Chris Madel

Yeah.

Which...

is sort of entirely inevitable.

There was also a kind of, you know, a terrible lack of iron ore.

So the quota had been recently lowered in 1938.

So von Schell warns Goering in March 1939 that only 50% of truck orders could possibly be delivered by the beginning of 1940.

And then that lack of work would then force factories to lay people off.

And he writes, once this has happened, then an increase in production is unimaginable for several years.

This would damage the motorization of the Wehrmacht, the Reich and commerce from which it would hardly be able to recover.

So he's got to come up with something.

So he comes up with the Shell plan.

which is underpinned by a belief that the greater efficiency requires more state control of the motor industry.

And you'd have thought, well, that's easy to do.

They're Nazis and do what they like.

But

It's not quite as straightforward as that, but in his plan, he wants to reduce the number of vehicle types from 131 different kinds of truck to just 23 types of truck.

You know, this is Max Beaverbrook and we're only going to build five types of aircraft in 1940 rather than, you know, 25.

But on a completely different scale, he also wants to increase the number of vehicles operating with gas generators of solid fuels instead of petrol.

So, you know, those coal burners on the back and all the rest of it.

I mean, this isn't the image of a modern fighting machine, is it?