The Butterfly Effect: A British AAR

[TheButterflyComposer]

The Reichskolonialbund are sobbing at being so cruelly ignored. Somehow they managed to have 1.5 million members in 1939 so there was at least a sizeable minority who cared to some degree.

Meh. It's a nazi organisation, so I immedaitly disbelieve both their official numbers and how much the average member cared about the former colonial empire.

The loss of said empire should have been a boon really, it meant Germany could finally stop wasting their time and resources on a blue water navy and concentrate on building a custom designed blockade and flotilla destroying line of subs and surface ships.

Well...they COULD have stopped wasting their time.

There is a line in one of the USAAF bombing reviews along the lines of "We knew exactly where the Nazi Synthentic Oil Industry was, we built it for them". Standard Oil was neck deep, if not worse, in trading with IG Farben right up until the end of 1941. Broadly speaking they wanted German synthetic rubber tech (as the US was utterly dependent on imports) and supplied them plenty of oil related tech in exchange. There's no reason that trade wouldn't still happen.

It'll probably be even higher. More German science, tech and people stayed in Germany, firmly anti-british stance for both sides, and a complete lack of other options for both.

It is a bit weird feeling sorry for Germany I'm afraid.

Yeah...they are still nazis, and still trying their tricks. The wounded gazelle gambit is one Germany perfected in 1925, and they've been deftly using it ever since.

As I fully intend to, also.

Fortunately this will not be a particularly long job, though I do of course remain appreciative of it.

I was surprised it was only just over 30 pages back, and even more surprised that it stopped halfway in 2021. Wow.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

This unreliability is the second worst feature of the forum software, behind the colour scheme and just ahead of the rounding of views and posts to the point of uselessness.

The color scheme at least is somewhat configurable; I've been using the far less upsetting white-on-blue scheme since shortly after the last redesign.

Just for you I shall endeavour to remember to include something on nitriding next time we have a reason to look at aero-engines.

I have a soft spot for nitriding as it is one of those dreadfully useful applications of plasma processing which has gone largely unnoticed by the broader industry.

You could argue that this is the voters fault for not liking the basic facts of nature, certainly it's an argument I have sympathy with.

This explains many things.

I did consider looking into this. But then I encountered sentences likes this;
but it is a rather oblique discourse indeed that will consider Mao’s dialectical materialism as a form of a reification of the liberal humanist subject; in fact, it would appear that such a claim is corrupt at the outset for those familiar with the intricate operations and nuances of dialectical materialism as it is grounded in Marx and in other post-Hegelian schools
This led to a series of flashbacks to Slovak critical social realist poetry and I decided to leave the entire subject well alone.

The readership surely thanks you.

I now have a desire to get this work translated into Entish, or failing that Elvish, and add on another few dozen appendices. What could go wrong?

Well, Hitler might end up forging the One Panzer to Rule Them All, which in this new proposed work might actually work due to magical nonsense - the key ingredient of all Nazi planning in this era.

I dare say TBC gets more top-of-page posts than the authAAR, truly a dreadful situation we find ourselves in.

 

[El Pip]

Meh. It's a nazi organisation, so I immedaitly disbelieve both their official numbers and how much the average member cared about the former colonial empire.

For a standard group sure. But in this case most of the Nazi leadership disapproved of it's very existence, save Goering, and that there was no actual advantage to being a member so I think the membership probably did care as they had to put some effort into joining and got basically nothing back.

The loss of said empire should have been a boon really, it meant Germany could finally stop wasting their time and resources on a blue water navy and concentrate on building a custom designed blockade and flotilla destroying line of subs and surface ships.

Yes there's absolutely no way that building that sort of fleet would have concerned any of Germany's neighbours.

I have a soft spot for nitriding as it is one of those dreadfully useful applications of plasma processing which has gone largely unnoticed by the broader industry.

Somewhat ironic really as nitriding is very much about not having any soft spots.

Turns out one of the inventors had to flee Nazi Germany in the late 1930s but sadly picked Switzerland and the idea languished. I am now wondering if perhaps he could flee to the UK where he would find many people who were interested in a better way to nitride. Admittedly I've no idea if plasma nitriding is better, but I feel that it should be as the name is far cooler than salt bath nitriding.

The readership surely thanks you.

I think shall retain it as a viable threat to be use should things become unruly or other gross breaches of standards and morality occur

Well, Hitler might end up forging the One Panzer to Rule Them All, which in this new proposed work might actually work due to magical nonsense - the key ingredient of all Nazi planning in this era.

The more serious problem is that in such a scenario Churchill may well end up in the Gandalf slot ("Behold, I am not Gandalf the Liberal, who was betrayed. I am Gandalf the Tory, who has returned from political death"). I mean it would be funny but I fear some of the leadership might explode at Churchill actually becoming a wizard.

I dare say TBC gets more top-of-page posts than the authAAR, truly a dreadful situation we find ourselves in.

Dark times indeed, but we must persevere.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

Yes there's absolutely no way that building that sort of fleet would have concerned any of Germany's neighbours.

Honestly? I have no idea why the nazis didn't do this. Not many of them were particularly concerned with sea power to begin with, and the navy was never going to win out in a battle between the obviously vital army, and Goering's darling luftwaffe.

So why not build a less resource intensive fleet designed to do what the nazis actually wanted their navy to do anyway (make life hell for any actual naval powers they were fighting, with as few resources as possible).

And you can't use the 'concern about other countries' excuse because this is nazi Germany, and not only do they not care, but very few neighbours can or would have done anything to stop them anyway.

Or, just don't bother with a navy at all and spend all your effort on other things (which is bascially what they did, bar some weird ego projects and the U boat program).

 

[El Pip]

Honestly? I have no idea why the nazis didn't do this.

I would be slightly upset at this has been covered in this very story. But that was many, many years ago so I shouldn't have unrealistic expectations.

So why not build a less resource intensive fleet designed to do what the nazis actually wanted their navy to do anyway (make life hell for any actual naval powers they were fighting, with as few resources as possible).

And you can't use the 'concern about other countries' excuse because this is nazi Germany, and not only do they not care, but very few neighbours can or would have done anything to stop them anyway.

The starting point would be that until late 1937 Hitler was still planning on Britain being an ally, or at least a 'friendly' neutral, so that overshadowed pretty much all Nazi naval thinking. So if you are not fighting the Royal Navy what is it the Nazis wanted their fleet to do? Keep the French out of the Baltic mostly and frankly no-one really expected the French Navy to even try something so ambitious so there was no real mission for the fleet. As has been mentioned the Panzerschiff were almost entirely political ships and for many years the Reichsmarine then Kreigsmarine had no idea what to do with them because they were overkill for keeping out a French Navy that didn't really want to go into the Baltic in the first place.

Then we come to the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, another part of the big 'Keep Britain on side effort' that Hitler was pursuing and something Britain wanted because the Admiralty were not stupid and wanted Germany tied into a 'normal' but small fleet they could beat not a 'freak fleet' optimised for breaking blockades and annoying the RN. This pretty much forced the Nazis into a standard ship builds, as was the entire point of the treaty, and so you see the Admiral Hippers which were notionally Treaty Standard 10kT 8" heavy cruisers. The Nazis lied utterly about the tonnage but spent years pretending they were complying, because Britain was the neighbour that did care and would do something if the naval balance of power was threatened.

Of course the Nazis can go off and build a Jeune École type fleet of subs, torpedo boats, AMCs and surface raiding cruisers but that fleet would have only one possible aim - fighting Britain. So it requires not only the British to not react adversely (even if only diplomatically and economically) but for Hitler's entire grand strategy and war planning to radically change and do so much, much earlier than OTL for no obvious reason.

Or, just don't bother with a navy at all and spend all your effort on other things (which is bascially what they did, bar some weird ego projects and the U boat program).

Two battleships, two battlecruisers, five heavy cruisers and a carrier were all laid down by the Nazis along with a pile of destroyers, that's on top of the ships Weimar had built. A lot of resources were spent on it and it caused shortages elsewhere particularly in specialist materials, tools and kit, so it was a lot more than nothing.

Now if the argument is that the Nazis should have actually built nothing then I can see the advantages. But of course it comes at a cost, the most immediately obvious one is no Norway campaign, plus the more complex term question of how Britain reacts when there is no German naval threat.

Even if somehow nothing changes and the route to war is unchanged you can easily see a situation in say early 1942 where the RN is able to freely send arctic convoys around a friendly Norway and Italy has been booted out of North Africa as the RN concentrated their forces and got mores supplies to 8th Army while cutting Italian lines. With ever more LL aircraft and tanks pouring into the Soviet Union (after all none are needed in Allied controlled N. Africa) and it just being a matter of time till the second front opens up, maybe 1943, maybe late 1942 if the US get their way, many Nazis would be wishing they had had a fleet that could have influenced all that.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Admittedly I've no idea if plasma nitriding is better, but I feel that it should be as the name is far cooler than salt bath nitriding.

Unfortunately it would be outside of the scope for this work, as even the non-causal relationship between Butterfly and Time cannot account for the fact that the plasma technology side of things really did not become industrially viable until the '60s and onward. The '30s and '40s while there was not no ability to develop plasma engineering applications the field was still in the relative infancy of developing the theoretical basis for pretty much everything having to do with radiation-matter interactions. In this work we still tread cautiously over the precepts of materials chemistry so probably best not to scare off the readership with talk of cross sections and ion ranges.

In any case, for whatever historical reasons nitriding in general is sadly underused, it is still used widely enough for industrial tooling and mechanical parts to be profitable but I have yet to see, for instance, drill bits on sale in the hardware shops with nitride coatings for wear resistance. It is a simple enough process, the problem is that nobody wants to spend the money on changing over the production line when they could instead be spending the money on important things like CEO bonuses and running brands into the ground for short-term profit.

should things become unruly or other gross breaches of standards and morality occur

I am not sure what you mean, TBC already posts here.

I mean it would be funny but I fear some of the leadership might explode at Churchill actually becoming a wizard.

I am 50/50 whether this is accurate or if you mistyped "readership".

plus the more complex term question of how Britain reacts when there is no German naval threat.

Most likely if there is literally no German naval threat, Churchill gets his Baltic adventure and possibly Poland is saved, not through any great intrepidity on the part of the Allies but simply as a side-effect of Churchill doing what he wants.

Really, the problem with the German Navy of WWII is not that it existed or that it sucked up too many resources from other things (the resource problem was a Germany problem, not a Navy problem, both in the sense of not enough to go around and in the sense of wasting resources on ineffectual pet projects). The problem was that a fleet-in-being doctrine not dissimilar to the Great War would have been a far more effective use of resources than the battleships-as-commerce-raiders abomination that the Nazis actually came up with. At least until after Taranto, as once the British figured out that they could just bomb ships instead of fighting gunnery duels things would have gone downhill quite rapidly for Germany in any case.

 

[Wraith11B]

So, I actually just finished reading a good article that touches on the balance that Raeder had to face when he became the OKM chief: he has to protect the German coast, protect German shipping, and then be able to project power into the enemy's sea lines of communication. Tirpitz was very much of the Mahan school: lots of guns, short legs, decisive battle. Raeder, on the other hand, is (at the outset) facing the most likely course of enemy action (MLCOA) of a war where Poland is the enemy, and France is supporting; to the second point, he has to keep the Swedish iron ore flowing into Germany. Thus, the panzerschiff: high sustained speed and long legs to first be capable of snuffing the Poles before turning and dealing with a French squadron of fast cruisers supported by an ancient battleship. They turn out to be wet ships because their designed employment expectations.

Then comes a completely different situation. Now they're into facing off against the Brits. Raeder has to play the risk game: he needs to force the British to spread out so much to prevent the mass from coalescing and causing the German trade to become interrupted, but also by spreading resources to things like commerce raiders sometimes half a world away, making it nearly impossible for the British to provide sufficient escort to every convoy. Something I learned from this paper was that the OKM was actually really ahead of the ball with both underway replenishment for both fuels and stores: the Dithmarschen-class, though there were others. Modern navies would use the designation "AOE" for fast combat stores ship; think an oiler (AO), ammunition ship (AE) and refrigerated stores ship (AF) all in one hull. These vessels permitted the wide ranging operations that did result in a good, albeit brief, impact on the effort: think Operation Berlin, where Scharnhost and Gniesenau both combine for over 115k tons of shipping, mostly tankers. This is a larger total than for any of the wolfpacks (citation needed, but I pulled the comment from the scholarly article).

 

[Wraith11B]

Sorry to double tap this, but since others have already read the above post (and to help the inestimable @El Pip along with getting to the top of the page), the two US Naval War College articles which will bear out modern research into my previous post can be found here and here.

The first (which I hadn't recalled at the time, but have since revisited) is a great primer on how "just build uboats!" isn't exactly a great answer: it highlights the effectiveness of the Kriegsmarine's SKL during the first few years of the war, which saw great success from commerce raiding by surface units.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

When Tomorrow gets to actually running Germany, a lot of you are going to be tapped to help advise various departments, clearly.

 

[El Pip]

Unfortunately it would be outside of the scope for this work, as even the non-causal relationship between Butterfly and Time cannot account for the fact that the plasma technology side of things really did not become industrially viable until the '60s and onward. The '30s and '40s while there was not no ability to develop plasma engineering applications the field was still in the relative infancy of developing the theoretical basis for pretty much everything having to do with radiation-matter interactions. In this work we still tread cautiously over the precepts of materials chemistry so probably best not to scare off the readership with talk of cross sections and ion ranges.

This is sad but not completely surprising. On a more positive note it has saved me doing the research to get to this conclusion, so I thank you for that.

In any case, for whatever historical reasons nitriding in general is sadly underused, it is still used widely enough for industrial tooling and mechanical parts to be profitable but I have yet to see, for instance, drill bits on sale in the hardware shops with nitride coatings for wear resistance. It is a simple enough process, the problem is that nobody wants to spend the money on changing over the production line when they could instead be spending the money on important things like CEO bonuses and running brands into the ground for short-term profit.

I can't get too angered about this, in the unlikely event I ever became a CEO then I'm fairly sure a large bonus would be my top priority as well.

On the actual point I wonder if this is because coatings can get you a similar result for far less effort and cost? I've no idea if it's true but I know you can get good titanium nitride coated drill bits for ridiculously cheap prices so my (entirely genuine) questions would ask if a plasma nitride treatment would be noticeably different to justify the cost. (I am assuming that this is not just the same thing with different names).

I am not sure what you mean, TBC already posts here.

I am told things could somehow get worse than that, though the mods were unclear as to how.

I am 50/50 whether this is accurate or if you mistyped "readership".

WhyNotBoth.gif

Most likely if there is literally no German naval threat, Churchill gets his Baltic adventure and possibly Poland is saved, not through any great intrepidity on the part of the Allies but simply as a side-effect of Churchill doing what he wants.

And it would be truly glorious

Really, the problem with the German Navy of WWII is not that it existed or that it sucked up too many resources from other things (the resource problem was a Germany problem, not a Navy problem, both in the sense of not enough to go around and in the sense of wasting resources on ineffectual pet projects). The problem was that a fleet-in-being doctrine not dissimilar to the Great War would have been a far more effective use of resources than the battleships-as-commerce-raiders abomination that the Nazis actually came up with. At least until after Taranto, as once the British figured out that they could just bomb ships instead of fighting gunnery duels things would have gone downhill quite rapidly for Germany in any case.

Sorry to double tap this, but since others have already read the above post (and to help the inestimable @El Pip along with getting to the top of the page), the two US Naval War College articles which will bear out modern research into my previous post can be found here and here.

The first (which I hadn't recalled at the time, but have since revisited) is a great primer on how "just build uboats!" isn't exactly a great answer: it highlights the effectiveness of the Kriegsmarine's SKL during the first few years of the war, which saw great success from commerce raiding by surface units.

Some excellent research from Wraith, much appreciated. There are some excellent nuggets in there but I think my issue is the lack of appreciation of the wider context (and in the case of the latter a worrying hint of Raeder fanboying).

As the article states it wasn't until October 1940 that a German raider actually managed to break out into the Atlantic (Graff Spee was pre-positioned prior to war) and the window of success was fairly narrow from then till the start of 1942 when Hitler hid the fleet in Norway. For me that late start is the key to it, because without the French bases and, far more importantly, the massive distraction of the Italian Navy, I don't think the German surface fleet would have achieved anywhere near the success it did. What Germany needed was a battle fleet that could distract much of the RN and so create space for the raiders to escape out into, they never had such a force themselves but were lucky that the Italians provided such a distraction.

This is not to deny the successes of the fleet, but just to point out it was never planned for by Raeder and the source of his "To die gallantly" line. He knew that if he attempted to use his ships as raiders without such a distraction then they were all just going to get sunk, even if they did manage to take a decent haul of merchants with them. To use your term he didn't have the fleet to play a 'risk game', he needed either massively more resources or, as he got in OTL, a huge change in the balance of forces.

As to the idea of just using them as a fleet in being, the Germans can certainly tie up a chunk of the RN and so help out the Italians (assuming they are active enough to actually be a fleet in being and not a 'fleet at anchor doing nothing') and I suppose a certain amount of light forces and naval air power will also end up pinned down covering such a force. I'm not convinced it's a massive improvement, I tend towards Corbett and think a fleet in being strategy cannot be entirely passive and you have to raid and leave port even if you do avoid decisive battle. If you have to leave port might as well do a bit of raiding while you are out, safer than trying to find a weak military target, helps the wider plan and ticks the 'active enough to stay a threat' box.

When Tomorrow gets to actually running Germany, a lot of you are going to be tapped to help advise various departments, clearly.

I look forward to being as respected and listened to as all the many experts who advised Germany in OTL.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

I look forward to being as respected and listened to as all the many experts who advised Germany in OTL.

We're building a special compound in the countryside purpose built for you....

 

[nuclearslurpee]

This is sad but not completely surprising. On a more positive note it has saved me doing the research to get to this conclusion, so I thank you for that.

It's honestly a bit surreal to read papers from the 1920s to 40s documenting painstaking experiments in plasma science with impressive attention to detail, rarely found in modern labs as respect for quality of science has rather deteriorated over time, and then simultaneously noting how far off the results or analysis in those papers are simply because they did not understand the fundamental physics of basically anything related to plasmas (or "gaseous electronics" as they used to say).

I often envy the scientists fortunate enough to be born before, and work during, that heady period between the discovery of quantum mechanics and the creation of the nuclear bomb and the ensuing Cold War. One of those rare periods in scientific history when brilliancy and insight counted for more than how much money governments and corporations poured into something. But I digress...

On the actual point I wonder if this is because coatings can get you a similar result for far less effort and cost? I've no idea if it's true but I know you can get good titanium nitride coated drill bits for ridiculously cheap prices so my (entirely genuine) questions would ask if a plasma nitride treatment would be noticeably different to justify the cost. (I am assuming that this is not just the same thing with different names).

The big problem really is the retooling and human capital involved to get a plasma process off the ground. Once you've got the equipment line set up and the right people to run it, plasma treatment is usually pretty cheap and efficient especially for something as relatively simple as nitriding (chemical processes involving toxic precursors/waste products are a more challenging story). The trouble is that you have to purchase and install a whole specialized vacuum technology system and hire/pay the people to run it, which is not cheap up-front and requires paying good money to well-trained specialists. This makes a lot more sense for something like semiconductor device manufacturing, where you already have the vac tech and experts anyways as those are a requirement to do business, than it does for drill bit manufacturing which traditionally uses none of these things.

As far as the result goes, for nitriding at least the end result is not really different. For a more complex treatment the advantage of the plasma is decoupling from the working temperature which can make a significant difference when chemistry, etc. is involved, but for nitriding this isn't usually a big deal because the base metal you're working on will hold up just fine at high temperatures needed for diffusion processes (although I think there would be a long-term cost savings, since heating is usually a relatively costly part of an industrial process). The bigger advantage is that a plasma treatment avoids the need to deal with chemistry, point in case you can just use ordinary N2 gas instead of something like ammonia which has, shall we say, certain undesirable properties for industrial safety purposes.

As a bonus you can use the exact same system and just pump in a different working gas (Ar for example) to do a surface cleaning step before/after nitriding which simplifies your process chain considerably. Of course the argument there is, sure, it's simpler, but our "more complex" 2-3 machine chain costs a fraction of this to build and install and any old dumbass with a hard hat can hit the "go" button if you really don't care too much about QA.

We're building a special compound in the countryside purpose built for you....

I suspect this will be far preferable to having to work in the same building as the rest of us numbskulls.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

I suspect this will be far preferable to having to work in the same building as the rest of us numbskulls.

One thing Germany had going for it was space. Lots of unused countryside to turn into secret projects. Even after I fix their super unorganised farming and infrastructure situation.

Good thing about HOI4 making the nazis mini-nuke every county and province they enter. I get to compeltly rebuild Germany from the ground up.

Means unemployment, construction slump, overpopulation concerns and lack of money have suddenly vanished. Just have to make sure no one invades us...

 

[nuclearslurpee]

Even after I fix

If this AAR ends with TBC's demonic analogue in charge of Germany and making grandiose claims about a new fascist world order that every nation on Earth will be itching to join with no strings attached, I will be very put out.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

If this AAR ends with TBC's demonic analogue in charge of Germany and making grandiose claims about a new fascist world order that every nation on Earth will be itching to join with no strings attached, I will be very put out.

It is a sign of a quality AAR when I end up ruling a decent chunk of the world and everyone blindly follows what I say. Esepcially if I'm also a demon.

And I need to balance out taking over the world with communism with taking over the world with fascism.

 

[nuclearslurpee]

It is a sign of something all right.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

It is a sign of something all right.

I am making notes nuclearslurpee. And your name, will go on the list.

 

[Midnite Duke]

I am making notes nuclearslurpee. And your name, will go on the list.

Learn something new every day. TBC being in charge of Santa's naughty and nice list, is today's new knowledge.

Only two more before top of page.

DO NOT MESS IT UP!!!

 

[nuclearslurpee]

If we make one more post and then leave it that is probably safer, because inevitably someone forgets to check to page count and steals the top of page.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

NO ONE POST ANYTHING. THIS IS THE LAST POST IN THIS PAGE.

I UNDERSTAND THIS IS A SACRIFICE. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS MINDLESS DISTRACTION AS SUBSTITUTE. LOOK AT THE LITTLE GOBLIN DANCE!