Discussion: Comparing British and German industries 1900-1940

Because British steel and machine tools (capital goods) production were vastly inferior to Germany, their main foe, and was insufficient to meet demand. It had to import more from the US and Sweden to make good of the shortages in these products.

E.g.
Steel production in 1913:
UK: 8 million tons
Germany: 16 million tons.
Stop reading Corelli Barnett and start reading Paul Kennedy! I'll put my copy of Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in a packet and send it to you if you'll provide me with your address.

You again misunderstand my point that the British munitions industry in 1914 was a joke because Britain maintained a much smaller army than the other great powers. It took time to convert the industry we did have from civil to military production. An expansion from 6 infantry division to 70 plus the arms supplied to the Dominion and Indian Armies plus the Allies was IMHO a commendable achievement given such a small mobilisation base.

Even the United States did not immediately begin to churn out vast quantities of munitions in 1917. It took time to convert their factories from civil to military production too.

I don't deny that the British produced less steel. I admit that it put us at a disadvantage. What I do deny is how it fits into your bigger picture.

In spite of all Germany's alleged advantages, who won? Your reply will be the UK but only because it had the British Empire, France, Russia, Italy, Belgium, Japan and America on its side. But that's what the Britain had been doing since the wars with Louis XIV, that is defeat a stronger enemy by being the core of a coalition of weaker nations that were collectively stronger than the enemy. The big exception being the American Revolutionary War when the rest of Europe combined against Britain.
 
What Thomas does not seem to understand is that capacity is not necessarily equal to actual production. One might have the capacity to produce more, but do not because it is cost-effective to import. However, once one needs to, production can be ramped up.
 
S

Even the United States did not immediately begin to churn out vast quantities of munitions in 1917. It took time to convert their factories from civil to military production too.

Actually the US mobilisation of production mainly relied upon factories built for the British and French, two field artillery factories, one built each for the French and British and three rifle factories built to supply British orders all provided the majority of weapons in those categories.

The War With Germany, A Statistical Summary

Of course this actually reinforces your point that it is much easier to mobilise from a larger base.
 
Also UK munitions production

1914: 91 guns, nil tanks, 200 aircraft and 300 machine guns;

1915: 3,390 guns, nil tanks, 1,900 aircraft and 6,100 machine guns;

1916: 4,314 guns, 150 tanks, 6,100 aircraft and 33,500 machine guns;

1917: 5,137 guns, 1,110 tanks, 14,700 aircraft and 79,700 machine guns;

1918: 8,039 guns, 1,350 tanks, 32,000 aircraft and 120,990 machine guns.

The figures from 1914 are from August to December, not the full year IIRC. However, the increase in 1915 is still considerable so the idea that British munitions production before the Ministry of Munitions was formed was a joke has to be but in context.

AFAIK the Shell Shortage of 1915 happened because the British Army had only been told to prepare for a short campaign on the scale of the Boer War and the because the generals had underestimated how intensively the guns would be used. AFAIK the British Army started the war with less heavy artillery per division than the German Army was that the British were expecting to fight a war of movement and that the heavy artillery would not be able to keep up. Is there any truth to those statements?
 

Thomas1195

Banned
What Thomas does not seem to understand is that capacity is not necessarily equal to actual production. One might have the capacity to produce more, but do not because it is cost-effective to import. However, once one needs to, production can be ramped up.
About capacity, for example, British steel output never exceeded 10 million tons per annum during ww1, and never reached near the level of 20 million tons per year during ww2. Or in machine tools, total British output during 1940-1944 was only around 350000 (German output was over 800000).
 
About capacity, for example, British steel output never exceeded 10 million tons per annum during ww1, and never reached near the level of 20 million tons per year during ww2. Or in machine tools, total British output during 1940-1944 was only around 350000 (German output was over 800000).
And did they need to? You're specifically ignoring that particular aspect in order to engage in German worship.

The true strength of the United Kingdom was being able to mobilize its global trade system to maximize output of what mattered instead of trying to engage in inefficient autarky. That is why Germany lost both World Wars.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
And did they need to? You're specifically ignoring that particular aspect in order to engage in German worship.

The true strength of the United Kingdom was being able to mobilize its global trade system to maximize output of what mattered instead of trying to engage in inefficient autarky. That is why Germany lost both World Wars.
Yes they did. Thomas1195 has a point. It's the way he makes it that I don't like.
Of course they DID.

Britain's debt after ww1 would have been far lower than IOTL if its industrial capacity was bigger. Britain with a bigger industrial capacity than IOTL would have been able to supply France and Belgium what these countries and even Britain itself IOTL relied on American imports, thus saving lots of their reserves (for both UK and France).

Next, for ww2, being less reliant on Lend Lease would have make UK much better off post war.
 
Of course they DID.

Britain's debt after ww1 would have been far lower than IOTL if its industrial capacity was bigger. Britain with a bigger industrial capacity than IOTL would have been able to supply France and Belgium what these countries and even Britain itself IOTL relied on American imports, thus saving lots of their reserves (for both UK and France).

Next, for ww2, being less reliant on Lend Lease would have make UK much better off post war.

But your prescriptions for how to get there are worse than the problem.

Not only that but the really interesting thing is how much Germany threw away by going to war in 1914 and that it still had not recovered come 1939. I am now of the opinion thanks to this thread that a whole slew of the Kaiserreich victory scenarios envisaged by many would not come to pass as Germany has as a result of its war effort created a competitor in even a nominally defeated Britain that it would not have had before. Thus to create the illusion of a victory bonus Germany would have been forced to loot Europe thereby in the long term denying itself the markets for high end goods it required to prosper.

War as the Germans for the main part will tell you, was not the solution to their problems.

However I realise this thread's title is misleading. You do not want to compare the British and German experience but rather denigrate Britain and evade the more problematic issues Germany encountered in the period 1900-1940.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
I am now of the opinion thanks to this thread that a whole slew of the Kaiserreich victory scenarios envisaged by many would not come to pass
You can ask yourself what if Austrian performed better. This would free up lots of German soldiers for the Western Front, which could have made a difference before 1918.

Oh wait, Rhian had just completed a good Kaiserreich TL.

Besides, a later ww1 in 1920s would mean that Germany possesses complete technological superiority over Britain in key industrial aspects like metallurgy, machine tooling, electrical, electromechanic (like telephony and radio telegraphy), chemical...

more problematic issues Germany encountered in the period 1900-1940.
I agree that Germany had problems in agriculture, but Britain also had to depend on foreign food imports.

German industries (I mean non Nazi) clearly had no problem in technology and organization. They had superior production techniques and superior management practices. While Britain might be better in producing low-tech goods and consumer goods, German HEAVY industries were clearly superior. Looking at the steel industry, British output was much lower than German, and the fact that they could not raise the steel production to above 10 million tons during ww1 and 20 million tons during ww2 proved their limited capacity. They could have used modern technology and larger integrated plants to raise steel output to those level above without using up labour from other industries by improving productivity, I said, productivity.

The biggest problem for Germany was creating too many enemies rather than economic, industrial and technological ones.

I realize that Germany could have break Britain by waging a Chinese style trade war, using methods such as devaluation and dumping.
 
You can ask yourself...

...what would this thread be like if you actually asked the question you posed in the title? I and others have done this but we shall never know because you always dodge the direct question.

The funny thing is, if you actually believed any of your statements you would actually present a wider range of sourced data because you would not be perpetually worried that anyone actually studying would point out the flaws in your claims.

Germany did have an impressive lead in some areas but what we discover was that Britain actually had more robust fall backs than expected in a lot of cases and was able to endure the strain of the First World War immeasurably better than Germany. Partly this was of course because Britain did not have a political system that needed a war and thus was able to wait for war to come to it before fighting one. That is in part why I have a problem with your prescriptions, they seem rather too modelled on that flawed state that only existed from 1933-1945, the remedies being designed for war compel war to make them cost effective.

The German conclusion was that Russia being more of threat and the Royal Navy being further ahead that no, in fact a 1920s war would have gone badly for them. They may have been wrong in this conclusion but you have not even deigned to examine the question.

What might be interesting is to try and posit where Britain and Germany would have been in 1920 without war. Certainly both countries ought to be richer and it looks likely that Germany would be richer relative to Britain and possibly, I might argue probably, less warlike. Success breeds contentment and wars cost money and lives. A successful Germany, possibly a bit more socialist would likely enjoy a better off and more content working class and likely a less alarmist ruling class not constantly in fear of revolution from within and assault from without.
Post 332

It does seem to be a possibility based on the trajectories identified by Broadberry and Burhop I linked in that post and other data introduced in this thread.

However I do realise that in actual fact your title is in fact misleading, it should read: How Many Goalposts Must a Poster Move Around in Order to Denigrate British Industry Between 1900-1940?
 
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However I do realise that in actual fact your title is in fact misleading, it should read: How Many Goalposts Must a Poster Move Around in Order to Denigrate British Industry Between 1900-1940?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.

Drats! it doesn't scan!

;)
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Well, various problems in British industry that eventually led to Thatcherism existed from the period I mentioned, such as poor technical education, heavy unions, slowness to adopt new tech or poor management.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
It does seem to be a possibility based on the trajectories identified by Broadberry and Burhop I linked in that post and other data introduced in this thread.
These trajectories showed two hypothetical productivity trends of Britain and Germany in a non-ww1 scenario and concluded that Germany would finally surpass Britain in mid-1930s.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Someone should realize that a Britain with 20% share of world manufacturing (more than the whole CPs combined) would butterfly away ww1
 
Steel production in 1913:
UK: 8 million tons
Germany: 16 million tons.
I can't refute that, but it has also been said that one can prove anything with statistics.

However, Kennedy said that Britain and Germany had about the same national incomes ($11 billion v $12 billion), but because Britain had a smaller population (45 million v 65 million it had a considerably larger national income per capita ($244 v $184).

Therefore the British must have been doing something else much better than the Germans.

Having said that making more steel in 1913 or more importantly being able to make it cheaply enough to sell more would have helped, provided that it was done via better labour productivity rather than with extra labour. For example a bigger steel supply in the second half of the war would mean there was no need to trade off tank, ammunition, merchant ship and warship production.

But it wasn't the end of the world for the British in World War One, which is what you are making their inferiority to Germany in some industries out to be.
 
And? Who cares. UK could import, while Germany could not and thus had to waste resources doing everything itself. Thus Germany is ultimately inferior to UK.
The British Treasury for one. Reducing imports saves foreign currency. It also puts more money into your own economy.

If the British steel industry before world war one had been able to make and more importantly sell more in the process increasing steel exports and reducing steel imports that had two beneficial effects. The first is that the British go into World War One with bigger foreign currency reserves. Second the British steel firms would be making bigger profits which they paid British taxes on so that the British Government could pay more of the cost of the war from revenue and less by borrowing, which in turn meant a smaller national debt at the end of the war reducing the crippling debt burden the UK was under between the world wars.
 

Thomas1195

Banned
Having said that making more steel in 1913 or more importantly being able to make it cheaply enough to sell more would have helped, provided that it was done via better labour productivity rather than with extra labour. For example a bigger steel supply in the second half of the war would mean there was no need to trade off tank, ammunition, merchant ship and warship production.
This was what I mean. Note that not only output, but German productivity in heavy industries was also higher.
 
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