According to Albert Speer, who was in a position to know, chromium was the worst resource shortage. After Germany evacuated the Balkans they could no longer import chromium from Turkey. Perhaps this was the primary reason to forego production of the Jumo 004A engine.
Germany resource stockpile as of November 1943.
(data is from "Inside the 3rd Reich")
19 months. Manganese
10.6 months. Wolframite (i.e. tungsten)
10 months. Nickel.
7.8 months. Molybdenum
6.4 months. Silicon.
5.6 months. Chromium.
During January 1944 Speer improved the transport of Nickel from Petsamo in order to increase the German nickel stockpile. Evidently ore transport to Germany was the bottleneck rather then mine output. There was a significant stockpile of nickel ore at the mine site awaiting transport.
These could be good figures but without mass figures they can't help alot. For exampe the amount of chrome looks low.But in 1939 Admiral Raeder submitted a request for the amount resources manpower needed for the "Enlarged Uboat construction Plan", from 1940 on. This plan envisaged completion of the 5 big ships [GZ ,Sey, Pr E Bism Tirp] plus a yearly production of 7 destroyers 9 Gross Torpedoboot and 60 Mineboot plus 275 Uboats per year . These monthly resources required were listed at....
195,000 tons of Steel Iron
5850 tons Copper
3900 tons lead
342 tons Tin
274 tons nickel
2950 tons Aluminum.
120,000 work force.
Rossler "The Uboat" pp 122-125.
Now atleast 1/2 of the steel and iron was to reconstruct the ship yards from producing mostly warships to producing mostly Uboats, and another 1/4 would be for munitions to supply the fleet, but even 1/4 of that amount is still 600,000 tons warships/U boats per year. If these warships all require St-37/44/52 steel , thats roughly 1 kg of Nickel per ton or 600 tons Nickel. Heavier warship armor is about 3-4 % nickel so given armor of 17500 tons for each battleship and about 6000 for the carrier plus 4000 for each cruiser, thats ~ 50,000 tons... of which 1900 tons nickel, or 210 tons nickel per month total .
The left over resources could provide atleast 768 tons nickel per year [64000kg x12=768,000 kg nickel]. If each Jumo 004 engine has 60% nickel in the hot section , thats ~16kg nickel per Jumo 004 [@ 60% nickel] ....thats 48,000 jet engines per year that could be built, if strategic metals were the limiting factor.
The above plan was not approved, but an amount 2/3 of it was approved, provided the capital ships and 1/2 the surface fleet was sacrificed to produce ~ 325 Uboats per year instead of 275 Uboats per year.
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