What is the absolute best that the AXIS could do in North Africa .What happens after that .

To clarify I wasn't talking about the accuracy 300 tons a day when the Axis were using it (quoted by @hipper), I meant the 4,200 tons a day by the British as claimed by Wikipaedia.

Dunno, but if a wagon takes 10t and a train has 50 wagons that's 8 or 9 trains per day.
 
What were the limiting factors on the capacity of the ports and IOTL did the Axis take any steps to increase their capacity?

I'm sure MVC said in Supplying War that Tripoli could only handle 5 ships at a time and Benghazi only 4. However despite these small numbers the convoys still required heavy escort, so were very inefficient.
 
This is Posts 33 and 34 combined.

General Military Cargo and Fuel Sent to Libya Jun 1941 to Dec 1942 Total.png
 
Going back to Post 32 the Libyan ports were unloading an average of 115,000 tons a month. However, that's when they could use Benghazi, Tobruk and Tripoli.

From the table in Post 43
125,000 tons were unloaded in June 1941 - Although Benghazi was recaptured on 4th April I think the port was still out of action - can anyone corroborate that?
150,000 tons were unloaded in May 1942 - but I don't know how much was unloaded at Tripoli and Benghazi (recaptured for the second time on 29th January 1942)
 
What if the German and Italian forces achieve all of their goals, get superbly lucky, their enemies make all the mistakes and they got the most decisive victory possible in NA .

What happens next .

Answer is an open sandbox .

Second question -How could the allies still win the war from here ?
You could start with Operation Compass failing miserably so that the Italian 10th Army isn't destroyed and on 9th February 1941 the front line is still at Sidi Barrani instead of El Aghelia.
 
What were the limiting factors on the capacity of the ports and IOTL did the Axis take any steps to increase their capacity?

Mostly just bad 1930s Italian infrastructure suffering from systemic underinvestment. Correcting it would have taken years (dredging a harbor, building piers, etc. takes a LONG time).
 
I found a couple of nice articles on Axis logistics.

https://rommelsriposte.com/2011/06/01/capacity-of-tripoli-and-benghazi-harbours-1941/

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/north-africa-the-war-of-logistics/

A couple of things stand out.
  • Rommels requirements were some 70,000t per month, which was well within the combined capacity of Tripoli and Benghazi and usually within the capability of the Italian merchant fleet.
  • Some 23,000t of that was fuel, but 1/3-1/2 of that fuel was used to bring the rest forward and the length of the supply line meant some 1/3 of the trucks were in maintenance at any one time.
  • Because of these costs I find the disappointment with Tobruk's limited capacity of 20,000t per month somewhat strange or misguided. I think that those 20,000t/m delivered to Tobruk equate to maybe 30,000t deivered to Tripoli in terms of fuel cost for delivery, time spent on delivery and reduced maintenance of the logistic fleet.

Assuming that the DAK can defeat the WDF/8th Army if it is mostly up to strength and well enough supplied I think the task is to ensure the Axis forces at the front get their ~70,000t/m. For mine I'd try to reduce the cost of the logistics chain with a railway, both from Tripoli and Benghazi, which could free up trucks and their fuel for front line use.
 

hipper

Banned
I found a couple of nice articles on Axis logistics.

https://rommelsriposte.com/2011/06/01/capacity-of-tripoli-and-benghazi-harbours-1941/

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/north-africa-the-war-of-logistics/

A couple of things stand out.
  • Rommels requirements were some 70,000t per month, which was well within the combined capacity of Tripoli and Benghazi and usually within the capability of the Italian merchant fleet.
  • Some 23,000t of that was fuel, but 1/3-1/2 of that fuel was used to bring the rest forward and the length of the supply line meant some 1/3 of the trucks were in maintenance at any one time.
  • Because of these costs I find the disappointment with Tobruk's limited capacity of 20,000t per month somewhat strange or misguided. I think that those 20,000t/m delivered to Tobruk equate to maybe 30,000t deivered to Tripoli in terms of fuel cost for delivery, time spent on delivery and reduced maintenance of the logistic fleet.

Assuming that the DAK can defeat the WDF/8th Army if it is mostly up to strength and well enough supplied I think the task is to ensure the Axis forces at the front get their ~70,000t/m. For mine I'd try to reduce the cost of the logistics chain with a railway, both from Tripoli and Benghazi, which could free up trucks and their fuel for front line use.


The trouble was that Tobruk was only usable with very small craft, as the FAA & RAF has a bad habit of sneaking in at night and sinking ships, the railway was a good idea but apparently there were only 60 KM of rails available ion Italy unless they started picking up lines from Italy and moving them to Libya. even worse moving rails cuts down on the warfare supplies you can bring in. OKW looked at this in detail and told Rommel to defend at Benghazi.

Go read about Lawrence's campaign in the desert to find out what would have happened to a railway line from Tripoli to Tobruk. It would be very vulnerable to sabotage.
 
The trouble was that Tobruk was only usable with very small craft, as the FAA & RAF has a bad habit of sneaking in at night and sinking ships, the railway was a good idea but apparently there were only 60 KM of rails available ion Italy unless they started picking up lines from Italy and moving them to Libya. even worse moving rails cuts down on the warfare supplies you can bring in. OKW looked at this in detail and told Rommel to defend at Benghazi.

Go read about Lawrence's campaign in the desert to find out what would have happened to a railway line from Tripoli to Tobruk. It would be very vulnerable to sabotage.

There was 60km of rail available in April 1942, I suspect that if the project was begun a year sooner or even late 1940 with the first italian offensive more rails would be able to be found.

As for the rest I don't disagree, but there are an array of other problems that have to be adressed that are likely worse or harder to overcome than the attacks on tobruk and those a railway would attract. Just as a matter of interest, did the British attack the benghazi-barce/derna railway much?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Mostly just bad 1930s Italian infrastructure suffering from systemic underinvestment. Correcting it would have taken years (dredging a harbor, building piers, etc. takes a LONG time).

2-3 years with peacetime pace and adequate funding. Funding and the associated will to invest are always the big challenges in these type of PODs. It may sound funny, but the best way to have the Italians do better in Africa in WW2 is not even a military POD, it is a colonial one. Mussolini makes the Italian 5th coast an ego project. Expanding/Rebuilding the old Roman Empire. To attack settlers, Mussolini staff starts some modest infrastructure projects such as improving the port, and connecting the ports with railroads. If there are any mines or the the like, some side track is built to these locations. Few additional modest airports are built so Italians can easily fly to the 5th Coast. If these actions start in 1936-37, by the time the war rolls around, most of the logistic issues have been fixed. Then it takes not major staff planning, just moving the troops to Libya before the war starts. Maybe just a few weeks or 10's of weeks early.

The second best POD, but it would be hard to get to OTL WW2 would be to find some of the Libyan oil. It is technically drillabe in the 1930's, so all the stuff in the first paragraph can be done, but done for the oil. The reason it is hard to have OTL WW2 is that if Italy is doing major oil imports in 1938 from Libya, the whole strategic situation changes and people will make different decisions. You also have things like Italy with a major tanker fleet.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
I found a couple of nice articles on Axis logistics.

https://rommelsriposte.com/2011/06/01/capacity-of-tripoli-and-benghazi-harbours-1941/

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/north-africa-the-war-of-logistics/

A couple of things stand out.
  • Rommels requirements were some 70,000t per month, which was well within the combined capacity of Tripoli and Benghazi and usually within the capability of the Italian merchant fleet.
  • Some 23,000t of that was fuel, but 1/3-1/2 of that fuel was used to bring the rest forward and the length of the supply line meant some 1/3 of the trucks were in maintenance at any one time.
  • Because of these costs I find the disappointment with Tobruk's limited capacity of 20,000t per month somewhat strange or misguided. I think that those 20,000t/m delivered to Tobruk equate to maybe 30,000t deivered to Tripoli in terms of fuel cost for delivery, time spent on delivery and reduced maintenance of the logistic fleet.

Assuming that the DAK can defeat the WDF/8th Army if it is mostly up to strength and well enough supplied I think the task is to ensure the Axis forces at the front get their ~70,000t/m. For mine I'd try to reduce the cost of the logistics chain with a railway, both from Tripoli and Benghazi, which could free up trucks and their fuel for front line use.

There is another side benefit of the RR. If these RR you listed are built by the time the war starts, then these skilled crews will enable the railroad to the front to be built a lot faster. In a ideal Italian world, the RR line will advance towards the Italian lines at a rate of 1 km per day or faster. So any pauses caused by logistical issues will rapidly be self fixing.

Also, when we take out the trucks, we are not only saving fuel, we are saving men, food, and the like. Looking at the numbers in this thread, you could probably not only supply OTL forces, but probably support a few more divisions. Or another way to think of it, is have motorized divisions. Many of these trucks can be used to add mobility to existing divisions.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The trouble was that Tobruk was only usable with very small craft, as the FAA & RAF has a bad habit of sneaking in at night and sinking ships, the railway was a good idea but apparently there were only 60 KM of rails available ion Italy unless they started picking up lines from Italy and moving them to Libya. even worse moving rails cuts down on the warfare supplies you can bring in. OKW looked at this in detail and told Rommel to defend at Benghazi.

Go read about Lawrence's campaign in the desert to find out what would have happened to a railway line from Tripoli to Tobruk. It would be very vulnerable to sabotage.

The Arab sabotage you mentioned happened for a decade plus to the Ottomans. The reason it became a problem in WW1 is the Ottomans had almost no troops in the area due to other war time losses. If you have another 1-2 divisions in Arabia in WW1, the Arab tribesmen are not an issue. In may ways the resemble the train robbers of the American West. These bandits simply did not operate often near significant numbers of armed troops or police. The same will be true in Libya.

There are plenty of rails available in Europe. It might require some changes to production schedules or purchases from Germany, but this is not a serious issue. The Ottomans managed to build RR without being able to produce or import significant quantities of rails. So too the Italians will be able to find the rails.

As to your comment about the RAF, yes, the British counter efforts will help limit the effectiveness, but it will still be a huge net benefit to the Italians. And it is also largely self correcting as the Italians have additional success. As the Italians move close to the Nile, and maybe even take Cairo, the combat effectiveness of the RAF in Tobruk and surrounding waters will be limited. And to be fair, all the problems the Italians have will slowly develop for the British. At some point, the ports in the Med will have to be abandoned. At some point, supplying Cyprus will be extraordinarily hard. The British will have to unload in ports on the Red Sea. The rail lines will be under increasing levels of interdiction. IOTL, western Egypt was the point where there is a natural defensive line that tends to form due to logistics. ITTL and after the use of the Med Sea ports stops for the British, the natural defensive line will be not too far from Red Sea or the Suez.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Yeah, this. The real bottleneck in North Africa was the lack of port capacity, with inland capacity being a second one. It doesn’t matter if more Axis supply ships get to port if they can’t be unloaded because the port is at capacity.

No difference, Afrika Korps still gets stomped.

While the Arika Korps still may well lose, the rest of your points are not correct.

  • Rail is more efficient than trucks. The trucks consume a lot of supplies. We have a potential improvement of the Italian supply levels by a few 10's of percent.
  • There is a positive feedback loop to being better supplied. Italians do better in battle. British do worse. Ratio of Italian to British forces improves compared to OTL. These battles mean the British begin to have their own logistical issues. Losing ports faster than OTL, more interdiction of British supplies, burning of supply dumps on retreats that did not happen IOTL, British airbase being farther from Italian ports.
Now to be fair the Afrika Corp can still lose, the details vary by ATL. And we are skipping another important point for discussion purposes. If the Italians are doing much better than OTL, it is likely that the Germans will send a lot fewer military units. And the Afrika Korp will be blended into the giant man eater on the eastern front.
 

hipper

Banned
The Arab sabotage you mentioned happened for a decade plus to the Ottomans. The reason it became a problem in WW1 is the Ottomans had almost no troops in the area due to other war time losses. If you have another 1-2 divisions in Arabia in WW1, the Arab tribesmen are not an issue. In may ways the resemble the train robbers of the American West. These bandits simply did not operate often near significant numbers of armed troops or police. The same will be true in Libya.

There are plenty of rails available in Europe. It might require some changes to production schedules or purchases from Germany, but this is not a serious issue. The Ottomans managed to build RR without being able to produce or import significant quantities of rails. So too the Italians will be able to find the rails.

As to your comment about the RAF, yes, the British counter efforts will help limit the effectiveness, but it will still be a huge net benefit to the Italians. And it is also largely self correcting as the Italians have additional success. As the Italians move close to the Nile, and maybe even take Cairo, the combat effectiveness of the RAF in Tobruk and surrounding waters will be limited. And to be fair, all the problems the Italians have will slowly develop for the British. At some point, the ports in the Med will have to be abandoned. At some point, supplying Cyprus will be extraordinarily hard. The British will have to unload in ports on the Red Sea. The rail lines will be under increasing levels of interdiction. IOTL, western Egypt was the point where there is a natural defensive line that tends to form due to logistics. ITTL and after the use of the Med Sea ports stops for the British, the natural defensive line will be not too far from Red Sea or the Suez.


In General the difficulty with increased Italian development in Lybia in the 1930s is that they fought a nasty Civil war there at the time building extensive railways, oil wells and pipelines would be problematic. The second problem is that Italy was also developing in Ethiopia and Albania at the time spreading limited investment Funds.

The difficulty the Italians would find in 1940 after the declaration of war would be British sabotage either directly through Bagnold and his chums in LRDG or through British support of dissident Arabs, I’m sure Popski would like to be seen as the new Lawrence. Professional saboteurs will operate near troops .

There were not plenty of Rails available in Europe everyone was building tanks instead, it would require a significant change in industrial priority to take railway troops and equipment from Barbarossa and give it to the sideshow in North Africa. Transporting the Equipment would decrease the amount of supplies available for the army.

To push the British away from air attack range of Tobruk, you have to push them Into Iraq. Which is quite difficult with supplies from Tripoli.
 
I'm sure MVC said in Supplying War that Tripoli could only handle 5 ships at a time and Benghazi only 4. However despite these small numbers the convoys still required heavy escort, so were very inefficient.
Yeah, something like that. I also remember that MVC concluded that what the Axis actually did ship to the NA theater was fairly close to the maximum the ports could handle.
Problem with not having a railway, is that you need trucks to transport everything. And the trucks need fuel and lubricants (and spareparts). Having a railway would mean that a lot less of that is needed. Also from memory, the trucks needed four or fives times the amount of fuel to transport the fuel to the front at El Alamein.
 
an alternate plan would be to cut British Suez route with least resources possible, to simply hold Libya with least resources possible?

my understanding the use of Med Route was eliminated quickly and Libya could have been supplied thru Tunis. (a less hazardous overnight route)
 

mad orc

Banned
So umm, as the OP, i would like to ask, can anyone summarize it all .
What is the conclusion of the discussion ?
 

Deleted member 1487

On multiple occasions in WW1, the British built RR at the rate of 1 mile per day. So 500 km per year is technically feasible. So looks like you could largely fix the Libyan logistic issues with a POD in late 1939. But I guess we would need Benny to be a better administrative and military mind.
If you had the labor, equipment, and materials on hand...all of which had to be shipped in and would be competing with war materials. Even using the negotiated port capacity from French Tunisia would be a lot of movement cost and less stuff to use in the East.
 
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