Preparing for the ‘Second’ Great War? Military Planning and Technology in the Interregnum Era; Central Europe entry, (1 of 2)

preliminary note

preliminary note: this was intended as a single, standalone entry with its own coherent logic, but I am splitting it into two parts for readability, since as one update it would be over 9,000 words. I’m putting both portions up right now, but be aware that these are both parts of the same piece.

Preparing for the ‘Second’ Great War? Military Planning and Technology in the Interregnum Era

Central Europe: Political Culture as Military Policy (1 of 2) ​

In war, the will of the people is a weapon like any other, and like any other, it wears out.

-Erich Ludendorff, Kampf im Maschinenzeitalter [Battle in the Machine Age], 1921

Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy’s strength too high than too low, such is human nature.

-Carl von Clausewitz, _On War

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into a military mind is getting an old one out._

-B.H. Liddell Hart​

Excerpts from Preparing for Armageddon: National Military Planning in the Interregnum Period, Richard Overy and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) ​

The Great War, The Deluge, The Inundation, The Trial, The Time of Troubles; such were the appellations ringed round the ultimately unmasterable decade which brought an end to the world of old Europe and inaugurated a new era of global tension. These captured the singularity and inimitability of the event. The thought of a -Second- Great War, a second Deluge, inevitably verged on the eschatological and catastrophic, an object best consigned to the imaginings of lunatics, surrealists, and the most deranged of ideological maximalists. Yet if the “Second” Great War was in some sense not fully conceivable, it was also increasingly feared. How else would the blocs settle their differences? How else would “a decision be reached” about the most pressing questions of the age?

Perhaps nobody wanted War, but better to be prepared for it if worst came to worst. Military planners, whose job it was to prepare for it, were initially among the few who openly talked of war’s possibility and contemplated its mechanics - they thus belonged amongst the avante-garde artists, the lunatics in the madhouses, and the German ultra-left. Unlike the most hotblooded militants, the military planners could speak a more prudential, restrained language of good-sensical preparedness. They could speak of such things in the cold light of day, even if initially, it was preferred to keep them holed away so that the public, traumatized after the trials of the great war, was not forced to reckon with unpleasant possibilities.

And so the technicians got to work, drafted contingency plans, and - in an event of some importance - all initially seemed to reach pretty much the same conclusion, a testament, perhaps, to the objectivity of geo-military analysis in a world where few agreed on much of anything. This is what they discovered. The Anglo-Americans, who had staked their military strategy on a policy of Eurasian containment, could not hope to maintain their foothold on the continent in the event of another war. Greece and the internationalized Straits would likely fall in a matter of weeks; the pressure placed upon the fascist French state by German, Italian, Dutch, and Soviet Armies would likely be overwhelming, regardless of the exact quality of these armies. The American expeditionary forces - depending on their size and quality of defensive preparations - could perhaps hold out from anywhere between two months and half a year, but the numerical disadvantage and logistical challenges would eventually prove decisive. If they retreated in good order, they might be able to maintain a presence on the European Continent through defending the Pyrenees mountain passes.

Elsewhere, the picture was altogether murkier. There was the traditional bogeyman of British Policy, a powerful Russia breaking down into India and endangering the Empire, but the analysts informed them that transit through the Himalayas remained a genuine problem for divisional-sized units. More pressing was the Levantine and the Persian Axis; the former presented much more favorable terrain for an attacker, and if the Soviets could press toward Suez, this would shatter the imperial system and force a peace on unfavorable terms.

The Anglo-Americans would have to depend on deterrence of a more subtle sort: they would need to hold onto the Middle East and Persia while employing airpower and the navy to gradually strangle the socialist bloc until they sued for a peace. As strategic bombing developed, it was hoped that the destruction of the Rhine-Ruhr complex would force the Europeans to sign a peace well before all of France was overrun, but the loss of the straits and Greece would nonetheless be significant. Thankfully, most Atlantic Union planners concluded, there appeared little appetite for a general war amongst the Europeans.

The Bolivian Crisis of 1933 started to change the calculations of military planners. Just as international tensions escalated and the planning of military experts began to receive more attention from national publics, a minority of military analysts - in concert, it must be said, with civilian ideologists - began to contemplate a quite different scenario involving a “global quasi-war”. This would be a situation in which no formal war was ever declared because its costs would be prohibitive, in which irregular partisan forces fought with the assistance of the military units of the great powers throughout a vast global theater. Not only was such a scenario imaginable, but it had, in fact, already occurred: the “quasi-war” as a concept dated not to the 1930s but to the First Revolutionary Era, and its chief proponents never ceased to point this out. The Americans and Soviets were particularly well-attuned to this possibility, but for reasons that will be explored further down the line, both the British and Central Europeans had trouble both in recognizing it as a live possibility and in squaring it with their own doctrine.

Finally, there was the East Asian theater. Nobody quite knew what to make of it; the Soviets had fairly sophisticated contingency plans for a war against Japan, but it was unclear - particularly in the 1930s - whether the Japanese would actually join the Anglo-Americans in a hot conflict. Despite their long-standing territorial disputes with the Soviet Union and reliance on American loans, it was also unclear whether China would expose itself to the risks of a war against the Soviet Union, which would involve a massive land campaign that might expose the acute domestic vulnerabilities of the nationalist government. The Soviets, for their part, had no desire to compromise their anti-imperialist credentials by rhetorical bellicosity against China, and in fact supported Chinese claims against Japan even while managing the fragile detente with the island nation.

Military planners did not, therefore, face a single known scenario which could be planned against, nor, it must be said, did they even have - by the end of the era - coherent agreement about what kind of thing war in the “Age of the Masses” even ultimately -was-. In this, they can be partially forgiven: their disagreement was not simply a failure of analysis but a feature of the world-system itself, which was suspended between a war that had ended and a new conflict which could not be fully imagined, the very category of “the next war” therefore becoming unfixed, its semantic fecundity and ambiguity frustrating, in the manner characteristic of the period, the desire for certainty. The Hot War became the object of theorization and planning not because it was the most likely scenario but because it was the most analyzable and legible to traditional military planning - science might not create its object out of whole cloth, but its manner of selection can, if one is not careful, be systemically distorting. The Hot War could be modeled with satisfying precision and comforting convergence, and for this very reason, it was modeled extensively. The Quasi-War, on the other hand, was a possibility that at least some powers believed could not be ignored, and so the young and the heterodox pushed for its inclusion amongst the slate of legitimate futures to plan against. This proliferation of futures was itself the normal condition of the interregnum, not just in the military domain but in all spheres of life. In this case, each military decision and doctrinal development was itself a wager about how the pervasive uncertainty would be resolved, and each military would bear the permanent impress of the particular war which they had chosen to fear or to desire.

The Central Europeans: Political and Industrial Structure as Military Doctrine

The socialist societies of Central Europe were not simply proletarian republics modeled on an abstract Marxism - they were, even if they could not always admit it to themselves, participatory and mobilized Rousseauian polities in which the “administration of men” could never be wholly displaced by the “administration of things.” The meticulous supervision which the councilar, delegative bodies exercised over military appropriations and the learned allergy to “Bonapartist” standing militaries exercised a determining influence upon the military posture of these societies.

By “Central Europe” we mean the four nations of Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. The appellation is chosen not merely because it is a convenient abbreviation for a set of societies in which a broadly similar relation obtained between a strong society and a weak state; it earns its keep because, in real terms, the military establishments of these four powers grew increasingly integrated across the Interregnum, with only Italy lagging somewhat behind the other three.

None of them maintained a permanent, professional army, each leaving its defense to a universal conscript militia. Germany had the most robust and extended training, requiring every citizen to undergo a year of service upon reaching adulthood and to complete month-long refresher programs every few years until the age of thirty-five. The Netherlands and Czech Republic made do with shorter periods of six to eight months and a considerably more permissive schedule of exemptions. In Italy, where the Camera del Lavoro coordinated call-ups and training, the “national” army displayed a distressing want of standardization, the quality of any given militia unit co-varying with the industrial geography of the region that raised it. The unevenness of the Italian order of battle reproduced the uneven development of the peninsula itself.

Only in Germany did a substantive and bitterly controversial exception to the militia tradition emerge: the so-called “Permanent Volunteer Corps.” Constituted in the First Revolutionary Era out of existing volunteer brigades, it hardened over time into a body of elite, ideologically dependable specialist units trained in aviation, submarine warfare, and commando tactics. These would furnish the core of the new air force and navy; equally important, they would supply the junior officer cadre of the militia itself, the device, easily overlooked, by which the Rousseauian social republic contrived to obtain professional operational leadership without constructing the standing professional army its political culture forbade. The corps was controversial for reasons that ran deeper than its expense and its separation from the citizen-soldier: the volunteer brigade was a double-edged form, which in living memory had served reaction at least as readily as revolution. The spectacle of an elite, ideologically vetted armed body standing apart from the militia awakened precisely the Bonapartist anxieties the whole military culture had been built to lay to rest. Its expansion thus remained hostage to the antimilitarist consensus, and only after the Bolivian Crisis did it begin to absorb significant numbers of new members.

In all Central European societies, military appropriations required the assent of the All-Union Congresses, the delegative bodies most closely tethered to the councils (or, in the Italian case, the Camera del Lavoro) , and these carried a systematic bias for civilian over military spending. They systematically elected for the butter that visibly improved the lives of the workers they represented over the guns that offered little in return beyond industrial stimulus and a steady stream of foreign, mostly German, imports. Even after the Bolivian Crisis, when the claims of internationalism loosened their purse-strings somewhat, appropriations remained governed by a defensive strategic logic, at least in their justification.

This logic ran as follows. In the event of an Atlantic Union provocation, the paramount task would be to expel the Americans from the continent quickly, before they could turn Western Europe into an airbase and staging ground. The primary instrument would therefore be a large and rapidly mobilizable militia capable of overrunning Valois’ fascist armies and the American expeditionary forces in western France. This demanded a well-equipped militia with deep munition reserves, swift rail access into France, and an armored spearhead which would be furnished by the Soviets. The calculus had the convenient property of justifying substantial expenditure on the militia, which was in every Central European society the most popular and most deeply rooted of military institutions. What it obscured, and obscured deliberately, was that the operation it described was an offensive one. A “quick strike” to reunify France, a thrust to the Pyrenees, the destruction of the widely loathed French fascist state; these were not just conditions for the security of Central Europe in the event of war, but reflections of shared ideological hopes, now made concrete in military planning.

The militia, however, ceased to be the all-important instrument once one passed from the quick strike to the “long war”, a scenario in which the successful reunification of France failed to bring the Americans to terms. Here the decisive question was air power. Already in the early 1930s, it was recognized that a drive into France would prove quick rather than attritional only if the Americans were denied air superiority over it, and should the war drag on, American strategic bombers operating from Britain with relative impunity might reach the Rhine-Ruhr, the industrial heart not merely of the German economy but of the entire Central European procurement system. Parity in aviation thus became an existential requirement. Armor could be safely devolved upon the Soviets, who possessed the resources and the professional structure to maintain a large tank corps, but aviation was a responsibility the Central Europeans took upon themselves.

Given all this, it is quite remarkable that the drive for aviation, artillery, and naval technology throughout the 1930s continued to wear defensive dress. The All-Union Congress would sanction costlier appropriations only where a cogent case could be made for a weapon’s defensive employment. In Germany, the Congresses remained skeptical of the large increases the Executive Committee favored, and most skeptical of all where the money was earmarked for small, professionalized teams rather than for the militia, while in Italy the Camera del Lavoro applied a comparable brake to the central government’s designs. The workaround was the obvious one: military spending was folded into larger packages possessing an ostensible civilian purpose, so that a given technology had to be justified, at least in part, by the benefits it promised the civilian economy. The consequence was a profoundly uneven military system which achieved groundbreaking advances precisely where a defensive or dual-use rationale lay ready to hand, and remained woefully backward wherever no such rationale could be contrived.

The First Track: The Militia

By the early 1940s the structure of military spending had resolved into three distinct tracks, each with its own purpose, its own constituency, and its own characteristic mode of justification before the councils. The first and largest share of the budget continued to flow to the militia, which commanded a degree of public support the other tracks never approached. The state of the militia, its provisions and the quality of its weaponry, carried a political weight that the remainder of the budget simply did not. Yet even here the trend was unmistakable. The militia’s share of the German military budget fell from some 85 percent in 1928 to just over half - roughly 55 percent - by 1942, a decline that registered both the mounting absolute cost of the other tracks and the steady diversion of funds into them. The militia remained the most popular institution even as its budgetary preeminence eroded and it lost its previous command of the purse. Italy, more stubbornly antimilitarist and content to buy German technology rather than develop its own, still devoted better than 70 percent of its military budget to the militia across the same span.

The technologies the militia track produced were fitted to the needs of the mass worker’s army. A non-professional soldiery required weapons that were durable, intuitive, and easily repaired, and to these ends their designers were content to sacrifice raw firepower, accessory fittings, and sophistication of feature. Better still if they could be manufactured cheaply and at a mass scale. The most celebrated of them, beyond question, was the Gewehr 41, one of the iconic firearms of the century, still to be found today in museums and attics across much of the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean.

The Erfurt Armaments Council had produced a serviceable standard rifle five years earlier in the Gewehr 36, but the G36 was in large part a copy of the Russian 91/30 Mosin-Nagant, the rifle that had won its fame in the Russian Civil War. It inherited the Mosin’s vices along with its virtues. When reports filtered back from the militia training sessions that workers struggled with the G36 over any extended period, the Council set out to reinvent the functional militia rifle from the ground up. The Gewehr 41 that resulted was no imitation of anything: a new weapon in new materials, radically pared down in construction and parts count, its novice-baffling two-thousand-meter sight discarded in favor of a fixed aperture set for combat range. The single inheritance it deliberately retained was the Mosin’s rimmed cartridge, a retention which was a strategic decision rather than a concession to habit. To chamber the Soviet 7.62×54mmR was to bind the German militiaman into a single bloc-wide ammunition economy, firing the same round as the Red Army that would supply his armor and, in time, as the insurgents and partisans across half the colonial world to whom the G41 would eventually find its way. The rim was a known mechanical handicap, awkward in a box magazine in ways a rimless case would not have been, but it was accepted because logistical commonality across IntRevMar mattered more than the marginal elegance of the feed. Everything else was new, including a clean, modern bolt of two forward locking lugs built around the old rimmed case.

Gewehr 41 (G41) Specifications ​

Type: Bolt-action service rifle
Origin: Socialist Republic of Germany; design by the Erfurt Armaments Council
Service: Adopted 1941; standard across the militia formations of Germany, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic
Cartridge: 7.62×54mmR
Action: Manually operated turn-bolt; two forward locking lugs; reduced parts count
Overall length: ~1,100 mm
Barrel length: ~600 mm; bore and chamber chrome-lined
Weight, empty: ~3.7 kg
Feed: 5-round integral box magazine, loaded from 5-round stripper clips
Muzzle velocity: ~750 m/s
Sights: Hooded front post; fixed rear aperture zeroed for ~300 m, with a single flip leaf for longer range
Practical rate of fire: ~12–16 aimed rounds/min
Effective range, iron sights: ~400–500 m

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The Second Track: The Platform Projects

While the weapons of the militia system drew on the emerging techniques of socialist-fordist mass production, those of the rapidly metastasizing platform track reflected Germany’s more well-established expertise in precision engineering and artisanal, small-batch production. The platform track was geared toward investment and technological development in strategically instrumental “platform” systems, primarily aircraft and submarines, manned by the expert operators of the Permanent Volunteer Corps and the nascent and slowly emerging semi-professionalized soldiers of the Czech Republics, Netherlands, and Italy. This accounted for the bulk of the rise in military budgets across the 1930s, with the third-track “special projects” track coming to claim a larger share only later.

On the whole, aviation technology remained the main focus of the platform track. The image of American bombers devastating the proletarian homeland was potent and mobilizing. American aeroplane development had received a substantial boost from the Eastern Seas War and remained comfortably ahead of European technology until the mid-1930s, a fact that caused genuine alarm once the new capacities of airpower became clear to military planners. Britain, anxious to maintain genial relations with the Europeans, declined to base substantial fleets of American bombers on its soil but also refused to rule out doing so in the event of a conflict, even one in which it was not formally a belligerent. This conditional refusal was impetus enough for the German interceptor program, which ran from the early 1930s into the early 1940s. In the All-Union Congress and in civilian propaganda alike, the “air drive” was justified in civilian and military terms at once. “One day,” one Czech leaflet promised, “you will be able to travel to our friends in Leningrad in mere hours, and vacation on the Black Sea after a quick flight, with no long train journey. You will reach beautiful Sicily, with its glimmering Mediterranean beaches, in less than half a day, all thanks to the industrious efforts of our aeroplane and engine workers.” The panic over American airpower was also quite real, and the interceptor - scattered across the lands, keeping its watchful gaze upon the skies - was to serve as an impenetrable wall of defense.

A German-Czech project, the first line of interceptors entered production in 1935. They possessed astonishing aerodynamic maneuverability and a quick rate of climb, but they were plagued by mechanical failures and manufacturing difficulties, and their armament, adequate enough at introduction, was steadily outpaced as American bombers grew heavier through the later 1930s, so that by 1938 it could no longer reliably penetrate them. A new two-year procurement cycle began in 1939, with the German and Czech governments funneling an extraordinary - some would say inordinate - sum into the project and contracting with the full gamut of engine and airframe producers.

Falke 2 Specifications ​

Type: Single-seat, single-engine high-altitude interceptor
Origin: Socialist Republic of Germany
Service: Entered service 1941; second-generation type, successor to the mid-1930s first-generation interceptor
Wingspan: ~10.5 m (34.4 ft)
Length: ~9.3 m (30.5 ft)
Empty weight: ~3,300 kg (7,275 lb)
Loaded weight: ~4,200 kg (9,260 lb)
Maximum speed: ~720 km/h (447 mph) at ~8,000 m
Service ceiling: ~12,500 m (41,000 ft)
Rate of climb (initial): ~22 m/s (4,330 ft/min)
Time to 8,000 m: ~6 minutes
Combat radius: ~350 km (217 mi) — deliberately short
Armament: Two 20 mm cannon in the wing roots and one engine-mounted cannon firing through the propeller hub; some examples substitute a 30 mm hub weapon for bomber-killing
Production: Limited; each airframe expensive in materials, machine-hours, and skilled labor

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The result was genuinely impressive, if somewhat over-engineered and profligately expensive per unit. The Falke 2 was perhaps the finest interceptor in the world at the moment of its production. If the Gewehr 41 had been designed around a citizen who would never be an expert, the Falke 2 was created for a tiny cadre of the most highly trained pilots that Central European socialism could produce, built by the most skilled hands in the most sophisticated plants the socialist economy possessed. It accepted almost no compromises and was crafted very nearly by hand, for this was the weapon that would protect the homeland, the physical guarantee that the Americans could not threaten the birthplace of the revolution with terror bombing. It climbed at twenty-two meters per second, a rate that would not be matched until the advent of jet aircraft. Its engine drew on a liquid-cooled, two-stage supercharger with an intercooler, the product of precision engineering in Dortmund. And it carried two 20mm cannon, with some variants substituting a single 30mm weapon against the possibility that the Americans might one day up-armor their bombers in reply.

American spies had no need to observe its operations covertly, for the government staged live, public demonstrations of the aircraft as a proof of “socialist ingenuity” and the fruit of a decade’s aviation research. Its prowess alarmed the American military establishment, which worried that German aviation might in time produce a superior fighter as well, until it was understood that Germany was neither technically nor fiscally capable of running a fighter program able to turn out sufficient numbers at comparable quality. The distinction mattered, because it marks the precise limit of what the platform track’s political economy would underwrite. The interceptor was permitted to be the best in the world because homeland air defense was the one military purpose the councils would fund without reservation. Excellence was affordable exactly where it would clearly be used for defense. Even at its small production runs, the Falke 2 overmatched the American bombers and so struck away one important leg of American deterrence, which was all the doctrine asked of it and all that its boutique scale could deliver.

The Heyl 2 Light Bomber

The light bomber was a more politically controversial weapon. Where the interceptor was defensive and therefore lavishly funded, the bomber was offensive and therefore funded only grudgingly. It was an aircraft built to cross the North Sea and crater the runways of British airfields, and the counter-force argument that justified it - that it would strike military assets, the bombers and their fields, rather than British cities and their working populations - was a distinction about targeting doctrine, not about the nature of the weapon, and the All-Union Congress understood this. The bomber was rescued from outright refusal less by the contentious British-airfield mission than by a second and far more defensible one: the prospect of using it to inderdict of Valois’ supply lines during the quick strike into France. This was an offensive task continuous with the popular militia doctrine, involving close support for the armed people’s advance rather than terror across the water, and it was this that finally allowed the program to be carried past the councils.

Heyl 2 Specifications ​

Type: Twin-engine medium/light bomber; tactical day bomber optimized for low- and medium-altitude precision attack
Origin: Central European Confederation; airframe by the nationalized Bohemian aircraft works (the Avia–Aero combine under the planning apparatus), engines by the German Junkers–BMW combine; final assembly at Letňany and, under license, in Saxony
Service: Entered service 1943; jointly procured across German, Czech, and Dutch air arms
Crew: Three (pilot, navigator/bombardier, radio operator/gunner)
Wingspan: ~17.5 m (57.4 ft)
Length: ~13.2 m (43.3 ft)
Empty weight: ~7,100 kg (15,650 lb)
Loaded weight: ~10,900 kg (24,030 lb)
Maximum speed: ~510 km/h (317 mph) at ~4,500 m
Cruising speed: ~410 km/h (255 mph)
Service ceiling: ~8,800 m (28,900 ft)
Combat radius: ~1,000 km (620 mi) with a reduced bomb load; ~600 km (370 mi) at maximum
Bomb load: ~1,600 kg (3,530 lb) maximum internal; ~1,000 kg typical for the longer-range airfield mission
Defensive armament: Three to four machine guns in nose, dorsal, and ventral positions; some examples mount a 20 mm cannon in a fixed forward installation for flak suppression and ground strafing
Production: Substantial; Central Europe’s most-produced multi-engine aircraft

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The Heyl 2 was the most genuinely trans-European weapon the Central Europeans produced, and herein lies its true significance. The interceptor had been a boutique article, built in a handful of sophisticated plants in small runs, while the bomber had to be manufactured in quantity, forcing Central Europe’s increasingly integrated production system to operate at scale. Designed by the Czech aircraft works and powered by German engine combines, the Heyl 2 was licensed for production in Turin, Milan, Saxony, and Prague. The engine and powerplant was assembled in Saxony and the Rhineland, the wings designed in Bohemia, and the airframe as a whole assembled in a number of different locations. It was the most offensive aircraft that most fully realized the integrationist dream, precisely because the need for mass production drove the cross-border industrial coordination the prestige interceptor never required.

And yet the Heyl 2 was, for all this, a weapon that could not perform one of its key intended purposes. A daylight bomber over defended territory requires fighter escort, and the escort was precisely what the Central Europeans’ military establishments were least equipped to provide, since a long-range escort fighter sat below even the bomber in political tolerability. If the bomber was offensive, the escort was offensive in its purest form, a fighter whose only conceivable purpose was to range over someone else’s territory and give battle there, possessing no homeland it could be said to guard. The magnificent interceptor was useless for the task: built to climb fast and fight over the Ruhr, it was short-ranged by deliberate design, a point-defense weapon with neither the fuel nor the endurance to cross the North Sea and loiter over a British field. What the mission demanded was a wholly different aircraft, and that aircraft fell straight through the seam of the councils’ own logic: the same political culture that made the interceptor easy to fund and the bomber barely fundable made the escort impermissible outright. In the end, military planners chose to treat the bomber as an adjunct to the continental offensive into France that everyone already endorsed (in the event, of course, of “Atlantic Union provocation”), while the harder mission, the strike against Britain, was written off. As a shorter-range weapon against less heavily defended objectives, the Heyl 2 performed comparably to its American counterparts.

The Submarine and Mine-laying Programs

To understand the Revolutionary German Navy, one must begin with the damage inflicted upon the High Seas Fleet by the British Surprise Attack on Wilhelmshaven in the first days of November 1919, which sank over fifteen ships of the former Imperial Navy and guaranteed British naval supremacy within the North Sea. There were some voices who advocated rebuilding the Navy to challenge the British, but the existing costs of reconstruction and the immense investment a surface navy would demand marginalized the navalists. Germany maintained around half of the ships it still possessed in the 1920s, more out of gratitude to the role of the revolutionary sailors in the revolution than as a genuine bid to create a competitive navy.

The American decision to build the world-fleet in 1933 changed everything. On the one hand, it confirmed that it would be futile to build up a traditional battle-fleet to attempt to gain surface parity. Germany - or, for that matter, the entirety of Central Europe - did not possess America’s shipbuilding capacity and lacked the fiscal capacity to expand it to a comparable level in any reasonable amount of time. They were already behind, and now it was clear there was no catching up.

The natural response was to respond asymmetrically, and this, in fact, was the response decided upon. In Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, the first task was to build up shore batteries and invest in a fleet of short-range torpedo bombers to refuse the gigantic American Navy the impunity to operate near the coasts. More expensive, and more important over the long-term, however, were submarine and mine-laying technologies. Here, the logic of asymmetric naval warfare asserted itself: the Japanese had settled on the same solution despite their vastly different political and strategic position.

In Italy, submarines were adopted relatively easily despite its anti-militarist culture given the vulnerability to blockade, but in Germany and the Netherlands, they were a more complicated and politically charged proposition. In Germany, the onset of submarine warfare in the Great War was widely associated with the tightening of the British blockade, and in the Netherlands, it was German submarines which wrecked the domestic commercial economy and immiserated the nation’s people. Perhaps only a gesture as flamboyant and challenging as the world-fleet, coming in the wake of the Bolivian crisis, could have provided the impetus to a renewed submarine program.

Nonetheless, it did not come easily. The submarines were justified primarily as a weapon to disrupt American supply lines during the first months of war and prevent the unimpeded flow of war materiel into Western France. In this way, it was framed as “defensive”, as a necessary response to the growing American logistical reach into Western France. The records also show members of the executive committee and military apparatus arguing to the Congress of Soviets in both Germany and the Netherlands that the development of submarine technologies would aid in the laying down of under-sea cables and hence the linking together of the socialist world. We cannot verify the accuracy of this claim.

The submarine program was not allotted the funds that it merited in either Germany or Italy, and the geographic distance between their main naval facilities prevented genuine collaboration. In the end, neither nation produced a submarine that was at parity with the Americans, though the character of their particular deficiencies is itself instructive: the Italians, operating in a decentralized socialist market economy, produced a mediocre submarine that could nonetheless be produced relatively easily and quickly, while German collectives, refusing to accept anything less than the plan targets, produced a submarine which was up to par in terms of its formal technical specifications but which was plagued by mechanical problems and ruinously long repair times. Nonetheless, the program could not be judged a complete failure. Inferior as these vessels were, they still posed a significant threat to any Atlantic Union fleet; given the distances involved in American logistics, they would, in combination with allied Soviet submarine forces, still pose a substantial threat to American re-supply for the crucial first few months of the war. But after this, the cordon would tighten, and the mammoth world fleet would wreck the feeble submarine force which the socialists had assembled.

More successful was the lower-key mine-laying program. This was less politically controversial, and required less institutional naval knowledge. The Dutch had already developed expertise, and Soviet spies successfully obtained Japanese schematics in the early mid-30s. Mines were notoriously difficult to disarm, especially over a coast where German and Italian naval bombers would be operating. The mine-laying vessels which came out of Central European shipyards were cheap, plentiful, and inconspicuous.

The turn to coastal defense and asymmetric warfare was perhaps over-determined. The Italian experience in Taranto, in which shore batteries successfully warded off Churchill’s raids, demonstrated the power of coastal defense weaponry. The Netherlands and Italy had both integrated their navies with the Germans in part out of a desire for a shared coastal defense scheme. The mine-layers constructed in German, Dutch, and Italian shipyards were placed under a unified chain of command, with defense of European shores one of the earliest examples of concrete trans-european cooperation. In 1938, the French Worker and Peasant’s Republic formally joined this defense scheme, adding the port of Marseille to its considerable assets and responsibilities.

In the event of a conflict with the Atlantic Union, there would be no question of establishing outright Naval Supremacy. The seas would be mined and the lines of capitalist resupply would be assaulted, with the aim of making it perilous for the world-fleet to operate in socialist waters. By the early 40s, the Americans had concluded that they would have to establish aerial supremacy if they were to successfully clear mines and operate in the North Sea and much of the Central Mediterranean, a task that would not be easy to accomplish.