Germany contracts USA companies to build blockade runners 1914

Merchant ship costs (UK) per ton were about £5 but rapidly inflated due to the war:

Costs for 7500 ton cargo steamer
  • 1900 £8 per ton
  • 1905 £6 per ton
  • 1910 £5 per ton
  • 1914 (July) £6 per ton
  • 1915 £17 per ton
  • 1916 £25 per ton
  • 1917 £25 per ton
  • 1918 £24 per ton
  • 1919 (July) £26 per ton

Fast liners like Titanic were about £29 per ton while pre war battleship costs were about £80 per ton. You should be able to swap 1 ton of battleship for 4-5 tons of fast transport 'blockade runner' at pre-war rates.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Your Argument about the large delays caused by convoys over independent sailings are refuted in the Admiralty staff college document
you are comparing the efficiency of peace time sailings to war time convoy operations. The correct comparison is between war time independent routing and war time convoys.

you are pretending that ships still stayed on peacetime schedules During the war and that no ship delayed leaving harbour when it had news of U Boat activity in the vicinity.

page 17 of the PDF
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/NHC/NewPDFs/UK/UK, Defeat-of-Enemy-Attack-on-Shipping1939-1945.pdf

it’s in the Chapter lessons of the first world war.

to Quote “ What was not taken into account were the crippling delays experienced in war time by the hold up and routing of independently routed ships. These delays were as strong a reason for the introduction of convoy in 1917 as the need to reduce actual Sinkings”

Two problems. Not actually data, just an opinion. Second, much more important problem is that the UK deliberately fudge the data in the WW1 analysis to reduce the number of subs built by other nations and odds of second major merchant war. You keep quoting INTENTIONALLY incorrect summaries. You somehow keep having some single ships occassionally have delays departing or waiting for a dock to routinely having 10's of ships hang around for days. It is the equivalent issue of the occassional issues that I have traveling on weekend to regular, weekday traffic jams. I know this is hard to accept, but these sources you quote are of the same reliability of a late Nazi era news clip.

Now lets look at some numbers. Famous convoy. HX 127, Halifax to Liverpool 2593 nautical miles. May 16th to June 2, 17 days. 408 hours. Speed. 6.4 knots average progression if heading straight.

HX 117 - 19 days, speed around 6 knots.

HX 107, 26 days. Speed. 624 hours 4.2 knots.

https://www.warsailors.com/convoys/hx127.html

Now these are the fast convoys, Liberty ships probably run at near 11 if straight which is a 10 day trip, roughly speaking.

So lets do an example of one of the 10-11 knot ships in HX 127. If run independently, it takes 2-3 days to load, 10 day trip, 2-3 unload, 10 day trip. Round trip every 25 days. If we take HX 117, mid range before port congestion, it is 2-3 load, 19 day trip, 2-3 unload, 19 day trip. Shipment about every 42 days, round trip. Take 25 times 1.5 (1/3 loss), you get 37 day round trip.

See how not only can I explain the logic, I can document with multiple real convoys with live data. 1/3 loss of capacity is a good estimate.

And just so you don't get indirect routing like they ran to Iceland coast, 9 extra days is around 2200 nautical miles detour. The detour would be leaving Halifax, going to Charleston South Carolina, then going to Lisbon, then going to Liverpool.


And just so you understand it was not the speed of the ships, SC-100 (slower convoy) only took 16 days to get from Halifax to Liverpool.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Assuming the conversion to a supply ship or blockade runner role, then probably more like a 250 man crew with no capacity for a fight, leave alone battling to the death - if caught a supply ship is supposed to strike its colors and scuttle after moving to life boats. OTOH, the number of 17kt + ships in the water (as opposed to on the drawing board) that were available to Germany in 1914 were not that many.

From memory, I had the Germans with 10s of unused merchant ships with speeds above 15 knots. When you talk about blockade runners, how many are you trying to get going?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The number of German merchants caught out and sitting in neutral ports was large. 76 ships were seized in Lisbon alone in March 1916 and recycled into available Allied shipping.

Presumably many of these had valuable cargos or the ships would be valuable as runners later. Why didn't the Germans just send order these back to Germany. The Northern Patrol wasn't establish until August 9th. Presumably 90% might make it back in this early stage before Britain was organized.


https://books.google.com/books?id=PkH9wfKMqHwC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=German+vessels+seized+in+Lisbon+march+1916&source=bl&ots=ra_wdq9zJG&sig=k05xutPH3GFGK1atEzAOEA3ytRQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiowsSGvOHeAhWHjVkKHVvbAWgQ6AEwDXoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=German vessels seized in Lisbon march 1916&f=false

Absolutely no prewar planning combine with loss of sea cables usage which meant these ships would need to receive radio messages on what to do. Also, for the ships going to and fro Germany, about 1/4 will end up in German ports, so Germany was swimming with unused merchant ships in WW1. Also, good chance these Lisbon ships never traded in German port. Highest market share of shipping market fro Germany was western Pacific (China).

Also, the Germans probably would have thought the war would be won in under a year at any point and time, so why bother.

Also, if you are going to send back, wouldn't you want to load these ships and try to sneak them through in the long winter nights?

I have looked at odd things for ATL, but if you look at the number of merchant ships and the ones near German colonial ports make a run to the German colonies, the colonies have enough men to make them much harder to take. If you do something like have a warehouse with old German infantry weapons and some older, smaller naval artillery (37mm, 88mm) and some ammo, these men/ships are holy terror at sea or land.

Basically, the German war planner planned how to keep the British/French/Russians out of the Baltic and southern third of North Sea. And at this the navy was successful at this tasked but struggled at everything else except losing the war by bringing in the USA.

I leave you with one final example. When looking at "could the Germans build more subs" for my ATL, I was shocked to learn that the Germans often had the U-boat building slips idle. The Germans would have gaps in their orders. The Germans would order ships, then cancel part of the order. All because, "The Germans did not want to have too many older U-boats after the war". Let me ask you this. Did the Heer worry about having too many older machine guns after the war? Too many of some older design artillery pieces? Or did the Heer order maximum production runs?

The German Navy was the Cleveland Browns of Navies.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
You are ignoring the fact that

1) independently routed ships also sailed on indirect routes
2) independent ships suffered delays due to the fear of Uboat activity.
3) Ships in convoy have fewer losses compared to independent sailings

the 33% figure compares wartime convoy to peacetime sailings
the 13% figure compares wartime convoy to wartime independent sailing.

No it doesn't. Look at my numbers is the previous post. Independent ships tended to run at max speed. They tended not to Zig and Zag. Running a straight line at 10+ knots is pretty decent protection versus most U-boats due to approach angles of the U-boat. And a lot of the losses in WW1 are when the ships start to get more predictible paths and near the ports. In the middle of the Atlantic, maximum sustainable speed is the solution.

I have addressed why it can't possibly be the routes. Sailing indirect might make a 10 day trip 12 days. Not 19 or 30 days. At the high end, these ships would be cross the Equator to avoid U-boats.

And you miss the routing issue, congestion. Typically, there is no delay since there is not a known, active U-boat near the port entrance. If rerouted, the amount moved would be 10s of nautical miles adding mere hours to the trip. If there was a wait, it might be a day. This compares with assembling up to 50 ships in a port and waiting days, maybe even a week for all of them to arrive.

Just again to put numbers to kill your myths. HX 125, 126, 127. May 6th, May 10, May 16. Sailings every 5 days on average. That means that a ship waits 0-5 days after loading to leave with an average delay of about 2.5 days. That is roughly a 16% delay to total trip time using prewar movement rates. Or put another way, since ships were unloaded in a few days to a week, a ship may sit around full in the harbor waiting to leave as it took to load.

Now to be clear, I am not arguing that you 20% loss due to general war conditions is either right or wrong, I am showing that you still lose another 1/3 when convoying. The extra 20% loss due to war would explain nicely why that everytime I calculate these numbers, the actuals are worse than my model.
 
From memory, I had the Germans with 10s of unused merchant ships with speeds above 15 knots. When you talk about blockade runners, how many are you trying to get going?

Enough to formulate an actual strategy in the neutral American market that can impact the war. I'm thinking along the lines of using the proposed cruiser submarines to deliver the extremely valuable dyes and stuff to US markets that serve as the means of payment, (and are too valuable cargoes to risk being lost to the blockade), while the work horses are going the other way, and have to be much more expendable ships because they're carrying bulk loads of nitrates, ammunition, etc. (The cargoes picked have to be things that the Entente itself is also trying to purchase for its own war effort in the USA. So, for something like ammunition, the purpose is less to get munitions to the front in Europe as it is to drive up ammunition prices in the US for the Entente, and steal US production. If the actual ammunition goes to the bottom of the Atlantic, that's supply not fired from British or French cannons).

So for numbers, maybe about two dozen in service at any time, with attrition replacements constantly in the pipeline? Some of the runners would be merchant ships for trading, others would be armed merchant raiders designed for escort - these would have to stay at sea at the American end.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Enough to formulate an actual strategy in the neutral American market that can impact the war. I'm thinking along the lines of using the proposed cruiser submarines to deliver the extremely valuable dyes and stuff to US markets that serve as the means of payment, (and are too valuable cargoes to risk being lost to the blockade), while the work horses are going the other way, and have to be much more expendable ships because they're carrying bulk loads of nitrates, ammunition, etc. (The cargoes picked have to be things that the Entente itself is also trying to purchase for its own war effort in the USA. So, for something like ammunition, the purpose is less to get munitions to the front in Europe as it is to drive up ammunition prices in the US for the Entente, and steal US production. If the actual ammunition goes to the bottom of the Atlantic, that's supply not fired from British or French cannons).

So for numbers, maybe about two dozen in service at any time, with attrition replacements constantly in the pipeline? Some of the runners would be merchant ships for trading, others would be armed merchant raiders designed for escort - these would have to stay at sea at the American end.

Interesting idea. I think you have enough ships in port in Germany to start the process for surface ships. Rough ATL would look like.

  • Setup 15-30 man planning department in about 1905 to study this type of issues in Navy. Mostly paper pushers, but they keep track where fast ships are at, Germany merchant marine stats, etc.
  • By 1912 or so, have paper gamed out things like a war with UK on other side. List of materials to buy, strategies, etc.
  • September 1914, order Merchant Subs and implement smuggling. Or start as soon as Marne is lost, your call. Probably push up to about 15-30 merchant subs with construction rate of about 1-2 month. Take profits,and build merchant ships in USA to replace losses out of merchant marine. Buy up supplies, and make sure they have scuttle orders.
  • Then you can do lots of work modeling impacts on the land. War winner, but probably in subtle way that is not enjoyable to write ATL.
 
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