Thread by @TrentTelenko

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter If Sir Henry Phelps Brown & Sheila Hopkins did not address the massive shift in industrialization by electrification covering 1920 - 1965 they have a methodological problem.

The shift from line shaft & belt mechanical power transmission to electrical had huge productivity plus.

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The widespread use of electric motors small enough to be connected directly to each piece of machinery meant any location with a concrete slab and electrical connections could be a factory.

It also made factories built post 1920 both easier to relocate and harder to destroy.

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter This is why the Soviet Union could relocate it's factories during the German invasion of 1941.

It is also why strategic bombing of German factories did not degrade production like pre-war air power theorists expected.

I've written about that here --
chicagoboyz.net/archives/58334…

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The U.S. Army Air Tactical School 1920-1940 was keying bombing effects to line-shaft factories.

This is why you see all the "percentage deroofed" figures as BDA in Europe because they thought they were destroying line shaft & belt power transmission.

Factories w/electric power

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...tools didn't need a roof.

Something the Soviets proved with their Ural factories in 1942 and the USAAF learned in 1944 from the Germans.

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The ability to use electrical power tools means sub-components could be built anywhere there was electric power as long as the transportation network held up.

The post D-Day strategic bombing of German oil and railway marshalling yards was what finally collapsed distributed...

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...German war production.

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The Reichsbahn lost all ability to track it’s engines and cars when the final 6-week aerial transportation offensive against it’s major marshaling yards kicked off the first week of March 1945 and at the end — mid-April 1945 — it could not even transport enough coal to power...

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ... its own trains.

This is in Mierzejewski’s “The Most Valuable Asset of the Reich: A History of the German National Railway Volume 2, 1933-1945.”

amazon.com/Most-Valuable-…

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter BTW, the Army Air Corps/Force DID know about the electric power motors running German factories.

Some bombardment guy from the Air Corps Tactical School had the great idea of checking with the US banks which financed the German factories built in the 1920’s and 1930’s for...

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...details of the factories’ construction.

And those banks still had the German business proposals for how they would use the bank loans. Including factory floor plans.

The Air Force’s bombardment guys used that information in making targeting decisions during World War Two.

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...It just didn’t occur to them that the use of electric motors for powering equipment made their plans for wrecking the factory roofs to destroy the power distribution systems completely irrelevant.

They had the information and didn’t connect the dots.

The B-17 was designed..

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...in the early 1930’s to deliver a 500-lb bomb designed to the specifications of the USAAC to blow a hole in the roof of a line-shaft and drive belt factory.

The B-17 carried 12 of them.

The B-24 carried 12 as well, to a longer range.

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The medium bombers B-25 and B-26 up to six 500-lb bombs.

The B-29 carried 40 each 500-lb bombs.

The issue is this entire suite of planes I just called out were designed around a munition that was made obsolete by advancing electric motor production technology 10 years before..

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...they were used in war.

And the failure of the USAAF to hit German power plants can from the same source -- ACTS theorists 1920-1940.

They looked at US electrical production and specifically the US power grid.

They thought the grid meant hitting power plants was irrelevant

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The problem with that thought was that big electrical generators and transformers were all long lead time capitol equipment that were highly vulnerable to bomb shock and fragmentation.

They were exactly the sort of target that the the US Army Air Corp Tactical School (ACTS)...

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ...“Industrial Web” theory of strategic bombing was looking for.

The basic idea that ACTS theorists had at the time was that their "Industrial Web" was a serial system where every component had to work to produce an effect.

Thus ACTS theorists fundamentally believed in the...

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter ..."weak link" theory of reliability, rather than the need to obliterate all key components that a parallel, or a complex serial/parallel system, require. Line Shaft and drive belt infrastructure fit this "serial system with a weak link" belief system of ACTS theorists to a tee

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter The reality of industrial electrification presented complex serial/parallel system that required massive system wide destruction to work.

Area bombing versus precision bombing, to be blunt about it.

The B-29 Firebombing of Japan was born via the failings of ACTS theory in ETO

@LarrySchweikart @GoroOuter For understanding the “weak link” versus more robust approaches to reliability, see J. DeVale (1998). “Basics of Traditional Reliability”

users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/des_s…

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