{"id":43987,"date":"2014-06-19T16:00:36","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T21:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=43987"},"modified":"2014-06-19T18:22:19","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T23:22:19","slug":"logistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=43987","title":{"rendered":"Logistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Mediocre minds discuss strategy; Good minds discuss tactics; Great minds discuss logistics”
\n– Unknown, possibly aprocryphal<\/p>\n

Every “war” in the living memory of any American under the age of probably 60 has been the sort of thing a peasant in the 1700s might recognize; a country’s professional military duking it out with another country’s military, or with insurgents in some unruly province, while back things went on more or less as normal.<\/p>\n

The idea of “total war” – the complete mobilization of every factor of a nation’s economy toward a war effort – sounds completely foreign to people today.\u00a0 The idea that entire nations would devote their entire economies – down to the food on one’s table – to defeating an enemy who similiarly engaged?\u00a0 That may as well be words from another language.<\/p>\n

But seventy years ago today, there were not one but two separate stories that illustrated how deeply America’s raw industrial output affected the outcome of history’s greatest war.<\/p>\n

Shorefront<\/strong>:\u00a0 For centuries, the greatest problem with launching an amphibious invasion – landing troops from the sea to not merely harass the enemy and leave, but to stay and conquer their target – wasn’t landing the troops on the shore.\u00a0 Any boat can land a group of soldiers on a beach; with enough courage and skill, they can overwhelm the defenses (if any) and prevail.<\/p>\n

The hard part is keeping those troops supplied.\u00a0 You can’t just land soldiers and expect them to keep moving; you need to supply them with ammunition, food and clothing.\u00a0 Their artillery support needs to land.\u00a0 And they all need ammunition.\u00a0 Vehicles – jeeps, tanks, personnel carriers, to fight the battles, and trucks to carry supplies to the troops at the front – all have to be landed, as well as fuel, oil and spare parts for all the vehicles.\u00a0 And the men; field hospitals, replacment soldiers, medicine, body bags.\u00a0 And ever more of all the above.<\/p>\n

The irreducible fact of fighting a war across any sizeable body of water is that the bridgehead, sooner or later, would need to capture an intact port, with dock facilities capable of unloading ships full of cargo to be tranported to the front.\u00a0 Cranes, wharves, warehouses, roads and railroads, all the infrastructure needed to accept, unload, sort, transfer and dispatch cargo to the front to support millions of fighting and support soldiers – there was only one way to get those.<\/p>\n

In the case of D-Day, it was complicated by the fact that the same geography that made the invasion beaches usable for the initial assault – a long, gently sloping shelf out from the beaches, with shallow water extending out hundreds of yards – made it exceptionally difficult to bring in cargo ship, which have deep “drafts” – they run aground in water less than 20-30 feet deep.<\/p>\n

Or that was the conventional wisdom.\u00a0 British and American engineers, in the runup to D-Day, hatched the idea of the “Mulberry” – an artificial harbor, capable of providing a shelter from the weather of the English Channel, and instant wharves and jetties and docks built straight out from the invasion beaches, capable of unloading bulk lots of cargo from ships designed to carry lots of it, in water deep enough for the ships to approach and navigate.\u00a0 They consisted of…:<\/p>\n