Operation Orpheus

The reason Tobruk and Benghazi were not used by the Italians, was because the route to Tripoli was much safer.

It doesn't matter if Tobruk and Benghazi have a smaller capacity than Tripoli; they still could have been used. Just send the heavy equipment (tanks, aircraft, etc...) through Tripoli, and the supplies Rommel needs immediately (oil, food, water, spare parts, etc...) through Benghazi and Tobruk.

One of the reasons Rommels supply situation was as bad as it was, was because the Italians would refuse to use any other port but Tripoli. They actually did supply Rommel a lot better than you would think (still, not enough of course), but since the RAF had air supremacy, most of the supplies got destroyed by British interdiction sorties.

Source please. I'm sumarising "Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton" by Martin van Creveld where IIRC he gives the exact capacity of all the ports along the N. African coast and demonstrates, to my satisfaction at least that, they were incapable of supporting any more forces than they did (and were in fact barely capable of supporting those).
 
Well one thing could have been done: replace the Italian soldiers and equipment with German soldiers and equipment.

That shouldn't require any expansion of the supply chain (at a guess a German consumes much the same as an Italian!) and it might give the German-Italian-Panzer Army a bit more punch. The British certainly considered the Italians to be the weaker link in Africa.

On the otherhand I suspect politics would prevent it happening.
 
Source please. I'm sumarising "Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton" by Martin van Creveld where IIRC he gives the exact capacity of all the ports along the N. African coast and demonstrates, to my satisfaction at least that, they were incapable of supporting any more forces than they did (and were in fact barely capable of supporting those).
Hey, I'm not saying Germany could send any more division over. Just that Rommel could have been kept at full strenght if the axis had set their mind to it, especially if some of the useless Italian leg infantry would have been removed.

My source is primarily "Rommel's Desert War" by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr.
 

CalBear

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Well one thing could have been done: replace the Italian soldiers and equipment with German soldiers and equipment.

That shouldn't require any expansion of the supply chain (at a guess a German consumes much the same as an Italian!) and it might give the German-Italian-Panzer Army a bit more punch. The British certainly considered the Italians to be the weaker link in Africa.

On the otherhand I suspect politics would prevent it happening.

Actually it would require a considerable increase in supply. The Italian forces were primarily infantry while the Heer units were mechanized and armored units. It requires far more to keep mechanized forces going than straight infantry. German troops also received better (and more) rations than their Italian counterparts.


This was not a problem limited to the African Campaign, The Allies experienced the same thing in France. Before a pipeline was established it was taking 3 gallons of gas to supply 3rd Army with a gallon. It is doubtful that any country on Earth, except the U.S. could have provided enough trucks to keep the "Red Ball Express" going.


It is also important to note that the Heer was only in Africa in the 1st place to support the Italians. It was a secondary theater, but Hitler was unwilling to give the British a major propaganda victory by crushing the Italians (which was where events were headed), as well as his desire to surrport his ally, so he committed a limited number of troops to the cause. As things went from bad to worse to "Hey, maybe we can defeat the British here" Germany's manpower committment increased to the point that, post Torch, when the Germans were cut-off and forced to surrender, they had more troops surrender than at Stalingrad.

(As I have noted in other threads, Africa was the stupidest thing Hitler did during the war to that point. The forces he squandered in Africa might have been enough to take Stalingrad by early September and to support a strong enough defensive line that the Soviet counterattack the following winter failed. In a very real sense, Africa cost Germany it's best shot at winning the war.)
 
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