In Italy, the lack of focus on producing more Italian designs had caused something of a political stir, but the funding was not diverted or removed from the airframes already procured. The first three wings of the Bf 109-i (modified from the traditional German version with the replacement of the Rheinmetall-Borsig 13mm MG 131s for the Breda-SAFAT 12.7mm machine guns and Italian radios) were received over the course of several months.
A political stir?! The utter rejection of two decades of policy on Autarchy, internal development and Corporatism is a bit more than a stir.
Also, of all the bits to substitute, why Italian made radios? Italian pilots tended to strip them out the fighter in the early war because they (a) needed constant attention to stay in tune and(b) didn't work even when tuned.
Goering had been fuming for years over the loss of some of the focus on aviation, but had developed a bit of a magnanimous view
Who is this man and what has he done with the
real Göering? Is this not Herman but his less drug addicted brother Albert?
Also why is that Fw190 shown succesfully launching a torpedo when it should have failed to launch, then fallen off unexpectedly, causing the aircraft to veer off wildly before cartwheeling into the sea?
The cost of these battleships far exceeded their usefulness as for much of the war
the Royal Navy’s focus was on Germany.
That many ships also far exceeded the capacity of the gun pits, armour plate production, fire-control and optics grinding, turbine mills and indeed steel capacity of Italy.
Should be. But the war came in its own time, and thus we have large formations of things to try and keep the economy chugging along... or something. I'm sure
@El Pip would have some better idea of the actual ramifications of the near constant expansion. What I've done in my current save is that I basically forced all of the Axis majors back to Full Mobilization as a penalty to cover the "Your economy has been running this hard for a year now, you have no money left to carry on as you have been."
Well as you asked;
This level of German production means the war factories are getting priority, so the export firms are getting no steel (or anything else). Which raises the question how the hell are the Germans paying for the imports of iron ore, rubber, chromium and all the other thing they lack (which is essentially everything)?
At this point no-one is taking Reichsmarks, let along Askimarks, as everyone knows they are worthless and the German exchange-control system makes them impossible to spend, plus as mentioned the export firms aren't making anything so there is nothing to buy. The gold has long since gone and surely no-one sane is offering credit. There can be no tech left to ship to Stalin and given that in OTL he was asking for the
Bismark for the next trade (and Germany was behind in it's payments) I can't see the Soviet Union providing anything. Stalin will start asking for debts to be cleared, and Germany can't do that, so either the trade stops or the Kreigsmarine starts sailing for Leningrad and it's new owners.
The one bright spot could be the synthetic oil and rubber plants, but they are only bright because they are on fire - OTL it only got full production of the pre-war plants in 1944, any faster and they will be inefficient, exploding death traps (and they were ridiculously unsafe in OTL). Even if they are somehow working that just exposes the fact Germany doesn't have the coal production to run those plants and the steel industry at the same time. I genuinely don't see how Germany is importing anything at this point, at which point the economy implodes
Internally, well MEFO is long overdue for repayment (and there is nothing to repay them with) and without the wartime fiscal repression and rationing inflation will have gone through the roof, not full Weimar but heading that way.
Germany has at this point run out of everything. Absolutely everything. The country couldn't even feed itself in peace time and relied on massive imports of feed for the national pig herd, which as discussed they can't afford, so they are probably even running short on Bratwurst and starting to starve. It is a relentless economic and financial horror show from every direction.
Italy is, if possible, in a worse place industrially as it doesn't even have coal, but on the plus side they won't be starving. Japan is probably the best of the lot as long as their is no banking embargo (a different thing from the oil embargo), they had fairly chunky gold and foreign currency reserves even when war broke out. Finger in the air guess,they can keep buying the iron/oil/etc they need till the mid-1940s. Of course they are red-lining the economy and printing money to pay the bills, the war hid that problem quite nicely for them but without it things will be on a knife edge.
