Different German Rearmament

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Deleted member 1487

What if Raeder was less successful in manipulating Hitler and loses out on his share of the rearmament money (no plan Z). Basically what this means is no Bismarck, Tirpitz or really any new surface ships outside several new destroyers. Sub production is kept to OTL. Instead the extra resources spent mostly on the Luftwaffe, with some of the rest going to increase motorization of the Wehrmacht.
Now I don't have actual numbers of what was spent by 1939, but I am willing to be that with an increased Luftwaffe and significant increase in motorization of infantry formations, that the course of the war might be somewhat different. Would this make a Strategic Bomber fleet (however small) somewhat possible?
Sure, the Brits would of course not have to worry about German capital ships and this would go harder on the Japanese, but that does not really effect the Germans, as Sealion is now more implausible than ever. Perhaps this even helps, as if Sealion is completely unworkable, the Battle of Britain is stopped earlier or not even started at all. But if it does happen, a larger LW is possiblely better prepared to inflict greater damage on the Brits, especially if the extra money and resources allow for heavy bombers to be developed. Might this mean a reverse airwar over Britain, with the Germans fire bombing British cities, rather than OTL raids over Hamburg? Would perhaps this extra pressure be enough to crack British moral?
 
What if Raeder was less successful in manipulating Hitler and loses out on his share of the rearmament money (no plan Z). Basically what this means is no Bismarck, Tirpitz or really any new surface ships outside several new destroyers. Sub production is kept to OTL.

No plan Z is what happened in OTL, actually. Plan Z was an admiral's daydream. What the Kriegsmarine got in OTL was no plan Z.

That said, no "new" warships? What is a "new" warship, i.e., when is that decision taken? Nothing that's built after Hitler comes to power? Then if the Kriegsmarine in 1940 has no Scharnhorst, no Gneisenau, no Scheer, no Hipper, no Blücher, and no Nürnberg. Prinz Eugen is not in the works and Graf Spee has not been sunk, for the very good reason it never existed.
They have the Lützow, the other CLs apart the Nürnberg (Emden, Königsberg, Karlsruhe, Köln). The Leipzig exists but in OTL it is down under repairs. Additionally, they have say 50 destroyers and corvettes/large TBs instead of 34.

Now what about Weserübung? The Germans have to carry it out with that larger number of destroyers – and with no other escort but the Lützow and four light cruisers.
Now in OTL, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Hipper, Blücher and Nürnberg were engaged and at least damaged, or at worst sunk, during Weserübung, while the Scheer was unavailable at the time. Of the ships that exist in this ATL, the Lützow was heavily damaged and two light cruisers sunk.
IOW, either the Germans are wise enough not to even try the Norwegian campaign, or, worse, they try and lose most of the Kriegsmarine, plus valuable para and mountain troopers in a failure. The presence of a strategic bomber force does not change this outcome, given that the problem in that case would be the range of the escort fighters.

A failed Weserübung and no German-occupied Norway means:
- no Swedish (and Norwegian) iron ore, very bad news for the whole German economy;
- no easy access to the Atlantic, a much more uphill fight for the U-Boote;
- no surface vessel raids, as you mentioned, but also no credible Seelöwe threat, regardless of the effect of a strengthened Luftwaffe, because there's no longer a Kriegsmarine;
- no direct threat to Murmansk;
- a nice propaganda coup for the Allies. The Germans have overrun Poland, but then got a bloody nose in Norway. The French morale gets better.

Not that everything goes fine for the Allies, of course, especially in the variant in which the Germans don't even try. The Anglo-French are seen as violators of Norwegian neutrality, and things may get tricky, both diplomatically and militarily, when one takes into account Sweden, Finland and the USSR (I had written SU here, but I corrected it in fear of that Syracuse University netcop...).

This is the "no Kriegsmarine" side of things, which is already bad enough for Germany. Maybe I'll find the time to write about the "more Luftwaffe" side too.
 
Well, if there is no Norway, we might have the UK support Finland against the Soviets and all of the ramifications that might cause; indeed, if the UK decides to bomb Baku, as was planned, WW2 just became a Triangular war.

No Idea at all what would happen if the UK and the Soviets came to blows. Nothing good though...
 
Well, if there is no Norway, we might have the UK support Finland against the Soviets and all of the ramifications that might cause; indeed, if the UK decides to bomb Baku, as was planned, WW2 just became a Triangular war.

No Idea at all what would happen if the UK and the Soviets came to blows. Nothing good though...

That's what I was saying when I wrote that diplomatically and militarily things get tricky when you consider also Sweden, Finland and the USSR.

However, given the timing of events in OTL, I wouldn't rule out that Stalin is even more eager to cut the war short than in OTL, seeing what's boiling up in the North Sea and knowing the Germans are much less of a threat in this ATL. So maybe by the time the Allies land in Norway, the Winter War is already over (as it was in OTL when the Germans landed first) and there's no excuse any more. A bonus for the Finns is that they have given up less, if the war ends a month earlier.
What Sweden does or is forced to do, that's another matter.
 

Deleted member 1487

Why couldn't germany simply send troops to Sweden to assist them if invaded by foreign powers? I mean Sweden is more likely to resist than Norway and this just gives them more reason to favor Germany. It may not also mean Axis membership either, if they can play it off as resisting invaders and just preserving their neutrality.
Norway would give the Allies a political black eye, maybe no lend-lease?
 
Why couldn't germany simply send troops to Sweden to assist them if invaded by foreign powers? I mean Sweden is more likely to resist than Norway and this just gives them more reason to favor Germany. It may not also mean Axis membership either, if they can play it off as resisting invaders and just preserving their neutrality.
Norway would give the Allies a political black eye, maybe no lend-lease?

Apart from the other problems I see in the above, it still doesn't solve the ore shipping problem for half the year, with Narvik in Allied hands.
 
They'll get the iron ore from Sweden anyway, from the Swedish Baltic ports for the 9 months or so the sea is not frozen. Sweden needed the German coal way more than Germany needed the Swedish iron, so the Swedes are not going to stop shippings just becuse the easiest and ice-free port goes bust (it did OTL, as the damage suffered was huge during the fighting).
 
They'll get the iron ore from Sweden anyway, from the Swedish Baltic ports for the 9 months or so the sea is not frozen. Sweden needed the German coal way more than Germany needed the Swedish iron, so the Swedes are not going to stop shippings just becuse the easiest and ice-free port goes bust (it did OTL, as the damage suffered was huge during the fighting).

Yeah, the loss of Narvik might not stop the Swedes but the fact that the Allies just preemptively blew Norway out of the water certainly could.

The funny thing is, apart from Norway I'm not sure how much of a difference this would make. The war in Poland and France already went like clockwork; extra mechanization would help a bit but it's hard to see how "in Paris in a month" can be improved on. I guess the big difference (ignoring butterflies) would be in Russia; but even then the limiting factor was the strategic changes-of-direction and the speed of the Panzers, not the speed of the infantry.
 

Deleted member 1487

What about the impact of a Strategic bomber force on the BoB? Enought to cause them to fold?
 
Consider what this means if the British can deploy most of their battleships and many lighter ships against Italy and Japan.

Also the huge resources the British can now deploy elsewhere. As I recall didn't the British have no less than eleven battleships under construction in response to what was known about Plan Z?
 
Yeah, the loss of Narvik might not stop the Swedes but the fact that the Allies just preemptively blew Norway out of the water certainly could.

The funny thing is, apart from Norway I'm not sure how much of a difference this would make. The war in Poland and France already went like clockwork; extra mechanization would help a bit but it's hard to see how "in Paris in a month" can be improved on. I guess the big difference (ignoring butterflies) would be in Russia; but even then the limiting factor was the strategic changes-of-direction and the speed of the Panzers, not the speed of the infantry.

If the allies can provide coal through Narvik, sure.
 
What about the impact of a Strategic bomber force on the BoB? Enought to cause them to fold?

No. Why? Let's see.

1. Strategic bombing, per se, did not make Germany "fold". And what Germany took, over years and years, has nothing to do with what a German strategic bomber force can do to Britain.
Normally, proponents of a "Britain seeks for terms" ATL point out the low morale. Apart from the fact that this is questionable anyway in a TL where the events preceding the Battle of Britain are like in OTL, in this ATL: 1a) the Germans have taken a beating in Norway, 1b) the British are not afraid of a Seelöwe, 1c) it is also to be seen what consequences the Norwegian debacle has had on the campaign in France. The overall outcome is that the British don't fold, no more than they did under German strategic bombing carried out with smaller bombers.

2. Strategic bombers, i.e. large bombers, are of course _less_ useful in the main thrust of OTL's Battle of Britain, which was to defeat Fighter Command first. Big level bombers flying high are not the tool to shut down airfields, much less radar stations. They would be effective against aircraft factories – in the longish run. Which is a time horizon the Germans lack.

3. In any case the assumption made in the original proposal as to the allocation of resources to the Luftwaffe – i.e., use them to build a number of strategic bombers – would make the overall Luftwaffe mix _less_ effective than in OTL. During the battle of Britain, the German bomber force was under-used, because the bottleneck was fighters. The Germans found out they needed to employ at least 2.5-3 fighters per bomber if they wanted the bomber back, and preferably more, say 5 to 1, if the bomber was actually a bait intended to kill the British fighter force in air-to-air combat; and they had _less_ fighters than bombers! So the increased Luftwaffe budget would need to be expended not only on large bombers, but on more fighters too. Unfortunately this requires the awareness that the bombers do not "always get through" in daylight if not heavily escorted, and that awareness was scarce in the late 1930s.

4. Finally, the British had decided to go for a strategic bomber force full tilt, early in the decade. Yet it turned out that developing workable designs, testing them, building the new and oversized production lines, building longer runways and bigger hangars etc. etc. took them _years_; and that's by building on the experience of fair-sized 2-engine bombers. The Lancaster flew its first operational mission in March 1942, and it was the result of a specification of May 1936! OK; it was a difficult development history. But the Stirling entered service one year earlier – still after a 1936 specification. Throwing money at the problems helps things, but days still have 24 hours only and weeks 7 days only. The Luftwaffe came into being officially in March 1935. That does not leave a lot of time to field a significant 4-engined bomber force.
 
They'll get the iron ore from Sweden anyway, from the Swedish Baltic ports for the 9 months or so the sea is not frozen. Sweden needed the German coal way more than Germany needed the Swedish iron, so the Swedes are not going to stop shippings just becuse the easiest and ice-free port goes bust (it did OTL, as the damage suffered was huge during the fighting).

1. Contemporary sources say Luleå was closed for 18-20 weeks a year, not 12.

2. There were other ports, too, mainly Oxelösund. However, the British Admiralty assessed in 1939 that this latter port could handle no more than 20% of the iron ore Germany imported from Sweden. It was mainly used for the shipments from other iron-producing regions.

3. From 1939 to 1944, at a time when the British where sending submarines and Coastal Command bombers along the Norwegian coast, both to directly attack freighters and to leave mines behind, the Germans kept using Narvik. On average, 20.1% of the Swedish iron ore going to Germany in those years went through Narvik. This implied, BTW, repairing those damages you quoted.

4. So if Narvik is not available, not only there is the problem with ice; it also remains to be seen whether the handling capabilities of the Swedish ports is sufficient.

5. Assuming it is, diverting all the shipments from Narvik to elsewhere will not be without costs and delays. The railway from Kiruna to Narvik was an outstanding piece of engineering, with both the rolling stock and the line being able to deal with exceptional weights, specifically for the one purpose of shipping iron ore. The rest of the Swedish rail network was not up to those standards.

6. Apart from all the above, it remains to be seen what the balance of power in Scandinavia is, if the Allies have successfully achieved a foothold in Norway. For the Swedes, having British bombers far away in Scotland, with German fighters in between, is one thing. But if deployed in Narvik, they are minutes away from Kiruna.
 

perfectgeneral

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Strategic bombers would hit USSR harder than the Commonwealth

If Strategic bombers bomb Baku and interdict the trans-Siberian railway, this will make a difference. Hard to get forces from the east back to retake Stalingrad and tanks would have less fuel. Assuming accurate bombing can be employed.

Extra logistic trucks will help while the mud holds off. These are coal dust powered, right?


Airfield denial could continue while Hitler gets a revenge Blitz of London with the strategic bombers, but this uses hindsight that Hitler didn't have. He might have still thrown everything into the Blitz.
 
1. Yes, but it is possible to transport the ore southwards by rail and by line cart (don't know the exact word, but 119km of lines was built during the winter of 1942 to transport ore to the smelting works and port in Skellefteå) to Umeå and Skellefteå, which both ususally have less frozen port time - saltier sea and being further south allows icebreakers to keep the ports open longer there.

2. Lots of ore was shipped on Swedish inshore shipping, escorted by the Swedish navy and attacked by Soviet submarines (mostly in 1942 for the later part).

3. Yes, repairs were done, of course, but intially the damage was great and closed Narvik as a port.

4. The combined capacities these ports connected to the railroad or the line cart line Luleå, Piteå, Skellefteå, Umeåm and Örnsköldsvik should be enough.

5. So was the northern track as well (norra stambanan), it was built to take timber and ore too, there should be no problems railwaying ore southwards, after all, ore was shipped soutwards for the Swedish steel industry before the big steel works at Luleå was finished 1943.

6. Indeed. Sweden will go for the carrot and the stick - provide coal and threaten to bomb the mines, and you get the way you want.
 
If Strategic bombers bomb Baku and interdict the trans-Siberian railway, this will make a difference. Hard to get forces from the east back to retake Stalingrad and tanks would have less fuel. Assuming accurate bombing can be employed.

A big assumption. I'd also want to ask:
- where do the strategic bombers take off from (taking into account their supposed range)?
- where do their escort fighters take off from (taking into account the actual range of German fighters)?
 
One thing is, if extra money goes to the Luftwaffe earlier you might just end up with extra numbers of ineffective aircraft

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
1. Yes, but (...)

You clearly know the lay of the land better than me. Even so, what you write amounts to saying that indeed there was, in OTL, additional work to strengthen the freight capacity on the Baltic side, and the Germans still sent 20% of their stuff through Narvik.

Taking into account that in OTL the Germans accepted the work to be done to repair Narvik and then the risk of British interference on an average of 20% of their shipments, I can only conclude that the alternative to that work and that risk would have been worse for the Germans (of course the Swedes have to pay for any improvements to their own logistical infrastructures, but I'd bet they unload that on the price tag for the Germans, if it's all done for the Germans' iron import's sake).
 
Would it be possible to achieve more or less all the important stuff the Kriegsmarine achieved OTL with less resources?

important AFAIK:
-battle of the Atlantic
-control of Baltic
-capable of invading Norway/Denmark
-threat of Sealion
-forcing the Allies to keep ships in N-Europe instead of in the Med or Far East

Wouldn't the Germans be capable of achieving this without having the pocketbattleships, the heavy cruisers, a pair of battlecruisers AND a battleship building program?
Couldn't at least one of those area's be abandoned without much negative influence (for the Germans) or even two?
In addition, by using hindsight, the Germans could have skipped all their dabbling into carriers.

Without for example Bismarck/Tirpitz and the pocketbattleships, the Allies wouldn't have the losses they suffered thanks to these ships (amongst others Hood and a large amount of sunk tonnage by the Adm Scheer).

Still, wouldn't the Germans be better off then?
 
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