WesWorld

Alternate history gives us the opportunity to imagine many “what-if” scenarios. However, if we are going to avoid flights of fantasy, we need to have our imagination conditioned by an understanding of why things happened the way they did. Often-times history is the result of accidents of personality, such as Rommel being away from his headquarters on June 6, 1944, or Hitler being asleep at a critical moment. But the deeper I look into history I find that often things worked out as they did because there was no better way at the time to handle the situation. In a conflict on the scale of the Second World War it is not possible to just wave hands and say, “what if it happened this way”, without giving thought to what that changed scenario would imply.

Let me give an example.

We know that the United States built a prodigious number of Liberty Ships – 2,680 to be exact – which carried the agricultural and industrial goods that in large measure won the Second World War. What did it take to construct these vessels?

First, it took new shipbuilding methods and new shipyards. None of the fifteen shipyards that built Liberty ships was in existence in September 1939, and most of them were not begun until 1940. Construction of the shipyards took an investment of more than $287 million (in 1940 dollars) by the US Maritime Commission before a single ship slid down the ways. Secondly, it took time. The first Liberty ship to be launched, the SS Patrick Henry, took 244 days from keel-laying to delivery – on 30 December 1941. Her subsequent sisters took far less. Every shipyard and every shipbuilding way in those yards had a steep bathtub curve in production – by the middle of the war Liberty ship production time was generally below 60 days – but getting there did not take overnight. I’ve summarized the output of Liberty ships below.



As you can see, production did not really hit its stride until 1943, though the tide had turned by late 1942.

Twenty different firms built engines for Liberty Ships – including several Canadian companies. The number of subcontractors and suppliers to just the yards building Liberty ships was huge.

Should we take this into account in playing Wesworld? Given our rules, I believe we have to trust to the individual player to condition their actions to what they know and what they can discern about historical factors, or can make a reasonable case for. We are playing a game, not creating an economic model; but I think we ought to be cognizant of the art of the possible.

I’ve been re-reading Glen Williford’s “Racing the Sunrise”, a study of American efforts to reinforce its Pacific outposts in the months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It covers a lot of ground, and touches upon something we Alternate Historians might forget: no matter how many ships, men, or airplanes you have they can only be in one place at a time. More to the point, it takes some measure of time to get a ship, airplanes or troops from Point A to Point B – and while in transit, they cannot do much of anything.

Shipping is perhaps the strongest example that can be painted for this. If your intent is to move large numbers of troops from Britain to South Africa – the Clyde to Cape Town – at optimum course and a speed of 15 knots it will still take more than twenty days of constant steaming. Allow for refueling, bad weather or any other eventuality and it might take as long as thirty days. That might not sound too bad – but then the ships must wait at their destination until they have unloaded – and only then can they either return to their point of origin (in another thirty days) or sail on elsewhere. In the meanwhile these same ships cannot carry troops or materiel elsewhere – that has to be done by other vessels. What might have seemed like adequate numbers of supply vessels can quickly be cut down if you are deploying over long distances.

Another factor too easily overlooked is port congestion. When a convoy of fifty or sixty ships arrives at even a well-equipped port not all of them would be able to unload at once – for many possible reasons. Other vessels may already be unloading; other vessels are loading for outward cargos; there may be shortages of equipment or stevedores to offload them. A port will have only so many berths and that is the limit of its capacity, unless you posit offloading into lighters using ship’s gear and that is a slow and dangerous process. Sone of the fifty or sixty ships will have to wait their turn – and while waiting, they are effectively lost to the task of moving cargo. At points during the Second World War American vessels in the Southwest Pacific might wait upwards of two months before being offloaded and allowed to proceed on their way.

It is important in framing a viable scenario to account for the inherent time lag of getting from Point A to Point B, and the potential ripple effect of tying up significant amounts of shipping or airlift in support of one effort.

This is a good point regarding time and resources.
It takes time to build up any industrial capacity and tool it and keep a production line running whilst shaving off time and wasted energy. Even by 1943 when the majority of workforce, industrial and resource mobilisation was complete, there were still constraints on what could be done and where best to allocate resources. For example escort warship production in Britain was hampered by slip length, it forced the design of more than one type of escort to make the best use of available slips and at the cost of destroyer production. A link to previous comments I've made on this are: http://wesworld.jk-clan.de/index.php?pag…4033#post134033

The points regarding shipping and port capacity are well made.

In Ubangi Shari for example, shipments of heavy supplies are probably taking around a month to arrive. Without the French assistance no air bridge would be possible and even 56 (less now given 3-5 aircraft are write-offs) is hardly enough to maintain the bridge and operate in air mobile operations. During Operation Veldmuis, the air bridge practically ceased for a week. That has knock-on effects.
The current Kongo offensive relies on Dutch supplies and whatever can be hauled overland from Kongo arsenals. Given the lack of railroads its slow, slow work. For the rebels, they rely on captured booty, what they can strip from the land and what comes through the porous borders of Chad and Sudan via much further afield via nefarious and circuitous means which equals even more time.

Filed under the rubric “It seemed like a good idea at the time” can be found many of the blunders of history that are so obvious with the benefit of hindsight. This observation should remind us that any action or inaction has consequences – some readily obvious and others less so; some actions might be quite suited for the prevailing conditions, but become painfully limiting when conditions change. In this last category one might place the National Shipbuilders Securities Ltd., created in Britain in 1930.

Its purpose was to assist in the closing of failing shipyards – like yards around the world British shipbuilders were hard-hit by the Great Depression – and to rationalize the British shipbuilding industry. Between 1930 and 1935 the combine closed down all or parts of more than twenty famous shipyards, including such major yards as Beardmore at Dalmuir in Scotland; Workman Clark in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Palmers at Jarrow and Northumberland Shipbuilding at Howden, both in the northeast of England. The how and why each yard fell into the hands of the National Shipbuilders Securities are varied – some yards were small and unable to compete in the lean times; others had suffered financial mismanagement, or were unable to invest in modern plant. But the yards that were closed down were dismantled, parts being sold off for other purposes or otherwise sterilized – most of the agreements under which properties came under the group’s control forbade shipbuilding on the site for a period of forty years.

Reorganization did save much of the rest of the British shipbuilding industry in the hard times of the early 1930s; but the long-term consequences would not emerge until the Second World War. The first – and most obvious – is that the lost shipbuilding capacity could not be regained; the yards were not merely closed, they had been eliminated. But consider the cascade effects – with fewer jobs in the shipbuilding trades skilled shipfitters and mechanics found work elsewhere, or otherwise fell from the active work force. The smaller workforce meant that there was less need for apprentices to learn the trade, which turned labor into a bottleneck when Rearmament got under way in the late 1930s. By choosing to use rationalization to reduce the size of the industry what funds were available were diverted from investment in new techniques of shipbuilding such as welding, which made possible the vast fleet of American war-built ships.

This salutary example should remind Alternate Historians that nothing happens in a vacuum, even in a resource-rich environment as Wesworld. Once started down a road or a decision tree making a 180-degree turn is difficult in the extreme.

True, though I would argue that rearmament and the war gave a much needed boost. Indeed by the late 50s the decline in British shipbuilding was once again underway and has continued ever since to the reduction now of just a couple of yards left and very little future for them beyond 2030.

The aircraft industry in the 1950s faced similar rationalisation pressures to reduce excess capacity and with even more government money channelled into aerospace post war the government effectively had the impetus to do whatever it wanted to protect its investments and reduce its expenditures.

As to loss of skilled manpower, I feel you may be over stating the effects. A shipyard producing no ships to 2-3 ships every 5 years has no need for a large workforce and so these men were unemployed anyway or forced to seek work in other industries or local yards. Even if the yards had been mothballed in 1931, in many cases they would have needed some updating and new equipment to effectively build newer ships unless they were to have been solely employed for building merchants and simpler sloops and minesweepers. As you pointed out in your first post, for the Liberty ships and other classes of ship, the US built a new modern infrastructure from scratch. Britain never had the space, money, resources or willingness to do this. Even if those yards had been re-opened the industry as a whole would have required even more manpower and I'm not sure there was that much excess trained manpower available to fully man another, for example, dozen shipyards.


In WW, many of the larger National Shipbuilders Securities Ltd. yards are still open, WW having seen less depression in shipping markets since 1920 than OTL though some rationalisation in the form of mergers has occurred. Same with the aircraft industry, three larger groups plus some smaller firms to pick up the sub-contract work and offer excess design and production capacity.