Guide to Logistics

This is a bit of a crazy idea, perhaps, so bear with - and it might be in the wrong place.

I ran into a "we should have one of these" - a beginner's guide to logistics.
Here's my kickoff - feel free to contribute and/or critique.



Logistics is kind of a boring subject, at first glance.

If you're like most people, you got into alternate history because of something cool or whizz-bang - whether it was the dark specter of the German-dominated Europe of Robert Harris' Fatherland, or the shocking immediacy of Soviet armies pushing into the US heartland, or the sheer stunning vision of two huge battleship fleets fighting for the fate of the world in WW2... or, alternatively, you wonder whether Napoleon could have maybe conquered the world if he'd just made it to Moscow a little faster.

If you want to know how a given battle would go, then the best thing to do is probably to look at the capabilities of each side - their training, their weapons, their vehicles and their position. It's what happens in a lot of wargames.
If you want to know what battles would happen in the first place, then logistics is often the key. It can offer fascinating results in those battles, as well - for example, one of the reasons the British troops so often won their battles against Napoleon on rate of fire (a well known piece of trivia) is that the British had so much more gunpowder thanks to their global trade links that they could practice every day. French troops often had hardly any practice.

First, a general overview.
Walking is fairly easy for someone moderately fit - I've walked fifteen or so miles in a day while doing other things before, and I'm not the picture of health. At that speed, I could walk from Berlin to Moscow in about two and a half months.
But to move an army isn't just a matter of walking.
Picture, for a moment, that an infantry division of ten thousand people is walking from Berlin to Moscow.
Now, they're going to need food. So everyone needs to carry enough food for them for two and a half months.
That's not really feasible. So they need something to carry the food - the Germans often used horse and cart (yes, in WW2. Surprising, isn't it?).
Okay, that simplifies things, the soldiers just need to carry their weapons.
Except that horses need to eat, too. If you're lucky the horses can just graze, but that slows you down a bit and you have to remember that. (And you have to remember to bring spare horses, by the way, in case one gets hurt. Oh, and you need to remember some veterinarians, and some horseshoes, and... basically you need to remember that you're going to now also be taking several thousand horses about a thousand miles along with your army.)

What's the other option to handle food? Bluntly, steal it. (Or pay for it, if you're rich). That's what the Germans did in WW2 in Russia - they stole food from the locals. This is tempting, but it leads to problems with partisans later on. The British did something similar in Spain in 1812, but they paid for it - in gold, no less - which meant that the locals were at least a bit less unhappy about seeing all their spare food carted off.

So we've got a division of ten thousand men, and we've worked out how they're going to handle food. Are we set?
No.
Because they've also got guns. Now, the soldiers will be expected to carry their rifle, and occasionally the light machine gun, but it takes a whole team of men to move a heavy machine gun around - which is going to slow you down. More to go on the carts.
And there's ammunition. A rifleman who gets into twenty fights on his way to Moscow, each of which involves firing twenty rounds, will have to carry four hundred rifle bullets. (And he'll want half as many again - don't want to run out!) Add a few grenades to that, and there's suddenly an awful lot of munitions per person.
(Machine guns, again, will have to go on the carts - a machine gun can get through hundreds of rounds a minute. So will a lot of that rifle ammunition.)
Are we done?
No. Because of artillery.
Artillery is one of the big logistics requirements. Each artillery piece can weigh several tons, and require a dedicated team of horses. Each really big gun requires a tractor - so you need to bring fuel. And they need shells - lots and lots of shells. And shells are really, really heavy.
(Example - the British standard field gun in WW2 was the 25-lber. Each shell was, as the name suggests, 25 lbs. If one gun team was keeping up a light bombardment, firing a shell every minute for an hour, that's 1500 lbs of shells - two thirds of a ton! For one hour of firing!)
These are some very overworked horses, especially if you have to guess how many fights you're going to get into.

In practice, of course, it starts to become impossible to carry what you need for a whole advance. What usually happens is that a division carries with them what they'd need if they bumped into something, or they got into one nasty fight. Everything else was shipped up as needed to whoever was using it.
How?
Ah. You can't use horse and cart, because that would mean that if you needed new artillery shells they'd take weeks to arrive - so either you keep shipping them up to supply dumps as you go, or you use the railway lines.


From a logistics point of view, a railway is magic. A single railway line with small trains and one track can carry a phenomenal amount of supplies, so long as you have the trains - if you have a few hundred trains, you can force forty-thousand tonnes down that single track line in a day. (One arrival every ten minutes, half the time spent waiting for the track to clear, few hundred tonnes a train.)

Great! Railways solve everything!

They do - if you can pull it off. But that means having to deal with writing your own railway timetables. For the whole of Russia. (And rewriting them at short notice - whoops, you need ten more trains at Orel by Wednesday, so you'll have to work out which ten other train journeys are not needed and how to get the trains from there to here.)
And while railways are great, they don't go everywhere - and remember those partisans I mentioned? Because they love to quietly disconnect your train lines at night so trains running at speed will derail.
Go slower? You can fit less down the train line.
Don't risk running trains at night? You just lost HALF the capacity of the rail line - more in winter.
Kill the partisans? Good luck, they've got all of European Russia to hide in. You can keep them off the train lines, but that's going to take thousands upon thousands of men - men not headed for Moscow.

And what if you're going somewhere there are no railway lines? Or if the railway lines there are go the wrong place?
(This is pretty much why the Germans turned south from their drive on Moscow in the autumn - not only were a lot of the rail lines focused on Kiev, but there were about a million Soviets there and they really didn't want the Soviets cutting their remaining railway lines... so they had to capture them.)

Extremely interesting post, thank you

What about the navy? A lot of transportation was naval based, especially with colonial wars

Tanc49 said:

Extremely interesting post, thank you

What about the navy? A lot of transportation was naval based, especially with colonial wars

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Oh, yeah, that was just the start. There's a LOT to cover.

I was thinking of doing a bit on How The Mongols Did It - how one of the reasons they seemed to defy normal military logic was their unconventional approach to logistics. Basically getting into the more specific cases.


Here's the possible things to look at I can think of offhand:

"What do you mean, it broke a leg?" - armies with war animals
"We need more bird crap" - nitro and explosives supply
"The sea-road is wide" - ship based supply
"Where's the nearest petrol station?" - vehicular supply
"Is it me or is it bloody freezing?" - surviving in the cold
"Which disease is it this time?" - surviving in the tropics
"Roof of the world" - logistics over mountains
"Nor any drop to drink" - hot climates
"And if it wasn't hard enough" - how the enemy can ruin your hard work
"You call this rubber?" - strategic materials
"Okay, we're here, now what?" - supplying an invasion

And some case studies. One good case study would be "Nicholas I versus the Nazi War Machine"

Case study: Nicholas I vs. The Nazi War Machine.


Nicholas was a Russian Emperor. (Well, Emperor of Russia, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc... the important bit is that he was in charge of the Russian Empire) He was also a trained engineer, and oversaw the construction of the first railways in Russia in the 1830s-50s.
This railway system was a bit unusual, in that it was built to broad gauge (sometimes known as "Russian" gauge.) The gauge is how far apart the rails are on the tracks, and while this was still being standardized at the time the choice of such a broad gauge was a little unusual. Nevertheless, it stuck, and while the rest of Europe used a different gauge (and Britain another still) the Russian system used broad gauge.

This became very, very important a hundred years later. Because the Russian system used a different gauge, trains could not simply roll on through into Russia during the German invasion even if the line was captured intact - they had to either have the trains unloaded and reloaded on a different, broad gauge train (which was time consuming, since it had to be done for every single train!) or re-lay the track so that the European trains could move further on the now-converted railway line.
This turned out to be very, very time consuming. During the battle for Moscow, the German rail conversion had - by herculean effort - pushed its re-laying of track to Smolensk.
Smolensk is two hundred and fifty miles from Moscow. Due to this difference, only two trains a day (broad gauge, hurriedly loaded from standard gauge train cars) managed to reach the German armies fighting around Moscow.

So, one of the things which defeated the Germans in 1941 was the decision of an engineer-Emperor over a hundred years before. And that's really quite interesting.
http://www.feldgrau.com/dreichsbahn.html to read more.

Very interesting. Very useful too.

Railways are even more magical if the rails are the same distance apart in all of them. Unfortunately, if you're walking from Berlin to Moscow, or vice versa; that isn't the case.

I know the OP knows this, but it is still worth mentioning, because if pesky partisans keep damaging locomotives and rolling stock, you can't just redirect ones which normally shift non-essential stuff from Hamburg to Stuttgart and make good.

Ah. It appears Tsar Nicholas employed Ninjas in the Russian railway system...

Geordie said:

Very interesting. Very useful too.

Railways are even more magical if the rails are the same distance apart in all of them. Unfortunately, if you're walking from Berlin to Moscow, or vice versa; that isn't the case.

I know the OP knows this, but it is still worth mentioning, because if pesky partisans keep damaging locomotives and rolling stock, you can't just redirect ones which normally shift non-essential stuff from Hamburg to Stuttgart and make good.

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Yep, just did a case study about it. I think I pipped you to the post by about three minutes.

Again, feel free to suggest more topics though!
Edit - oh, there's one. Corporal Forbus - disease.

Fantastic stuff! Very helpful and informative.

Most useful! Logistics - Boring, but vital.

Bring out your dead - disease


One of the biggest problems for any army in history was disease.
It's sometimes hard to remember that the germ theory of disease was only really being developed in the mid-nineteenth century, something as elemental as washing hands between treating patients dates back less than two centuries, and that Sulfonamide and Penicillin drugs were first developed in the 30s and 40s.

With that in mind, it should be understood that the cause of most casualties in most wars was disease - not bullets, not artillery, but disease.
Let's take one example first.

On their retreat through Poland in the 1810s, the Russians practiced a scorched-earth campaign. (This is itself tricky, but they did a fair bit of damage.) The result was that the area was disrupted and people were displaced from their homes - so sanitation broke down.
This resulted in a typhus epidemic - just as the Grande Armee passed through.
Now, the Grande Armee consisted of young men in hundreds of thousands, who would be dirty and sweaty (hot summer, marching tens of miles a day, and at war) and living in the same clothes for days.
Typhus is spread by lice.
The Grande Armee was essentially torn to shreds by Typhus. Within a month, he had suffered 16% casualties - 80,000 men were unfit for duty or dead, due to the disease alone.
One two week period slashed his combat effectives count from 160,000 to 103,000 - mostly from Typhus - and the total casualties caused by the disease are hard to determine but may have been well over half the entire Grande Armee's losses. (This may explain why Napoleon was down to 100,000 men from 500,000 by the time he reached Moscow - not General Winter, but the summer, reduced his numbers by hundreds of thousands of men. Ironically, the winter may have saved those who survived.)


More generally, armies are almost always great places for disease to build up. Unwashed, tired men in close proximity (to each other and dead bodies), without enough food, often sleeping in cold and damp conditions with weakened immune systems, possibly with minor injuries, sharing food, wading through mud or dirty rivers, and (if the army does not have excellent sanitation and self-control) with shit everywhere. Almost the ideal way to catch disease. (And in most pre-WW1 armies, there were also camp followers, ie prostitutes - adding STIs to the mix - and cavalry, which present their own problems with horses catching their own diseases.)
This is quite apart from tropical diseases such as yellow fever, or malaria (which in Elizabethan times was widespread in the Chesapeake Bay having been imported from the swamps and marshes of England!) or even deliberate biological warfare such as the charming Mongol habit of hurling infected corpses over town walls.
Even if disease doesn't kill someone, it can make them incapable of fighting in any serious battle - this is part of why troop numbers in the ACW can be misleading, because if five thousand men out of thirty have got the runs then they can't really fight even if they'll recover and will not be counted as casualties in the final reckoning.


Disease tended to affect armies in the field much more than those dispersed in billets or those garrisoned in pre-prepared barracks, simply because the armies in the field are less warm, less dry and usually less well fed.

It's also worth noting that gunpowder bullets in the American Civil War and earlier travelled so slowly they could pick up microbes from the air as they moved.

In sum - disease is one of the things which should not be ignored in any war, and some of the great historical generals could do what they did simply because they took simple sanitation procedures which cut down on their attrition to things like dysentry.

(In the Second Balkan War (1913), the Ottoman Army lost zero men in combat, and 4,000 to cholera.)

One final anecdote. The First World War involved the deaths of millions of people.
But the influenza epidemic that all those troop movements helped to foster (specifically, the American Expeditionary Force is believed to have brought it over and then sent it to all parts of the US) killed tens of millions. Even in the 20th century, war and disease are linked.

Here to there - break of bulk


No matter what you're transporting, no matter where it's going, you will want to avoid breaking bulk too much.
To break bulk is to change what is carrying your materials, and involves a lot of tedious loading and unloading. For example, if you trucked supplies to the docks and then loaded them on a ship, you're breaking bulk (BREAKING down the BULK cargo into smaller lumps to move across to the new way of carrying it). If you ship them to a port and unloaded them onto a train, you're breaking bulk again, and if you then carry them by train to a rail head and truck them the last few dozen miles, that's another case of breaking bulk.

Now, breaking bulk isn't bad per se - you have to do it sometimes - but it's harder to do it by hand, and doing it less is usually easier.
In the example mentioned, it's hard to see how to avoid breaking bulk that many times, but modern containerization has managed it - the containers are modular, so they are taken off the truck in one trailer-sized piece. This makes it easier to ship things across multiple platforms.
An example of how this can add an extra complication is bridges. If a road bridge but not a rail bridge has been built over the Bug River, then the logistical supply officer will have to take everything off the train, load it onto trucks, drive it to the other rail head, and re-place it on another train on the other side. Simply repairing (or managing to capture) the rail bridge makes things much easier and faster, since he is no longer having to break bulk.

It's also why the LST is so useful - it has RO-RO capacity (ROll on, ROll off) and so a truck can be put inside loaded and then drive out at the other end. No breaking of bulk required.

Here is another subject

Push supply or Need driven supply (working from memory here the terms may be different)

Push supply - very centralised - the logistics network makes an assumption about a given units needs and just pushes supplies to them regardless of their actual needs.

Need driven supply - the unit in questions orders what it needs from the Logistics network and are sent what they order.

There are pros and cons of each system

The first system works well for a peacetime army or an army not conducting a lot of fighting - ie the army has 120,000 men, 500 guns and 200 tanks - get the slide rule out - but falls down when units get into higher intensity fighting as the assumed supplies may no longer reflect what a unit needs - ie increased spares for the tanks as they have been moving about more than normal and ammunition expendature for the guns is suddenly 20 x normal.

And unit/army being supplied this way may find itself running out of critical items and the system will be slow or unable to compensate in time.



The 2nd system works well in a proffessional army so long as the logistical arm of the force has the ability to fulfill those needs and can absorb the changes in demand.

Ultimately you end up with a combination of the 2 - for example you know your army has 120,000 mouths to feed therefore you can make a pretty good assumption that X amount of food will suffice for a given period - so you can get away with 'pushing' that amount of Food through the system.

However things like spares and ammo are largely a 'need' driven items - a certain amount of assumption can be made but ultimately an infantry unit that uses up 2 basic loads of ammo in June may then uses 10 in July due to an increased intensity of combat or training - this may be predicted but is still largely driven by need and the unit itself is the best judge of what those needs are!

Nicely done...

Nicely done...

FWIW, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton by Martin Van Crevald is a short, inexpensive (paperback), and pretty readable summary with some excellent real world/historical analyses. Well worth reading.

Best,

Just to put it in context a 1939 German infantry division at TO strength is 16,500 men, 500 trucks 400 cars 500 motorcycles,200 sidecars, 5,000 horses and 1,000 wagons. It needs 53 tons of hay, 54 tons of food 20 tons of petrol, 1 ton of lubricants, 10 tons of ordinance, 12 tons of misc stuff per day. (experience showed the POL requirement was about 50% low in Russia and in the process of catching up Heroic Red Army dust killed a lot of engines)

And you are supposed to move the whole lot 2-5km per hour so even without fighting. So its keeping a small town alive then moving it 10-15 miles down the road the next day. You have to find your own water.

BTW as soon as you start fighting seriously the supply consumption goes up. The Divisional artillery in a western division would be firing a hundreds of tons of ammo per day.

One forgotten thing ( at least the Germans forgot it) about russian railways is that the locomotives are bigger. Not only do they have a broader gauge but they carry more coal and water than German loco's so need water depots turntables and switching yards far less frequently than German. The Germans had to build them and move all the construction kit forward along the overloaded tracks to get there.

Wow, this is a tremendous effort on your part and I really want so much more!

Push supply or Need driven supply (working from memory here the terms may be different)

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Push and Pull as I learned myself

I'll just add two things:
This book: Steaming East: The 100 Year Saga of the Struggle to Forge Rail and Steamship Links Between Europe and India , about, guess what, the struggle of the communication between East colonies and West Metropoles. Great book about the Great Game and railways in Central Asia, also expanding on all that gauge stuff. Really fun read (y'know, if you're into this sort of things...)

And the fact I did my master thesis partly about the logistic of commerce and communication in pre-industrial world, you wouldn't believe how well organised the Roman Empire's commerce was. From the vocabulary you use I'd say you also studied supply chain management, would that be correct?



Please please gimme more!

Tanc49 said:

Wow, this is a tremendous effort on your part and I really want so much more!



Push and Pull as I learned myself

I'll just add two things:
This book: Steaming East: The 100 Year Saga of the Struggle to Forge Rail and Steamship Links Between Europe and India , about, guess what, the struggle of the communication between East colonies and West Metropoles. Great book about the Great Game and railways in Central Asia, also expanding on all that gauge stuff. Really fun read (y'know, if you're into this sort of things...)

And the fact I did my master thesis partly about the logistic of commerce and communication in pre-industrial world, you wouldn't believe how well organised the Roman Empire's commerce was. From the vocabulary you use I'd say you also studied supply chain management, would that be correct?



Please please gimme more!

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Push and pull - face palm - of course - I knew I gotten it wrong

My interest is purely from having read lots of good military history where such things were discussed - ie Stephen Bungays book - Alamein

I trained as an Aircraft Engineer and now work for an international Credit card provider LOL

Tanc49 said:

Wow, this is a tremendous effort on your part and I really want so much more!



Push and Pull as I learned myself

I'll just add two things:
This book: Steaming East: The 100 Year Saga of the Struggle to Forge Rail and Steamship Links Between Europe and India , about, guess what, the struggle of the communication between East colonies and West Metropoles. Great book about the Great Game and railways in Central Asia, also expanding on all that gauge stuff. Really fun read (y'know, if you're into this sort of things...)

And the fact I did my master thesis partly about the logistic of commerce and communication in pre-industrial world, you wouldn't believe how well organised the Roman Empire's commerce was. From the vocabulary you use I'd say you also studied supply chain management, would that be correct?



Please please gimme more!

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If you mean me, then no I've not studied it. My university degree was in Geology, I did Ancient history at A level but no more, and I work in finance.
I just read a lot - most of this I learned on this forum, I'm just pulling it together in one place and making it a bit more accessible.

Gannt the chartist said:

Just to put it in context a 1939 German infantry division at TO strength is 16,500 men, 500 trucks 400 cars 500 motorcycles,200 sidecars, 5,000 horses and 1,000 wagons. It needs 53 tons of hay, 54 tons of food 20 tons of petrol, 1 ton of lubricants, 10 tons of ordinance, 12 tons of misc stuff per day. (experience showed the POL requirement was about 50% low in Russia and in the process of catching up Heroic Red Army dust killed a lot of engines)

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That figure for ordnance looks remarkably low to me - divisional artillery (ignoring the organic mortars, machine guns and the like) was 40 x 105 mm guns and 12 x 149 mm guns.
Shell weight for the 105 mm was about 14 kg, so assume 20 kg per round for charge, packing cases and the like. One salvo is therefore 800 kg.
Shell weight for the 149 mm is about 44 kg, so assume 60 kg per round on the same basis. That gives one salvo as 720 kg, and one salvo from both types at one and a half tonnes. Even if none of the troops fire any other weapon, that ammunition allowance only gives them six salvoes (90 seconds of fire) per day. You aren't looking at a serious battle here - it's closer to what you would expend on a peacetime exercise!

"You call this rubber?" - strategic materials.


This one's almost not even about war at all. It's about economics.

There's always been strategic materials, pretty much since ancient man noticed that stones from one place could be chipped into sharper shapes than rocks from another.

One of the early ones was Bronze. It's an alloy - tin and copper - and you need both of them to produce good bronze, and they're not always found in the same place. In fact, one of the first trading cultures relying on sea power was the Minoan, based on Crete. It used trade links reaching as far as the British Isles to source copper and tin, and sold the resultant bronze, using a substantial merchant marine. (Incidentally, it collapsed because of a gigantic volcanic explosion to its north which smashed all the boats with a tidal wave - the trade net basically collapsed, so did the Minoan civilization, and the result was a Dark Age.)

Moving forward in history, good quality iron can produce strategic differentials. The iron ore in some areas of India was contaminated with just the right mix of minerals that it produced absolutely phenomenal sword-steel. (Damascus steel was similar.) This wasn't reproducible at the time, of course, since the blacksmiths knew how to turn the iron ore into fantastic steel but not how to turn OTHER iron ore into the same steel. It may as well have been a different metal entirely.

Another strategic material which might be surprising - bow staves. The longbows of the British (English and Welsh) yeomanry were the terror of western Europe, but they also nearly rendered the Yew tree extinct in Europe due to their voracious appetite for the things - laws were at one point passed mandating bow staves be provided by any incoming trade ship!

Then there's gunpowder. It's sometimes not appreciated just how hard it could be to get your hands on enough gunpowder or the source materials thereof all through the gunpowder age - the US government brought up all it could get at the start of the American Civil War, and that fitted on one ship (which was incidentally delayed during the Trent Affair, when it looked like Britain might possibly go to war with the US).
That's because sources of saltpetre aren't everywhere. (British India was IT for the US, in terms of sources, until their in-war new methods like manure beds started producing a couple of years in.)

Incidentally, Britain's position as thassalocracy and global trade network controller was very useful in getting this stuff - to the point they sometimes forgot how much other powers didn't get it. The Americans in the ARW really had to scramble to get their hands on gunpowder for the first year or so.

There's also ship wood - oaks take a long time to grow, and any tree has to be properly seasoned before it produces a good ship. Cutting-out expeditions (shipborne raids) would steal it - or burn it - in the seasoning piles, because without it a new fleet would be impossible to build and even repair work became difficult.
This leads to an amusing anecdote.
When the Danish navy was soundly defeated and taken by the English at the battle of Copenhagen 1807 an order was given by the navel ministry to the minstry of agriculture and forestry to plant new oaks for the construction of a new navy at some point in the future. In 1995 the current ministry of nature send a note to the defence ministry informing tham that the oaks were now ready to be used for shipbuilding.


But the real explosion in strategic materials came with the rise of industrialized warfare.
Coal? High quality iron ore? Oil, of course, but also rubber, aluminium, chrome, food, ball bearings... almost all of them can be a potential choke point.

Here's a few lesser known examples.
1) The voyages of the Gay Viking.
The HMS Gay Viking was one of a number of high speed, low payload blockade runners built to sneak into the Baltic, load Swedish ball bearings and sneak out again. These were vital for several reasons, not least to stop the Germans getting them. (A ship called the Gay Viking loading up on Swedish balls was presumably not intended as a pun.)
2) Copper.
The German army was so short of copper in early 1940 that it was producing and warehousing artillery shells without the driving bands, because the driving bands would require too much copper.
3) Rubber.
Germany had one hell of a rubber problem in WW2. All the rubber was grown too far south for them to get hold of (Brazil and SE Asia, basically). They had an advantage in the Buna process, which could produce it from oil (which they weren't exactly swimming in), but the resultant artificial rubber was NOT as good as natural rubber - even today artificial rubber isn't as good, but can be used to eke out the real stuff.
This is one reason all the Luftflotte '46 super-aircraft aren't very plausible - the real Me262 was in very real danger of its tires exploding on takeoff or landing, to say nothing of the other problems that their materials crunch produced such as the jet engines having a habit of melting... but that's a digression.

These kinds of concerns were why the British strategy in WW1 and to some extent in WW2 has gravitated towards blockade - try and make your enemy run out of something critical, wait, then move in.



And, finally, the most amusing strategic material of all. Tea.
The British Army in WW2 got through more tea than artillery shells - by weight. The only thing they used more of than tea by weight was bullets.
In 1942 the Luftwaffe decided that, deprived of tea, the British Empire would pretty much grind to a halt. They therefore decided to bomb Mincing Lane - centre of all British and Imperial tea trading - flat. It worked too. The tea industry was sent into chaos and tea was rationed to two ounces a week - which is very very little. From a morale point of view it was one of the most successful bombing strategies of the war.
In response to shortage fears, in 1942 the British decided to buy the tea. As in all of it. In the world.

There's also a power generating dam in the UK (Wales, specifically) built for the express purpose of handling it when millions of kettles go on at once.

Tea is serious business.

Question: How much seaweed per day does a mer-horse eat?

Saphroneth said:

"
3) Rubber.
Germany had one hell of a rubber problem in WW2. All the rubber was grown too far south for them to get hold of (Brazil and SE Asia, basically). They had an advantage in the Buna process, which could produce it from oil (which they weren't exactly swimming in), but the resultant artificial rubber was NOT as good as natural rubber - even today artificial rubber isn't as good, but can be used to eke out the real stuff.
This is one reason all the Luftflotte '46 super-aircraft aren't very plausible - the real Me262 was in very real danger of its tires exploding on takeoff or landing, to say nothing of the other problems that their materials crunch produced such as the jet engines having a habit of melting... but that's a digression.

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Can you provide a source for Buna not being as good as natural rubber? I've heard this bandied about, but cannot find any reliable sources stating this. Also it was also made from coal, not oil.

Edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_rubber

Natural rubber, coming from latex of Hevea brasiliensis, is mainly poly-cis-isoprene containing traces of impurities like protein, dirt etc. Although it exhibits many excellent properties in terms of mechanical performance, natural rubber is often inferior to certain synthetic rubbers, especially with respect to its thermal stability and its compatibility with petroleum products.

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http://www.cmu.edu/gelfand/k12-teachers/polymers/natural-synthetic-polymers/index.html

Natural rubber does not handle easily (it's sticky), nor does it have very good properties or durability (it rots). It is usually vulcanized, a process by which the rubber is heated in the presence of Sulfur, to improve its resilience, elasticity and durability. Synthetic rubber is preferable because different monomers can be mixed in various proportions resulting in a wide range of physical, mechanical, and chemical properties. The monomers can be produced pure and addition of impurities or additives can be controlled by design to give optimal properties.

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http://www.bridgestonetrucktires.com/us_eng/real/magazines/bestof3/speced3_synthetic_rubber.asp

What sorts of performance?

"Natural rubber tends to be really good at certain kinds of things, like tear resistance and wear, but less good at reducing rolling resistance.

"With synthetic, because we're making rubber that's exactly the way we want it, we can create rubber that can be fuel efficient, have a high affinity for carbon black and other components that go into the tire, process more easily and all sorts of other desirable characteristics.

"With natural rubber, you pretty much get what you get.

"With two basic components, styrene and butadiene, we can vary the amounts of each, how they're linked to each other and the overall chemical structure of the result. That gives us lots of different varieties, each with different capabilities.

"We can make about 40 different kinds of synthetic rubber, and although most of what we produce is used in tires, we also make special types for other applications."

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http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/syntheticrubber.html

Researchers at I. G. Farben, a German conglomerate that included Bayer, focused on the sodium polymerization of the monomer butadiene to produce a synthetic rubber called "Buna" ("bu" for butadiene and "na" for natrium, the chemical symbol for sodium). They discovered in 1929 that Buna S (butadiene and styrene polymerized in an emulsion), when compounded with carbon black, was significantly more durable than natural rubber.

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