Sunday, August 15, 2010

How to loose WWII

The Germans lost by frittering away their industrial capacity building too many different types of weapons. Both Heinz Guderian and Albert Speer complained about this in their post war memoirs. I have a lovely coffee table book of the German air force listing every aircraft they developed. During WWII the germans developed 143 different warplanes, of which a whopping big 58 went into production. The other 85 designs went no farther than prototypes.
In contrast, the highly organized US Army Air Force numbered all it's designs. Over all of WWII, USAAF sponsored a mere 67 designs, of which only 14 went into production. Estimating that the less organized US Navy, which did not number it's designs, added perhaps another 50% to both numbers, we have maybe 100 American designs, with a mere 21 going into production. In short, the Americans out produced the Germans by concentrating on building a few, but superior, types of aircraft.
Plain old capitalism was more effective at marshaling the nation's industrial power than National Socialism was.

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