Delayed Haber-Bosch process

[Emperor Qianlong]

What if Fritz Haber (and/or Carl Bosch) were not able to develop/commercialize the synthesis of ammonia as quickly as they did in OTL? What if by 1914, mass production of synthetic ammonia is still not possible? How does this affect WWI?

[Zyzzyva]

Originally Posted by Emperor Qianlong

What if Fritz Haber (and/or Carl Bosch) were not able to develop/commercialize the synthesis of ammonia as quickly as they did in OTL? What if by 1914, mass production of synthetic ammonia is still not possible? How does this affect WWI?

I would think Germany goes under much sooner - 1916 or even 1915, maybe. No ammonia -> no explosives -> no artillery -> no war effort.

[Emperor Qianlong]

Originally Posted by Zyzzyva

I would think Germany goes under much sooner - 1916 or even 1915, maybe. No ammonia -> no explosives -> no artillery -> no war effort.

Well, that was broadly my idea. The question I had was how long they would hold out. Also, how this does affect the post-war world. I can't imagine the "Dolchstosslegende" arising in this timeline.

[Zyzzyva]

Originally Posted by Emperor Qianlong

Well, that was broadly my idea. The question I had was how long they would hold out. Also, how this does affect the post-war world. I can't imagine the "Dolchstosslegende" arising in this timeline.

I'd imagine by 1915 they'd be feeling the squeeze. WWI armies ate shells like popcorn. I really can't see any of Falkenhayn's eastern front offensives coming off when they're running low on artillery.

Actually, in 1915 they were doing the first bout of unrestricted submarine warfare, weren't they? I can see them going in for that in a bigger way - after all, they need victory now, and f*** the Americans. If they don't win by fall 1915, they're screwed anyways.

Once the allies win - the CPs'll probably negotiate, since victory will become obviously impossible pretty quick - the peace would be something to see. Less antipathy for the CPs, since you don't have 4 years of vicious propaganda behind you. No Russian revolution, no AH revolutions, no British conquest of the peripheral bits of the Ottoman Empire. Hell, I can see the CPs doing better - maybe even significantly better - out of this TL.

[Xenos]

I agree with Zyzzyva. German munitions production would not survive the British blockade and Germany would be forced to capitulate much sooner than OTL.
Although I find it hard to accept that Germany would be significantly delayed in perfecting the Haber process. At the outbreak of war, Germany was the scientific Mecca of the world, and they especially excelled in chemistry. This, combined with the desperation caused by the blockade would inevitably result in the process being developed ASAP.

[Faeelin]

Hrmm. Even if Germany hits on the process a few years later, can they implement it?

So, they begin by importing saltpeter, or trying to, from Chile. Oops. And nitrates are also used for fertilizer, so it's a trade off. 1916 will not end well for Germany.

[MrP]

Nifty little book here that a kindly reader of PlC found for me on the German Chemical Industry. Should be handy for considering this issue.

[1940LaSalle]

I'm inclined to agree with Zyzzyva et. al. on this one: all it would take to slow down development of a commercial-scale process would be one sizable accident. You're working with compressed gases and ultimately with anhydrous ammonia, both of which have the potential to do damage and bodily harm. Don't forget that although Germany led the world in the chemical industries in that time, chemical engineering was nowhere close to what it is now: at the time, most chemical plants were engineered by mechanical engineers working in concert with chemists, and a lot of the design guidelines, correlations, etc. used today didn't exist.

So: an accident in 1915 (let's say) slows down development. Importation of Chilean nitrates are strangled by the blockade. I'm thinking Germany comes to the conference table via feelers sent through Switzerland, Sweden, and perhaps the United States in early 1916 at the latest. It might come early enough so that the Brusilov offensive didn't take place, thus buying the tsarist regime in Russia a bit more time. I'm guessing a less draconian peace than that arrived at via Versailles: possibly even a status quo ante bellum peace.

[Zyzzyva]

Originally Posted by 1940LaSalle

I'm inclined to agree with Zyzzyva et. al. on this one: all it would take to slow down development of a commercial-scale process would be one sizable accident. You're working with compressed gases and ultimately with anhydrous ammonia, both of which have the potential to do damage and bodily harm. Don't forget that although Germany led the world in the chemical industries in that time, chemical engineering was nowhere close to what it is now: at the time, most chemical plants were engineered by mechanical engineers working in concert with chemists, and a lot of the design guidelines, correlations, etc. used today didn't exist.

So: an accident in 1915 (let's say) slows down development. Importation of Chilean nitrates are strangled by the blockade. I'm thinking Germany comes to the conference table via feelers sent through Switzerland, Sweden, and perhaps the United States in early 1916 at the latest. It might come early enough so that the Brusilov offensive didn't take place, thus buying the tsarist regime in Russia a bit more time. I'm guessing a less draconian peace than that arrived at via Versailles: possibly even a status quo ante bellum peace.

They had Haber-Bosch at the beginning of the war. If you think they could have made it to 1916 without it, you have no idea how many munitions a WWI army ate.

[MrP]

Originally Posted by Zyzzyva

They had Haber-Bosch at the beginning of the war. If you think they could have made it to 1916 without it, you have no idea how many munitions a WWI army ate.

I used to have no idea - couldn't find any hard figures at all, in fact! - until I read that nifty little book. Very useful!

[Earling]

One thing that always got me, couldn't they just be more economical with munitions? There is no real set requirement in how much heavy artillery you need to have firing at a trench is there?

[MrP]

Originally Posted by Earling

One thing that always got me, couldn't they just be more economical with munitions? There is no real set requirement in how much heavy artillery you need to have firing at a trench is there?

Short answer: yes to both.
Longer: They could've been more sparing about counter-battery, destructive and harassing fire, but that'd lead to greater German casualties, as Entente units could operate with greater impunity. As for how much artillery you need firing at a trench, there is a minimum level. The Somme's a pretty good example. Cover it in GCSE History (yeah, I know this is my usual schtick, but it's very apt here), and you'll get x soldiers involved, y number of guns, z number of casualties. Start reading about it in greater depth and you find out interesting things such as the fact that while the absolute number of artillery was impressive, the density of fire was less than in previous offensives.

The chaps who thought that barbed wire and so on would be rendered ineffectual by a sufficiently heavy bombardment weren't so wrong as one initially thinks. It's just that it needs a lot of guns firing at a small area as opposed to a large one. This still, of course, isn't going to knock out bunkers that are sufficiently deep to ignore bombardment, so there'll still be enemy soldiers left to oppose the infantry attack.

But the Germans did sit on the defensive after the Battle of the Marne IOTL, so they weren't using as much as the French, say, who had to abandon offensive operations in, IIRC, November '14 because of a shortage of shells. The Germans can conserve supplies by sitting on the defensive everywhere, but this will bugger up the development of Stosstaktik for starters, and help Russia quite a bit, even if it has no immediate impact on the Western Front.

[Zyzzyva]

Originally Posted by Earling

One thing that always got me, couldn't they just be more economical with munitions? There is no real set requirement in how much heavy artillery you need to have firing at a trench is there?

No. This is WWI. You can just about measure the success of an offensive by the density of artillery. The figure I saw was that the line between "Somme-type tactical failure" and "Michael-type tactical success" is around something like one artillery piece per eight yards of front. (Less on the Eastern Front, of course). Without obscene quantities of artillery, you aren't going anywhere: the allies will have vastly larger forces with vastly less casualties - as impressive as the machine gun is, most people were killed by artillery - you can't run attacks and you can't run counterattacks, and you will lose in record time.

[1940LaSalle]

Originally Posted by Zyzzyva

They had Haber-Bosch at the beginning of the war. If you think they could have made it to 1916 without it, you have no idea how many munitions a WWI army ate.

Please see the link below, posted by an historian at Princeton:

http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/t...zmaczynski.htm

And I quote:

World War I started in 1914. Early in the war, naval battles were fought off the coast of Chile and in the South Atlantic between the British and the Germans. These battles enabled the Germans to transport some nitrates to Germany but eventually these naval battles and others established the British control of the sea. Many historians and scientists think that Germany would have run out of nitrates by early 1916 if it had not been for German scientific discoveries and their industrial technology.



The same site points out that a single plant was up and running by 1913--but one plant does not an entire industry make, unless the plant is the duPont Chambers Works (Deepwater, NJ) producing elemental fluorine in the early 1940s for the Manhattan Project.