a lot of supply.