What if........Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union?

Yupper, positive. They are still a very agrarian nation in many ways, and until the 'mad cow' crappola were still a beef exporting nation. They led in mutton and lamb as well compared to other nations of comperable acres of arible land. The fact that Germany is about the same size as my home state of Montana is reduced in value due to its less arible terrain. There are some "less than ideal" areas of Great Britian as well, but there are also great tracts of land with are usable.

 

About food: You are 100% wrong.

Lets see the data them:

Second to this paper. Britain "depended upon imports for more than half of her food".

For comparison, in WW1 (1913) Germany imported 25% of her food. In 1939, only 14%.

So, if Germany suffered a loot in WW1 because of the blockade, what would happen in Britain if they had their merchant marine wiped out?

 

your own link shows that after 1939 the stocks of food in Britain were increased, and land was opened up for food production mostly grain and vegetables. And that while pig and poultry production decreased the production of beef and milk actually increased. They were certainly importing half their food, but not the essentials. I see luxury items in the mix, and they certainly had to import all their fruits and spices.

The rationing itself, and how it was applied seems to show what they considered most likely to be needed long-term.
When rationing was imposed in Great Britain it went like this:

1939 - Petrol rationing (ended May 1950 )
8 January 1940 - Rationing of bacon, butter and sugar
11 March 1940 - All meat (except fish) was rationed
July 1940 - Tea and margarine were added to the list of rationed foods.
March 1941 - Jam was put on ration.
May 1941 - Cheese was rationed
1 June 1941 - Rationing of clothing (ended 15 March 1949)
June 1941 - Eggs were put on ration
July 1941 - Coal was rationed because more and more miners were called up to serve in the forces.
January 1942 - Rice and dried fruit were added to the list of rationed foods.
February 1942 - Soap was rationed so that oils and fats could be saved for munitions. Tinned tomatoes and peas were added to the list of rationed food.
By 17 March 1942, coal, gas and electricity were all rationed
26 July 1942 - Rationing of sweets and chocolate. Each person was allowed about 2oz (55 grams) a week
August 1942 - Biscuits (cookies) rationed
1943 - Sausages are finally rationed,
Fish, SPAM, carrots, and cabbage were never rationed.

1945 World War Two Ends, but rationing in Great Britain continued in some areas with bread now rationed for the first time. This was (I believe) in response to Britain shipping much of its own wheat and flour to the European nations (their section of occupied Germany most of all) to help alleviate the shortages there.

1948 - The end of rationing begins. It is another 5 years before rationing of all products is stopped.
25 July 1948 - end of flour/bread rationing
15 March 1949 - end of clothes rationing
19 May 1950 - rationing ended for canned and dried fruit, chocolate biscuits, treacle, syrup, jellies and mincemeat.
September 1950 - rationing ended for soap
3 October 1952 - Tea rationing ended
1953 - Sweet and sugar rationing ends
4 July 1954 - Food rationing ends completely.

In many instances the items were rationed to make sure every Briton had a fair chance at getting his/her share, not because there was a "shortage" but to more equitably distribute the food stocks.

Immediately after WW2 there were still one million British citizens working in agriculture, and even though it is only about the same size as our (American) state of Oregon, it still has over 25% of its land involved in agriculture. While Germany has slightly larger area, and has about 33% available as arable land, their concentration of labor was in the urban factories rather than agriculture.

With Germany’s population of between 86 and 90 million (I’ve seen both numbers), they were an importing nation for some basic food-stuffs. That is to be compared with the British population on the British Isles of slightly more than half that with between 46 and 48 million (I’ve seen both numbers).

 

Adam Tooze in 'the wages of destruction ' states that the problem was the backwardness of the German agriculture ;most of German farms were to small and could not use mechanised means . In Germany there was only 2.1 arable ha (5 acres ) per farm,in the UK :3.8 ha .29 % of the German work force was working in the agriculture sector ,most farms had big debts ,the state had little money to buy fertilizers . The result was that the output of the agriculture was very low .

 

As the "Food Control In Britain" link shows, the wheat production rate went UP in Britain, from 70% to 85%. I doubt the same can be said for the wheat production in Germany.

And let’s not forget that a great many people were better fed during wartime food rationing than before the war years. Infant mortality rates declined, and the average age at which people died from natural causes increased. Shortages encouraged people to be inventive with their food. Beef, pork and lamb were all on ration and very difficult to get hold of, but other sources of meat were not. Rabbits, fish and chicken for instance were never rationed.

Neither were horses. However some of the more unscrupulous traders used this niche in the law whereby horse meat which was not rationed was passed off as beef which meant that sometimes diseased and unfit meat found its way on to the market

Some people who lived near the sea even tried catching the odd seagull or two to add to the cooking pot. Offal was never included in the meat ration although liver became a rare treat. But there was always the old favorites to fall back on for a tasty meal. Things such as pig's feet in jelly, stuffed pigs ears or even calf’s feet pie!


By the end of the war it was found that the average food intake for the country was slightly higher than it had been before the war began even though the caloric intake declined slightly. In part this was mostly due to many of the poor people that made up the majority of city folk were already too poor to feed themselves and their families properly.
This led to the nation as a whole being generally healthier. People ate less fat, less meat and much more in the way of grains and vegetables. The average calorie intake only fell from 3,000 to 2,800 per day. Beer was not rationed although production was reduced, so availability was not universal.

People’s diet was better, they were somewhat thinner but a lot healthier. With special food, drink and vitamin supplements for babies and pregnant mothers, infant mortality fell from 51 to 46 per thousand live births during the war. British rationing efforts produced important social effects such as the introduction of free school meals for the children of poorer families, free cod liver oil and orange juice from concentrate for the under two year old children, and extra milk and eggs for expectant mothers, and milk at schools.

Source:

www.worldwar2exraf.co....ation.html

(that is from an old file of mine, it appears the link is dead these days.)

The UK never even came close to serious food shortages, let alone the type of starvation witnessed in Leningrad or Holland or other parts of the world. Apart from feeding the civilian population, the UK was quite successfully rationing 4-5 million service personnel as well.

There was one point in late 1942 when the food stocks in reserve fell to about three months worth, but by then the American Liberty ships were arriving faster than the Kreigsmarine could sink them. Despite the "privations" of rationing and the restricted number of foodstuffs available, the general health of children improved and on average they grew to be taller and heavier than children before the war. The simple truth was that many people were better fed during wartime than before the war years. The wartime food shortages forced people to adopt new and better eating patterns.

Meals eaten away from home, whether in expensive restaurants or industrial canteens, were ‘off ration’ and provided a very popular option for people who could afford them. The ability of the rich to enjoy almost pre-war quality meals at top hotels led to such resentment that the government prevented restaurants charging more than 5/- a meal from 1942. British Restaurants supplied a convienient and cost effective way of eating away from home. A diner could eat a nourishing three course meal for just 9d. Standards varied, but the best had a large regular clientele and attracted huge queues of diners. British Restaurants were open to everyone, but mainly served office and industrial workers.

British Restaurants were run by local authorities, who set them up in a variety of different premises such as schools and church halls. Although they were clean and well managed, British Restaurants avoided unnecessary luxury. The average British Restaurant was more like a works canteen than a restaurant but that didn’t deter their hungry customers.

See:

History.UK.com 1940s

 

Read "Hitler's U-Boat War" by Clay Blair and particularly the table on page 99 of Volume One. It's a myth that the U-boats were "killing" Britain. In the first 28 months of the war (9/39 to 12/41), the tonnage of merchant ships under British control actually increased from 17,784,000 to 20,693,000 tons. That's an increase of 2,909,000 tons or more than 16%.

It may be true that imports into Britain decreased by something like 25% in 1940 (not 1942), but that was almost exclusively due to the imposition of convoying regulations. In fact, Britain could, and did, survive on the decreased level of imports in 1940. From Blair's numbers, it appears that British imports in 1942 exceeded the 1939 levels. Blair points out in volume two of "Hitler's U-boat War" that the U-boats never achieved destruction of more than 2% of the convoys to Britain, and this was nowhere near enough to cause the British war effort to collapse.

The diversion of resources from the Eastern Front, even if on a scale approaching 200 Billion RM could not have been brought to bear on the U-boat war because Germany simply did not have the shipyard capacity nor the trained manpower to immediately produce significantly more U-boats.

 

Yes, it would have taken a lot more than Germany's u-boat offensive to starve Britain into submission. The US Navy's submarine offensive against Japan was a much more effective and successful campaign than the effort mustered by Dönitz and the German navy against Britain. Notwithstanding that tens of thousands of German u-boat crewmen and Allied and neutral merchant seamen died in the battle of the Atlantic, it could never be as large and effective a campaign as the much larger and better-resourced US Navy's submarine offensive in the western Pacific against Japanese merchant shipping and the Imperial Japanese Navy. The US submarine offensive against Japan really bit deeply and hurt the Japanese logistically and economically.

For a good, relevant article see: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/history/pac-campaign.html[SIZE=+2][/SIZE]

 

more men working in agriculture does not mean they are producing more,it means that you NEED more men .
These 25 % of the German working population produces 8 .3 % of the national income .
The answer on your last question :why was their productivity bigger,with less land ? Because the British agriculture was more mechanised :there was 1 tractor for 31O acres arable land in Britain,in Germany 1 for 81O acres .

 

If you guys missed this on that link I supplied for the UK during the period between 1939 and 1944, here is an eye opening chart (or rather data sheet) that shows the percentages of any food goods between those years as to availablity. It appears only sugar was in really short supply, at under 70% available in 44 as oppossed to 39. I suppose that could be explained by two different things, one; cane sugar imports declined, and two; sugar beet production was reduced to produce more grains and vegetables.

 

There are a number of assumptions built in there that are not necessarily correct. For instance if your production capability is already saturated and you have to up that then doubling resources into it may lead to less than double output. Like wise if you start effecting the cost of required resources.

It's not at all clear that this is indeed the case. Even if the resources aren't a constraint building up the capability would likely take some time. Germany was hardly unconstrained as far as any resources go except possibly coal.

 

ok all you guys are saying that germany wouldnt have enough shipyards and space to make more u boats. wouldnt the germans just turn more occupied ports into sub pens and building yards?. (marseilles, nice, genoa, around mediterrainean e.t.c). And with such an influx in funding research would be increased thus better types of UB would come into service?

ps i dont think training more UB crews would create problems, if results form the sea were positive germany would have made more training facilities.

 

Marseille and Nice were occupied by the Germans only in november 1942 and how would the Germans transport the U Boats to the bases of Lorient and St Nazire ?The UBoats could not get out oof the Mediterranean (the current was to strong ).

 

UBs operated in the mediteranean and germans could have accessed marseilles and nice when ever they wanted after france surrendered i mean come on will the vichy forces stop the germans?

 

From UBoat net:UBoats could NOT leave the Mediterranean submerged,because the currents at the strait of Gibraltar were to strong,and not submerged was impossible also,due to the British counter-measures .
If the Germans had occupied the whole of France in june 194O,there would not be an armistice and the French fleet would have sailed to Britain .

 

There are several reasons why your proposal wouldn't be a satisfactory solution to the problem.

First, the Germans were short of skilled shipyard manpower because of the need for men in the Army and other industries. There simply weren't enough German men and women to rapidly expand shipyard labor ranks when so many other industries and the Armed Forces also needed labor. The Germans could have drafted French labor, but their experience in French aircraft factories under German occupation, proved that the French (probably deliberately) worked so slowly that their productive capacity was only 50% of German labor efficiency.

Second, U-boats required great amounts of steel and rubber, both of which were in very short supply in German-occupied Europe. The Germans had to keep switching the allocation priorities of steel and rubber (and other scarce commodities) around during the war as conditions changed and this proved a very inefficient way to produce any kind of weapons.

Third, the German economy was stretched to the breaking point as the war progressed. There weren't any spare funds for "research" until Hitler desperately decreed a priority for "wonder weapons" research in 1943. This, of course, was way too late to produce much in the way of advanced naval vessels which take years to develop. The Type XXI U-boat, for example, wasn't a radical new idea in submersibles; it was simply a normal design which emphasized very large banks of batteries to increase underwater speed. But because of the haste with which it was designed, it was poorly designed and built and hence didn't have much impact on the war.

Fourth, the Med wasn't a good place to operate subs, even though both Britain and Germany tried to do so. In any case, Donitz was reluctant to send subs to the Med because he didn't consider it a decisive theater for U-boat activity. The North Atlantic was the area in which the decisive U-boat/Convoy battles took place. The German's main problem in getting boats into the North Atlantic is that they had to transit the Bay of Biscay to get there, and the British put up an effective 24 hour air patrol over the Bay to interdict the U-boats.

Fifth, U-boats couldn't be built in the bomb-proof U-boat pens and the British, and later Americans, bombed the U-boat shipyards, and factories making U-boat equipment. This bombing would have been extended to any new shipyards wherever they were established.

Admiral Donitz sure thought so. The problem wasn't just a lack of training facilities. The biggest problem was manpower, again. There just weren't enough men in naval service to provide the crews by the time expanded U-boat production was achieved. By 1943, there were 23-year old ex-naval pilots skippering U-boats. Most of the crews were very inexperienced and green crews were extremely ineffective in the U-boat war. Also, at one point almost a third of all commissioned U-boats were in the Baltic in training roles. This meant that they couldn't be deployed to the North Atlantic where Donitz desperately needed them.

To gain a good understanding of the problems the Germans had in sustaining even a minimal U-boat effort, I recommend Clay Blair's "Hitler's U-boat War" (Volumes One and Two). Blair was a WW II submariner who has written extensively about submarine warfare in that conflict.

 

That's actually rather understating the problem. As it was Hitler had essentially bankrupted Germany developing the Wehrmacht prior to the war. Only looting the conquered countries and the controls he was able to implement because of the war kept Germany from an economic collapse in the 40s perhaps as early as 1940. One implication of this is that any upgrades in capability prior to the war need to be offset by giving up capability in another area. It's a zero sum game at best. If the new capabilities require much in the way of imports it's even worse than that.

 

devilsadvocate ...read the title of the thread. im sure if germany didnt commit a war with russia manpower would be somewhat realxed dont you think? and germany was the country that invented synthetic rubber(just a side note) during 1942. and if germany was broke at the start how did they fund a war with russia? for 4 years?

 

By looting the countries they conquered and not paying back the lones that were due.

 

The Germans didn't "invent" synthetic rubber in 1942, they were one country of many experimenting in the field and actually came up with a reasonable one (BUNA) much earlier than that. But the US had Thikol and neoprene.

See:

The Birth of Buna

It doesn't describe exactly how the bonds form in the process, but does cover the eventual development of the stuff (both S and N). You probably could google up either variety for a more detailed explanation.

During the war years the Buna was 10 to 20 times the cost of natural rubber, but it beats no rubber at all which was their position by 1940!

Buna wasn't that great a substitute to start with, about its only attribute was an oil resititance which natural rubber lacked. Almost all tires and such are synthetic/natural latex blends today, but are only remotely related to BUNA.

And the Nazis manage to fund their war by stealing their neighbors gold reserves, property, raw maerials, and food stores. Their economics was nearly a Ponzi scheme run on a national level. As soon as the input was cut off by their first loss on the battlefield, it began to collapse. That was when output (payment) couldn't be covered by new input (theft). It was probably more of a "rob Peter to pay Paul" set-up instead of a Ponzi.

 

Even if this rather esoteric explanation were more than tangentially true it’s irrelevant; the Germans would allocate their stolen booty to U-boat production instead of war with Russia. And since the Russian war cost the Germans much more than they ever recovered in booty from it, it cannot be argued other than that all the wealth and manpower the Germans poured down that gaping yaw would instead become U-boats and aircraft fighting Great Britain.
GTE – stick to your guns. I just about fell off my chair laughing when someone said that Germany couldn’t find room in Europe to port more U-boats. Hello – Norway??? BTW – the Germans themselves must have been really, really confused little ubermeisters, because they ran their economy with the impression that by allocating their materials and manpower, they could divert their war economy towards the production of any materials they chose, with the limitation being raw materials and manpower, not finances.