No Hindenburg Program

  • Thread starter Deleted member 1487
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Deleted member 1487

if you make canon with all your steel and iron then you cannot make trains also, common sense, but still lost in the planning process.

The study of the mismanagement should be compulsory in all economic/management courses.

This is the most crucial aspect IMHO, misallocation of resources/labor. The Falkenhayn period war ministry incrementally increased production of war goods like cannons and machine guns based on explosives output, because it made no sense to make things that cannot be supplied. Ludendorff didn't care and expended valuable, irreplaceable resources on boosting production for things that could not be supplied, ultimately taking these resources out of existing, crucial areas like transportation and repair, all while transferring manpower back and forth without a use or plan for their use at home. All this used up resources and unbalanced a delicate economy that required careful management instead of industry-pleasing profit plans that destroyed German powers of production.
 
This is the most crucial aspect IMHO, misallocation of resources/labor

This is a truism for all aspects of life - I have a great deal of admiration for those rare few, very few, that get it right first time all the time.
 

Deleted member 1487

This is a truism for all aspects of life - I have a great deal of admiration for those rare few, very few, that get it right first time all the time.

It wasn't even an issue of normal misunderstanding as in most cases; the Germans already had the situation handled properly and then Ludendorff came and upset the apple cart based on his connections with industry and his insane ideology of total war.
 
Labour strikes: the germans suffered much less then the UK economy in this area, but there were no 'real' issues with war production in the UK. /QUOTE]

The key difference between Germany and UK was the UK was an open system with access to global trade. The Germans had only limited trade to Austria, Switzerland, Romania (before they entered the war) and its northern neighbors like Netherlands, Sweden, etc.

The Germans needed to export coal to Netherlands and Sweden to get foreign exchange to do things like buy Swedish Iron ore.

The UK never faced serious food shortages and lack of calories was a big part of the reason that for a drop in productivity in Germany per man hour. A hard working coal miner for example needs something like 4 or 5K a day worth of calories. If ration is for 1,500 or 2,000 you are going to have major problems. Herwig covers the effects of the food shortage in great detail best work I have read on conditions in Germany & A-H.
 
It wasn't even an issue of normal misunderstanding as in most cases; the Germans already had the situation handled properly and then Ludendorff came and upset the apple cart based on his connections with industry and his insane ideology of total war.

Many of the H Programs success were already in the pipe line from previous program. The Germans needed tighter control over labor but Ludendorff managed to botch it with the Auxiliary Service Law.

Michael
 

Deleted member 1487

I suggest Gerald D. Feldman's Army, Industry and Labor in Germany 1914-1918. Despite its age, 1966, I have not read a better book on the German War Economy.

Feldman covers some additional data points on the rails. He focus' on the coal shortage but also mentions the general over taxing of the railnet. One military crises after another, having to take over most movement of raw materials as barge system just stopped from hard freezes in winters of 1916/17 & 1917/18. Also talks a little bit about the maintenance issue and the fact that the Hindenburg program robbed more manpower from the railway repair units as people jumped jobs to higher paying factory work. So there was not enough manpower to do repairs. Plus the railway authorities didn't even tell the civilian government and military authorities there was a problem till after the crises started to hit in 1916.

One last thing Feldman talked about was that factories to make shells setup once the war started were almost all crowded into Berlin. So the factory owners could be closer to War Office. So what happened was steel was shipped to Berlin, turned into shells and then shipped back to the Ruhr, then filled with explosives and THEN shipped to the front. So shells had to cross Germany twice going to and from Berlin for no other reason than factory owners had direct access to War Minister in Berlin.

Michael

I finally managed to find my copy and in his chapter on the coal and transportation crises, Feldman tributes much of this to the Hindenburg program and inefficiencies in the transportation setup, which was exacerbated by the coal shortages, which in turn mostly goes back to the Hindenburg program.

Though your figures from "Race to the Front" indicate there were other issues from 1917 on, which partly have to do with the great strain that the Hindenburg program's implementation had on the rail net (shifting of nearly 1 million people around for building/manning factories, shifting building materials, supporting building programs, etc.), which probably would not have occurred without the plan going in to effect. Feldman and principle actors of the period (Groener for example) seems to support my position that without the Program German production would have gone up in all categories, the coal and transportation crises mitigated by the War Ministry through responsible step-by-step increases in production and responsible handling of shortages/industry inefficiencies, and nearly 1 million more men would have been available to the army over the OTL number.

Also the pressure for unrestricted submarine warfare would have been mitigated, as even Ludendorff's experts were telling him it was not worth it and the navy's numbers supporting unleashing the subs were bunk, but he did it anyway because of the crash in production. Also the pull back to the Hindenburg line, according to Feldman, was caused by the shortages in explosive production thanks to the failures of the Program and the manpower shortages to the army thanks to the combing out of workers for factories that were either not used or shut down shortly thereafter anyway due to lack of raw materials. Without the Program Feldman seems to suggest that the German army could have gone on the offensive after the failure of the French offensive at Chemin des Dames and been close to Amiens with the French unable to help the British.
 
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