Re: More rails to North Africa
- From: Louis Capdeboscq <louisec00@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 05:22:43 -0400
Sorry, this message went unsent for a few days.
Haydn wrote:
"Louis Capdeboscq" wrote:
Regarding my statement about convoys not sailing for lack of stuff to send, this is corroborated by the figures for tonnage sent. See e.g. October 1940 when the tonnage dropped compared to September and November...
Tonnage dropped, but convoys apparently didn't. August 1940 7 main convoys (discounting the coastal shipping between Libyan ports) put to sea, 20 in September, 19 in October and 17 in November. Hard to say they didn't sail.
The point that I made and that you disagreed with was not that the Italians wouldn't sail, it was that lack of things to ship to North Africa was a factor in preventing more deliveries, not just port capacity etc.
I'm aware of the official Italian navy line, which goes something like this: "we were wrongly accused of being too afraid to sail and not doing our best to support the ground forces, while in fact we did the maximum possible and delivered as much equipment as port capacity could handle". I agree that the navy can't be blamed for not trying to sail, but disagree with the port capacity thing. I think that more could have been shipped, not because the RM wouldn't sail but because other conditions precluded it such as lack of fuel and lack of materials to ship.
For example, if you do a tonnage sent per convoy calculation, you find that there was a 43% drop in October (this counts each man sent as worth 7 tons of shipping, and the lower the value the higher the drop).
I'd rather point at the port capacity bottleneck. Through 1940 the freighters' average unloading layover at Benghazi was one week. Two tankers lay at their Tripoli moorage for no less than a month (August / September), and that was all the more disappointing as 9 ships in all could be simultaneously loaded/unloaded over the whole harbor of Tripoli.
Yes, but this wasn't a "hardwired" port capacity problem, because the physical limit had not been reached, as later events proved when unloading became faster than that. Instead, it was a combination of lack of personnel & specialized installations, all of which could have been shipped within the existing port capacity had they been available or made available.
Here's a quote:
"In the port of Tripoli, in 1941, 2,700 tons per day (daylight) could be unloaded, and 300 additional tons of fuel could be unloaded through hoses. To unload as fast as possible 5 ships carrying 20,000 tons in January 1942, it took the port's unloading structures and personnel 8 days." (De: Haydn, Objet: Re: Rommel's Supply (was: What's wrong with Guderian?) Date : vendredi 1 octobre 1999 20:38) :-)
That said, surely stuff was often sorely missing on the piers. Statistics show that in many cases, an average 30% of the ships' lading capacity was exploited. A cargo ship with a capacity of 6,800 tons once sailed carrying a ludicrous 920 tons payload. Simply, in my opinion, stuff shortage didn't necessarily keep the ships in port.
True. Say you had 5 piers, as in Tripoli, and only 5,000 tons to ship, it made sense to send 5 freighters, each one loaded with only 1,000 tons. This meant that a successful British attack would only sink 1,000 tons of cargo instead of 5,000, and unloading would proceed five times as quickly, thus minimizing exposure to RAF attacks.
It was also grossly inefficient in terms of shipping and fuel, and it definitely didn't indicate that the port capacity limit had been reached.
True. On the other hand, January through March some of the largest and most complex convoy operations were carried out - M43, T18, K7, etc. - and were all uniformly successful, though some painful losses were suffered. Again, material shipped from Italy was insufficient, and again, the convoys did sail.
Well, my point wasn't that the Italians wouldn't sail, it was that sometimes they didn't sail more because there wasn't anything to ship.
In other words, I'm not blaming the Italians for lack of trying, I'm saying that more equipment could have been shipped to North Africa had it been prioritized. With more fuel and more equipment to ship, the Italian navy had the sealift capacity and the North African ports had the unloading capacity to handle more, as their historical performance demonstrated.
LC
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