WI: Mulberry style harbor in north africa

CalBear

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Sure.

All they need is absolute air and naval supremacy.

That is the tricky bit.
 
Sure.

All they need is absolute air and naval supremacy.

That is the tricky bit.

Ok, timing is pre-taranto to start. What would be the most eastward they could position such a Harbor given they would need superior cover from land-based aircraft (eg. Most favorable place with air strips much closer for axis aircraft.
 

nbcman

Donor
As it says. We know Axis advances into Egypt were heavily limited by lack of suitable ports. Could the axis have made a mulberry style harbor on the Egyptian coast with a 7000 tons a day capacity (http://www.combinedops.com/Mulberry%20Harbours.htm) and pushed on into Egypt?

One can assume this happening early or late in the conflict.

Since it took over 2 years to design and 6 months to build at far superior facilities than are available to the Axis, the Italians need to start design work in early 1938 to have them ready by mid 1940 assuming they have perfect foresight. Realistically, the Italians would not recognize their limited port capacity until after their DoW so a Mulberry would not be ready until late 1942 or early 1943-in time to see their forces surrender in Tunisia. EDIT: Not to mention where are the Axis going to come up with the 2+ million tons of concrete and steel and the 45,000 workers to build them or even half that if only one Mulberry is built?

But the question you first have to ask is why? Mulberries were used because there were no friendly ports available in Normandy. It would be far cheaper and easier to expand the port capacity in Cyrenaicia (Tobruk & Bengazi) plus improve the infrastructure from the ports to the front.
 
As CalBear asked but more specifically, at what date in the Mediterranean war would the RM be willing to stand and fight against a full collected RN fleet on the coast of Egypt ?

I think the RN would be very willing for the likely result of trading part of its fleet for the entire RM battle line ? (remember that a static battle will allow the old R class to take a full part and remove the speed advantage of the Italian ships)
 

CalBear

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Ok, timing is pre-taranto to start. What would be the most eastward they could position such a Harbor given they would need superior cover from land-based aircraft (eg. Most favorable place with air strips much closer for axis aircraft.

Not parity, not even superiority. Supremacy. No enemy destroyers. No enemy torpedo bombers, no enemy submarines, and please God no enemy capital ships or heavy cruisers.

You need the circumstances that existed at Normandy, maybe that at Okinawa, although that would be dodgy due to the heavy air attack potential.

You get one major bomber attack, or one flotilla of destroyers, or a couple squadrons of torpedo planes, or a battleship with 20 minutes of main battery and it is all over. You have to utterly defeat the RN surface fleet and RAF, or at least wipe them out in the region while pressuring then to such an extent they can't reinforce. You have to eliminate the RN submarine threat (and the Axis utterly sucked at ASW) otherwise all an artificial harbor presents is a handy Buffet six days cruise from Gibraltar or three days from Alexandria.

What's more, you have to be ready to do it. It isn't something you can throw together.

Overall you have to have won two of the three phases of the war before you can even attempt it. If the Axis had been able to pull that off they wouldn't NEED a Mulberry in a sideshow like Africa.
 
First, in OTL the two Mulberry harbors consisted of 400 components (including the port infrastructure and ship and cassions for the breakwater). Even if you're only doing one Mulberry that's still 200 old hulks and large lumps of concrete you need to tow... for a once off effort ala D-Day you'll be needing at least 50 ships put aside to do the towing.

Second, where do you prefabricate the components? There's little point doing so in North Africa since now you've just tied up the existing port infrastructure bringing the concrete and steel in. If you do so in Italy itself, well, Catania to Tripoli is around 300 nautical miles, to Benghazi 450 nautical miles. Using a major port on the Italian Peninsular itself puts distances around 500-600 nautical miles. By way of comparison during Overlord the Mulberrys had to cross somewhere between 100 and 200 nautical miles, and even then it took something like two days to get the first components into position and around a week to bring the ports to operational status. The greater distance means the Italians either need to put more vessels on towing duty (can they spare the necessary numbers?) or they need to accept a longer construction time since the vessels involved need to cover a larger distance, this in trun brings an increased risk of detection and attack.

Third, given prefrabrication in Italy the Italians need to tow through open waters, unlike the allies during Overlord. This means they're more exposed to both weather and surface attack.

All in all, it looks to me like you'd need naval supremacy to pull it off.
 
If they manage to get a harbour in place and had the shipping available to use it there is still the problem of moving the cargo off the dockside. A railway line or a highway and thousands of trucks is needed you dont just have a harbour in isolation you need the transport network.
 
What?
An Italian General not worry about logistics before invading an African country??
Surely you jest!
Hah!
Hah!
Libya only has two ports today: Tripoli and Benghazi.
WI the remnants of a WW2-vintage mulberry was still laying on the Libyan coast to this day?
Which prospective site is closest to 1940-vintage railroads?
WI if the old mulberry had been buried under a few millions tons of rubble?
How would a third port benefit the modern country of Libya?
 
Been more realistic, but still difficult to follow the Quiberon Bay model. (See Operation Chasity). That did not require breakwaters. Floating docks, paved roads, and rail spurs were prepared & ready. It stll would have been a serious challenge for Italian industry, tho their naval engineers had the skills, just not the numbers.

The simplest would have been to convert a few shallow draft cargo ships into proto LST. The first four LST the Brits built were just that. Converted oil tankers. By building paved beaching ramps (compacted rock) the Allied port ops units increased port capacity. The Italians might have done the same, perhaps tripling the capacity of Benghazi or Tobruk.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
The Italians I think would be far better off improving port capacity pre-war, and not just in Benghazi and Tripoli, but also adding a third port at I guess Tobruk, and constructing coastal rail and road infrastructure of high quality.

This would of course all be massively expensive, and would tip off the British. So to get away with this, you need much better Italo-British relations, or perhaps a joint project with the British to construct a Tripoli-to-Cairo type project. The British keep in mind were willing to go to Germany for cooperation on the Cairo to Cape project.
 
But the question you first have to ask is why? Mulberries were used because there were no friendly ports available in Normandy. It would be far cheaper and easier to expand the port capacity in Cyrenaicia (Tobruk & Bengazi) plus improve the infrastructure from the ports to the front.

I have been under the impression that these ports were of insufficient capacity, and I guess after war broke out they would have been even more overloaded b investments in infrastructure.
It does however seem from the other replies as well that pre-planning (before DoW) is necessary within these timeframes anyway. Could the harbors in Cyrenaica have been expanded sufficiently say post 1936 and could the roads and potentially rails have been made to support a major invasion eastward of Cyrenaica?

Been more realistic, but still difficult to follow the Quiberon Bay model. (See Operation Chasity). That did not require breakwaters. Floating docks, paved roads, and rail spurs were prepared & ready. It stll would have been a serious challenge for Italian industry, tho their naval engineers had the skills, just not the numbers.

The simplest would have been to convert a few shallow draft cargo ships into proto LST. The first four LST the Brits built were just that. Converted oil tankers. By building paved beaching ramps (compacted rock) the Allied port ops units increased port capacity. The Italians might have done the same, perhaps tripling the capacity of Benghazi or Tobruk.

I like these suggestions, but cant find such a site in western Egypt. Maybe marsa matruh could have supported such a scheme?



Overall, seems there are good reasons we didn't see something like this IOTL. Requires some circumstances and planning for it not present IOTL.
 
The Italians I think would be far better off improving port capacity pre-war, and not just in Benghazi and Tripoli, but also adding a third port at I guess Tobruk, and constructing coastal rail and road infrastructure of high quality.

This would of course all be massively expensive, and would tip off the British. So to get away with this, you need much better Italo-British relations, or perhaps a joint project with the British to construct a Tripoli-to-Cairo type project. The British keep in mind were willing to go to Germany for cooperation on the Cairo to Cape project.

Ninjaed on this one. Seems a fair bet, but would have to be bilateral to make friendly sense.
Maybe not unlike Benny to put an implicit threat against the British Empire though. Basically they could have made such an effort as blackmail?
 
Ninjaed on this one. Seems a fair bet, but would have to be bilateral to make friendly sense.
Maybe not unlike Benny to put an implicit threat against the British Empire though. Basically they could have made such an effort as blackmail?

The problem is that Benny the Moose only entered the war because he was afraid that if Italy didn't he'd get nothing at what he fondly supposed was about to be a big and wide-ranging peace settlement. Libya was vulnerable to attack on both borders and the French could have staged an offensive (given sufficient warning) out of Tunisia and Algeria. Plus war with Britain means the Suez Canal being closed to Italian ships and his army in Abyssinia withering on the vine (which is what happened).
An aggressive Benny the Moose planning a war against the western Allies will need some impressively large butterflies flapping their wings. It might even need him to realise that sending supplies to Franco would be a mistake, which might delay a Nationalist victory quite a bit, or even lead to a possible Republican victory.
 
A prewar port development might be disguised as 'economic' development. The Facists went for big splashy projects that did not always make sense. If there were no accompanying military accutrements, barracks, defense works, supply depots, field exercises, ect.. the Brits might decide the port expansion was just a Facist make work project.
 
As it says. We know Axis advances into Egypt were heavily limited by lack of suitable ports. Could the axis have made a mulberry style harbor on the Egyptian coast with a 7000 tons a day capacity (http://www.combinedops.com/Mulberry Harbours.htm) and pushed on into Egypt?

One can assume this happening early or late in the conflict.

Anybody wanna calculate what kind of impact the attempt to build these Mulberries would have upon German and Italian war production? Does either country have the kind of material surplus they would need to squander on a project of this magnitude? I'm guessing the answer to that second question is ''no'', but I wouldn't mind seeing a more informed opinion.
 
Anybody wanna calculate what kind of impact the attempt to build these Mulberries would have upon German and Italian war production? Does either country have the kind of material surplus they would need to squander on a project of this magnitude? I'm guessing the answer to that second question is ''no'', but I wouldn't mind seeing a more informed opinion.

The material that went into the Mulberry harbors was dwarfed by the steel, concrete & labor that went into the Atlantic Wall. Labor wise the Mulberry construction was a small percent of the overall port repair/expansion the Allies conducted globally. Its easy to look at the photos of the two Mulberrys & think WOW!. The reality is the reconstruction of the Cherbourg port group in 60 days is a equally impressive project. That port went from near complete destruction in late June, to triple its nominal peace time capacity of 8,000 tons daily. Dock capacity was added, beaching ramps for LSTs instaled, the electrical power plant rebuilt, harbor communication system rebuilt, dry storage rebuilt & expanded. Most important of all the dock side railway capacity was more than doubled with a entire additional set of spur tracks. In early September the port intake of Cherbourg & the adjacent fishing ports surged to 24,000 tons daily.

What made the Mulberry harbors look impressive is a large portion of the construction was concentrated in a few months from December to April. The floating docks & breakwater systems were originally tested in January 1942. Subsequent engineering improvements to the design went fairly slowly. Materials were stock piled during 1943 & some work accomplished, but it was not until the date for Op Overlord was firmly set at the Terhan Confrence in November 1943 that work on the Mulberrys, the Quiberon Bay port components, and the Britiany-Cherbourg port reconstruction material was accelerated to full speed.
 
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Eh, I'm just regurgitating material from a few books & a web site. I'd recommend Ruppenthals 'Logistics in Overlord' as a primer for understanding the flow of supplies & combat units into France. It lacks much on the British but still manages to convey the logistics constraint Eisenhower was limited by. R Adm Ellesbergs 'The Far Shore' has a useful description of the instalation of the Mulberries, & the salvage of the A harbor after the storm. Ellesberg was a senior USN salvage engineer & his eyewitness observations are facinating.
 
the Italians would be far better off building LCM, LSM, and LST type shipping. It would be far less vulnerable. Of course that too requires 20/20 foresight, more naval construction facilities, resources and labor than is available and of course a lot of money.

But at least they would be somewhat more survivable.

Failing that, something similar to the the US Navy Attack Transport (AKA), with all the booms and tonnage of a transport or heavy freighter, but with their own landing craft (LCM and LCI). This too is a big issue in terms of construction capability, but those ships are far more survivable then the LCM etc above.

Of course none of them are good at surviving submarine attack and the Axis really were terribly weak in ASW, but all of them are more flexible, survivable and cheaper than building a Mulberry
 
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