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We might have to define "particularly scarce".![]()
Well, compared to the Axis powers at least.
High octane aviation petrol was something of a bottleneck at various points in the war, but fuel oil? That doesn't require anywhere the level of petrochemical heroics as producing high octane gasoline. Of course getting the fuel from the refineries to where it was needed is a potential issue, but the Allies in general had quite plentiful logistics capability, again compared to the Axis. I'm not an expert so maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't read about any serious Allied fuel oil shortages.
Two of them were used in the South Atlantic to search for the Graf Spee. Part of around 20 (?) ships that participated. Surface raiders tied up very large numbers of ships.
Yes, the surface raiders were arguably a very cost effective weapon. Particularly the auxiliary cruisers were fairly cheap compared to a "real" warship. But as mentioned in this thread before and elsewhere, improved coverage of the oceans be it with long range patrol aircraft, planes launched from ships, radar etc., meant this strategy had a rapidly approaching best-before date. Long range submarines (e.g. Type IX?) might be better at surviving, but will also have a harder time finding targets due to their conning towers sitting low over the water?
We have to be careful with statics. German only spent around 300,000 tons on major surface combatants, defined by me as anything larger Z class destroyers and a few minelayers.
40 Z class destroyers at 2500tons each only gets another 100,000tons
They did spend a lot of tons of steel on the U-boats but that is another topic. Not using U-boats really makes things simple for the British/allies.
Yes, that matches my napkin calculations. My million ton figure was about 300k tons for the big surface ships, and then 700k tons for the Type VII and IX u-boats.
I'm not really sure what to think of the submarines, should they have spent more or less on them? On one hand they were a pretty cost effective weapon in the sense they sunk a huge amount of tonnage and kept a lot of Allied forces busy, but on the other hand they never really came close to the goal of starving the UK into submission.
Germany was really gambling as Germany depended on imported Iron ore for a lot of it's production. Just before WW II Germany used 22 million tons of iron ore but only 10 million tons were from Germany, the rest was imported. And German iron ore was not high quality stuff and it had to mixed with imported ore to make high quality steel and other elements to make armor quality steel. Germany got 9 million tons of ore in the year before the war from Sweden. Germany had gotten some of it's iron ore from Sweden even in the 1st WW so this was not new and it was well known. What should Germany do to help protect it's supply? and the problems with the Baltic freezing over for 4-6 months depending on year and where in the Baltic were also well known and that is the reason for the port of Narvick which was ice free all year (or mostly) and the reason for the railroad connecting Narvik to Sweden (but not to the rest of Norway). After the fall of France Germany just swiped a lot of French domestic Iron ore. Swedish ore stayed a major source for Germany until some time in 1944.
Yes, roughly. It seems the Wikipedia article on the subject draws heavily on the 1965 article by Karlbom, which seems isn't the final word on the subject. This article claims that while Swedish ore helped, it wasn't that critical, pointing out what the author thinks are mistakes in the Karlbom article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03585522.1973.10407767
As for what the Germans could do, hard to say. Luleå and Narvik were used because they were the only options that could provide sufficient volume. Other approaches and some issues:
- Ship the ore by train down Sweden. Then only a short hop over the southern Baltic would be needed. I suspect there wasn't enough capacity in the Swedish rail network for this, and maybe also not suitable ports in southern Sweden. They did export some limited amount of ore via Gävle and Oxelösund, somewhat north and South of Stockholm.
- Use the Swedish blast furnaces, and instead import steel ingots, which would reduce the volume of cargo. OTOH Sweden, not having any indigenous coal reserves was dependent in importing coal or coke, so in the end whatever would have been gained by importing steel ingots rather than iron ore might have been eaten up by increased volume of coal export to Sweden?
What kind of fleet should the Germans build to help insure the flow of Iron ore from the Swedish mines to Germany? It doesn't have to be deep sea/blue water but until aircraft prove them themselves the Germans have to plan on stopping British small ships from hitting the ore convoys coming down the coast of Norway. Or at least laying mine fields and other harassment.
You can travel along islands for a fair bit on the Norwegian coast, which might make it feasible to employ minefields to prevent the British from attaching the ore ships, and also provide a lot of hiding places for things like torpedo boats that can attack British ships trying to come too close. So it might be they don't need a blue water navy to protect those convoys. They might need something though to protect the run from Norway over the Skagerrak to German ports on either the Western or Eastern side of Denmark.
But if they build the PBB's and the sisters to counter the French navy anyway, what they could sacrifice I guess are the Bismarcks and the Hippers. Build a dozen destroyers instead, minelayers, torpedo boats and such, and still save a lot of resources.