The News of the Week in Review
Twenty News Questions – 10
New Turn May Be at Hand in the War at Sea – 11-12
Strategic Centers of Russia’s Industrial Strength (map) – 13
Key to the Federal Defense Organization (by W.H. Lawrence) – 14-16
Answers to Twenty News Questions – 16
The New York Times Magazine
Our Own Skytroops ** – 17-22
* Another new place-name. Better get out the atlas.
** Homer didn’t notice the off-page direction so there is no page 25 on which to continue. The article ends with “But the”. Make up your own ending or just look at the pictures.
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/oct41/f26oct41.htm
Germans penetrate Crimea
Sunday, October 26, 1941 www.onwar.com
On the Eastern Front... In the Crimea, German forces break through the defenses of the Perekop Isthmus.
also, there is an interesting little note from Morgenthau about people not having enough money to pay taxes and needing to save. shortly after that i believe, the govt instituted “withholding” which opened the spigot on the current bloated government we now have. without withholding, the government would never have been able to grow to its current size.
just another example of how the powers that were required to win the war, once granted to government, were never retrieved to the people.
law of unintended consequences.
Some very interesting articles relating to industry today.
First, take a look at the map of the USSR. It begs the question whether Germany had a chance of defeating the USSR. They’ve come far into the Soviet Union, but logistically can’t go farther. Yet look how much farther they have to go to destroy Stalin’s industrial centers. I said they needed two years to campaign. Maybe they needed three; maybe it was impossible. I know David Glantz thinks it was.
The other industrial item is our own labor unrest, which other posters have commented on. The unrest revolves around the steel industry, and the supporting coal industry; the basic muscle of American (or any country’s) economic might in the 1940’s. Getting back to the USSR, Stalin isn’t faced with these problems.
Comparing the Soviet and American steel industries brings up another point regarding the efficiencies of a command economy vs. a market economy. In a market economy, a steel corporation must keep it’s costs down in order to be competitive, and even to survive. The command economy does not work that way, and will tolerate waste and inefficiency because there is no compelling reason to avoid waste and be efficient.
The example: Steel manufacturing. Where is American steel manufacturing? Mostly in Western Pennsylvania and the south shore of Lake Michigan (the article says Chicago, but we all know its really Gary, Indiana). Where is the bulk of Soviet steel making? The Soviet Pittsburgh is in Magnitogorsk, which the map shows as a major metallurgical center. “Magnitogorsk” in Russian means “magnetic mountain.” It was a deposit of iron ore so large that it created it’s own anomaly in earth’s magnetic field. So does it make sense that the USSR put all it’s steel mills there? Not really; one would then assume that the American steel industry would be located in Duluth, not Pittsburgh. Or that European steel would be made in Swedish ore fields, and not the Ruhr. In fact, in competitive western steel industries, the mills were located atop the coal fields. (Or in the case of Gary, near the coal fields but where the ore could be shipped by ore freighter after the coal is brought from southern Illinois by rail). The reason is that the steel-making process in use at the time used about two tons of coal to every ton of ore to make steel. In a competitive industry, a company that put a mill on top of the iron mine and shipped coal would get killed with higher transportation costs.
I would imagine that a similar disregard of efficiencies permeated the entire five-year plan Soviet economic system, and is why it ultimately failed.